Walk the short stretch of Langston Boulevard near Five Points on any weekday morning this month and you'll pass a strip of shopfronts that all point to the same story, even though nobody planted a sign saying so. A pizza shop with a line out the door. A coffee roastery with butcher paper still taped over its windows. A grocery store with a permit notice stapled near the entrance. None of it looks connected. It is.
Cherrydale's commercial spine isn't getting longer this year. It's getting denser inside the buildings it already has. That's the part worth understanding if you live within walking distance of Five Points, because it changes what you should expect to see change, and what you shouldn't.
The Small Building Doing a Lot
The clearest evidence sits at 3800 Langston Blvd, a modest retail row on the ground floor of a small condo building. Burger Billy's Joint has run its smash burger concept out of one bay there since spring 2024, in a shopping area that has otherwise seen a fair amount of tenant turnover. Now two more concepts are moving into the same short row at once.
Good Trouble Roasters, a coffee and wine bar from owner Mike Greiner, is in the final stretch of build-out. Greiner, who has spent 18 years running the New Mexico salsa company Black Market Salsa, originally hoped to open in August. Construction ran long.
"Not all the way where we want to be yet, obviously, but we are getting there."
The plan is coffee and pastries in the morning, wine and beer by early afternoon, with an all-electric Air Motion Roaster doing the actual coffee roasting on site and interior murals from Brooklyn artist Jess Kostelnick covering the walls. The name isn't decorative. Cherrydale was the site of a lunch counter sit-in in June 1960 that helped desegregate Arlington County businesses, and Greiner has said the name is a direct nod to that history, alongside plans to partner with local nonprofits.
A Rita's Italian Ice is opening in a separate bay in the same row, though no confirmed date has been announced. Between the two openings and Burger Billy's Joint already there, one small building is about to hold three separate food and drink concepts.
There's a practical wrinkle worth knowing before you walk over. Parking directly in front of the row is limited, and it's easy to assume there's nowhere to leave a car. There's more space behind the building, accessible from the same row, and Burger Billy's regulars already use it.
| Business | Address | Status as of late August 2026 |
|---|---|---|
| Burger Billy's Joint | 3800 Langston Blvd | Open since spring 2024 |
| Good Trouble Roasters | 3800 Langston Blvd | Construction finishing, targeting September |
| Rita's Italian Ice | 3800 Langston Blvd | No confirmed opening date |
| Tatiana Pizza | 3610 Langston Blvd | Soft opened late August |
| Safeway | 3713 Langston Blvd | Mid-renovation |
The Pizza That Beat Everyone to Market
Nearby, Tatiana Pizza got there first. The shop soft opened at 3610 Langston Blvd serving 32-inch pies alongside chicken alfredo, eggplant parmesan and Italian cold cut subs, run by owner Abu Ali. It's the concept's second location, following an original in Dupont Circle, and its first outside D.C.
Cherrydale wasn't short on pizza before this. A Pizza Hut has been at 3311 Langston Blvd for years, and Pines of Florence has served the neighborhood from 2109 N. Pollard Street. What changed isn't the category. It's the format: a larger, sit-down-adjacent menu with a portion size built for sharing, arriving in a strip that previously ran smaller and more counter-service.
The Anchor That Isn't Expanding
Farther down the boulevard, the Cherrydale Safeway at 3713 Langston Blvd is mid-renovation, and the contrast with everything happening nearby is the point. This isn't a store adding square footage. A permit filed in February covers renovations across 6,601 square feet of the existing 40,000-square-foot store, roughly a sixth of the total. Store Director Kyle Young has described the goal as turning the location into a "super premium" store, with rearranged departments and an upgraded product mix rather than a bigger footprint.
This is a grocer that's been on Langston Boulevard for decades, and one that went through a similar deli-and-produce revamp back in 2013. The current project isn't a break from that pattern. It's a repeat of it, on the same fixed floor plan the store has always had.
What the Long-Range Plan Didn't Anticipate
Arlington's official vision for this corridor operates on a different clock entirely. The county's 40-year Langston Boulevard Area Plan, adopted in 2023, imagines added density and thousands of new residents along the corridor over decades, following the same community process that renamed Route 29 from Lee Highway to Langston Boulevard in 2021.
That's the plan for a generation from now. What's actually visible at Five Points this month is smaller and faster: three tenants stacking into one retail row, a grocery store renovating a sixth of its own footprint, a pizza shop filling a gap in portion size rather than category. None of it requires new construction, new zoning, or the kind of density the long-range plan describes. It's happening inside walls that were already there.
That distinction matters if you live nearby and have seen headlines about the corridor's future and pictured cranes. What you'll actually notice this fall is quieter: new signage, a line at a pizza counter, a grocery aisle rearranged.
Some things on this stretch aren't part of the story at all, and that's worth knowing too. Cherrydale Hardware, housed in a 1936 building that once served as a Masonic Lodge, isn't going anywhere. Neither is Cherrydale Motors, the family-run dealership and repair shop that's operated on Langston Boulevard for years. The Custis Trail still cuts through Hidden Pond a short walk from Five Points, and the Cherrydale Farmers Market, a producer-only market that's run since 2021 as part of the Field to Table family, keeps its regular schedule regardless of what's happening in the storefronts around it.
What to Watch This Fall
Tatiana Pizza is already serving. Good Trouble Roasters is targeting a September opening after its August timeline slipped during final construction. Rita's Italian Ice hasn't announced a date. The Safeway renovation has no public completion timeline either, though the permitted scope suggests it's a matter of months, not a full rebuild.
None of these openings will change the shape of Cherrydale. What they show is a commercial strip that's choosing to fill in rather than expand out, tenant by tenant, inside buildings that have stood on this corner for years. For a neighborhood built on a small-town crossroads more than a century ago, that's a familiar way to grow.
If you're weighing what a changing block like this means for a home nearby, or just want a second opinion from someone who tracks Arlington's neighborhoods this closely, Caitlin Platt is always glad to talk through what's actually happening on the ground.
