Spring has sprung, DC is alive with activity and many Glover Park restaurants and their properties are in play, while some remain persistently vacant and others maintain business-as-usual. Check here for the current list of Glover Park restaurants.
Kusshi
Glover Park’s popular sushi restaurant at 2309 Wisconsin Avenue has changed hands multiple times in the past decade. Known for a long time as Sushi-ko, it was sold in 2014 by famed chef Daisuke Utagawa after he racked up a tremendous amount of unpaid federal and DC income taxes. Wei Zhang took over and renamed it Sushi Keiko, but within a few years he stated family issues and a need to return to his home country, so he sold the business to Ferry Huang in 2018. Ferry had been running Sushi Keiko ever since, but it seemed his heart was not in it long term. He had advertised the business for sale on and off, most recently asking $95,000 stating that he wanted to retire due to health issues. Tone (a.k.a. Tony) Chow has purchased the business and has incorporated the location into his sushi restaurant chain “Kusshi”, with locations in Tysons, North Bethesda, Bethesda, Arlington and Silver Spring. He also has plans to open two other Kusshi’s in Reston VA and Rockville Town Square. Tony Chow advertises himself as a real estate broker, a real estate investor, Kusshi founder, founder of Poke Dojo restaurant and a co-founder of Thoughts to Paper, a team of patent attorneys running an intellectual property company in Germantown MD. Tony is fluent in Mandarin Chinese. Busy guy, hope his Glover Park restaurant is good.
Xiquet
Head chef Danny Lledo’s dream came to fruition with the opening of Xiquet, a fine dining experience. He renovated the building at 2404 Wisconsin Avenue with an upstairs kitchen with wood burning oven, and merged the space formerly used for his Slate wine bar. He and his wife, Elizabeth Banker, paid $1.3 million for the building in 2015, held in his wife’s LLC, “Superstar Elizabeth LLC”. In 2019, Elizabeth transferred 100% of the interest in the building to Danny. Now he seeks to sell the real estate for $4,550,000 with a 10-year rent-back to stay and continue to run Xiquet there. The sale listing claims that the proposed rent will amount to $250,000 net operating income, translating to a 5.5% cap rate. A 5.5% cap rate on restaurants is a tough sell these days considering the risk free rate of return in a treasuries money market fund is in the range of 5.25% at the moment due to the Fed’s rate hikes last year.
Sprig and Sprout
Sprig and Sprout at 2317 Wisconsin Avenue, the popular Vietnamese Pho and Banh mi restaurant in Glover Park, opened for business a dozen years ago and is going strong. Unfortunately, the real estate is under stress. The building is owned by a real estate investor not the restaurant owners. The investor received a foreclosure notice two weeks ago from the note holder, demanding payment of $807K. This investor got into difficulty on a Jiffy Lube property in Illinois when costs, including property taxes, rose precipitously, and it might be related to the distress here in DC. Commercial borrowers don’t have the same protections as residential borrowers do in foreclosure, so things can happen quickly. There is no indication in the foreclosure notice about whether the default can be cured without having to pay the balance in full. Let’s hope it won’t affect Sprig and Sprout regardless of the outcome of the foreclosure.
Ilchi Uyghur
Eerkins Uyghur opened nearly 6 years ago at 2412 Wisconsin Avenue, and has served great central-Asian cuisine (though I’ve never been able to get their online ordering to work, strange). The business was taken over by Maimaitiyiming Hasimu (say that 10 times fast) last year and rebranded as Ilchi Uyghur. I have absolutely no information on Maimaitiyiming but I like saying the name out loud.
Subway
The Subway building at 2216 Wisconsin Avenue was purchased in 2015 for $1.9 million by a partnership of Anthony Lanier and Richard Cohen, both big-time real estate developers in DC. Maybe their LLC cover named “Sidegames LLC” was intended to suggest that this investment was a “side game” relative to their typical mega-deals. In any case, the property has been marketed quietly on and off since then, and now is under contract in a presumed sale. The property is mixed residential and commercial and offers interesting development flexibility. No word on the buyer, but expect change to come to Subway in the near future. Subway doesn’t seem to get a whole lot of business in there anyway.
Continued Restaurant Vacancies
Two of three restaurant properties at 2400 Wisconsin Avenue still sit vacant, after In Bocca al Lupo closed up shop a few months ago, and Heritage India moved out 7 years ago. Only Dumplings and Beyond operates in the space now, which saves the owner from punitive vacant property tax.
The old Grog and Tankard (most recently Mason Inn) at 2408 Wisconsin Avenue still languishes after 6 years. The owner Thomas Tsianakas did apply for permits to build out the restaurant space and add a third floor, but no action has been taken yet.
The former Social Beast and Town Hall space at 2340 Wisconsin Avenue continues to be advertised for lease, but still no takers after two years.
Chris Jones
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