"I always try to be a positive person," chef Michael Schlow says. "D.C., like any city, has its ups and downs."
He's talking about the six years between closing his restaurant, the Riggsby, in 2019 and reopening it on June 3, 2026, one block from where it used to sit. In between: a hotel sale that ended the original lease, a planned move to Bethesda that pandemic timing killed, and a run of closures across his company that took it from 19 restaurants heading into 2020 down to about nine by that spring. Four of the closures were in DC alone: Prima, Casolare, Alta Strada, and Nama Ko.
Schlow could have rebuilt anywhere. He chose to come back to the same six blocks.
That choice is the real story of Dupont Circle's dining scene in 2026, more than any single opening. Restaurants aren't just landing here. They're returning here, on purpose, after leaving somewhere worse or proving themselves somewhere else first. If you live in the neighborhood, that distinction changes how you should read the wave of new dining rooms opening around you.
The Restaurant That Left in 2019 Just Moved One Block
The new Riggsby sits inside the Royal Sonesta at 2121 P Street NW, part of a newly renovated lobby and Parlor space designed to feel like a small European hotel lounge, complete with a fireplace. The buildout cost $6 million and came from Edit Lab by Streetsense, the same design team behind the original Riggsby's look. That continuity matters. This isn't a licensing deal or a menu revival dropped into a generic space. It's the same creative team finishing a project they started a decade ago, down the street from where they started it.
About 70 percent of the menu is new or reworked. The chopped salad and steak Diane survived the move. The schnitzel a la Holstein got a cosmetic overhaul: instead of anchovies and capers scattered across the plate, Schlow now builds them into an emulsion and dots it across a cleaner presentation. New additions draw from old James Beard and Betty Crocker cookbooks, including Swedish meatballs finished with a mushroom sauce and shaved black truffle.
The room itself leans into the parts of the old Riggsby that regulars kept asking about: deep corner booths, dim lighting, a snug bar built for the kind of Old Fashioned conversation that doesn't happen well in a bright room. None of that is an accident. Schlow spent six years hearing what people missed, then built a $6 million answer to it.
Three Weeks Earlier, a Different Kind of Comeback Landed on M Street
On May 12, 2026, Uchi opened its doors at 1700 M Street NW, on Dupont's southern edge. The concept isn't new anywhere else. Chef Tyson Cole built it in Austin more than 20 years ago and won a James Beard award doing it. What's new is that parent company Hai Hospitality, now expanding nationally, picked Dupont as its DC entry point rather than a flashier downtown corridor or a neighborhood with less existing competition.
CEO Tony Montero has said each Uchi location gets tweaked to feel embedded in its city rather than dropped in from Austin. In Dupont, that meant a 185-seat room built around a "Swinging Sixties" theme and two private dining rooms with separate back entrances built specifically for guests who don't want to be seen walking through the front door. Montero's read on the difference between markets is blunt: Miami diners want to be noticed arriving. DC diners, including whoever books those private rooms, generally do not.
The menu keeps Uchi's long-running signatures, the hama chili that's been on the menu for two decades, the karaage, the "fried milk" dessert, and adds DC-specific dishes like crispy tuna rice and a lobster coconut curry. Happy hour runs weekdays from 4 to 6 p.m., with $10 cocktails on one end and a $120 tasting for two on the other. Hai Hospitality's next DC-area move, a more casual spinoff called Uchiko, is already planned for Bethesda next year, which tells you the company isn't testing this market. It's building out a plan.
The Common Thread: Dupont Rewards People Who Already Believe In It
Line up Riggsby and Uchi next to Ko Japanese Dining, the tasting-menu spot that opened on the third floor of a P Street row house in 2024, and a pattern shows up that no single opening would reveal on its own. Ko took its owners roughly a decade to bring to life. Uchi's national parent chose Dupont deliberately after two decades of success elsewhere. Riggsby came back to almost the exact spot it lost, after its original hotel home was sold out from under it.
None of these are first-time bets. They're decisions made by people who already had a relationship with this neighborhood, good or complicated, and chose to deepen it rather than walk away. That's a different kind of restaurant scene than one built on churn, where spaces turn over every eighteen months and nobody sticks around long enough to earn a corner booth's worth of regulars.
If Dupont's newest restaurants feel more considered than flashy lately, this is why. The people opening them aren't guessing.
Even the Farmers Market Got a Renovation, Not a Relocation
The same logic shows up somewhere less glamorous: the FRESHFARM market that has run along 20th Street NW every Sunday since 1997. On May 24, 2026, the market changed its layout for the first time in years, expanding the fire lane between Massachusetts Avenue and Hillyer Place and pulling farmer vehicles off 20th Street entirely. The goal was straightforward: more room for foot traffic at what organizers called the most crowded corridor in the whole market.
Twenty-nine years is a long run for anything in a city that reinvents its retail every few seasons. The market didn't get replaced or shrunk when it needed adjusting. It got redesigned to handle more people, the same instinct behind the $6 million Riggsby buildout and Hai Hospitality's decision to plan a second DC-area location before the first one had marked its first anniversary. When something works in Dupont, the move is to invest in it further, not to go looking for the next neighborhood over.
What's Actually on the Calendar This Month
None of this requires waiting for a special occasion. This past Sunday, September 6, the Dupont Circle Cocktail Crawl sent neighbors between Balos Estiatorio, Press Club, Residents Café & Bar, and Casamara Rooftop for a few hours, two featured cocktails and a mocktail at each stop, capped by a raffle at Casamara Rooftop. It is exactly the kind of low-key, recurring event that doesn't make headlines but keeps people walking between the same handful of bars year after year.
Coming up: Art All Night takes over the neighborhood on Saturday, September 12, from 7 to 11 p.m., with more than 15 venues running art installations, live music, and interactive programming into the evening. And on the first Friday of every month, the First Friday ArtWalk turns Dupont's galleries, embassies, and cultural spaces into a self-guided evening circuit from 6 to 8 p.m.
None of these are new traditions invented to chase foot traffic. They're existing institutions that keep drawing people back, the same way the restaurants do.
Worth Walking For
The easy read on Dupont Circle right now is that it's having a moment: new sushi, an old favorite back from the dead, a bigger farmers market. The more accurate read is that very little of this is actually new. People who already knew this neighborhood decided it was worth a second investment, a bigger one, after they had already seen what it could do.
That's a useful thing to know if you live here and have noticed your options getting better instead of just different. It isn't turnover. It's people staying.
Abrams Residential keeps a running list of what changes and what holds steady across the neighborhoods we call home, from a new restaurant on the corner to how a block has actually held up over a decade. If you want more of that kind of ground-level read on Dupont Circle or anywhere else in the DC area, reach out.