According to Annandale Today, the building at 100 West Broad Street sold the same kind of thing for more than a century: rakes, nails, paint, whatever a household needed that week. It opened in the 1880s as J.W. Brown's Groceries and Hardware and stayed a hardware store, under one name or another, until it closed in 2025. A real estate company bought the property in June 2025 for $3.6 million, and the storefronts sat boarded up through the rest of the year while Falls Church waited to find out what would replace 140 years of continuity.
The answer arrived on September 3, 2026. Wonder, the dine-in and delivery concept that lets a single order pull dishes from more than a dozen restaurant brands at once, including Bobby Flay Steak, José Andrés, and Marcus Samuelsson's Streetbird, opened its grand-opening week in a 44-seat space on the same footprint. If you've walked past this month, you've seen the kiosks inside where the hardware aisles used to run.
That alone would be a decent local story: old retail category out, new food concept in. Sixteen days after Wonder opened, the 50th Annual Falls Church Festival had been scheduled to close Little Falls Street for the Taste of Falls Church on September 19. The festival's food-vendor eligibility criteria offer one way to consider how event rules relate to the broader idea of a local restaurant.
How the Festival Defines Food-Vendor Eligibility
The festival's eligibility language is specific. Only brick-and-mortar restaurants and breweries located within the City of Falls Church or the greater Falls Church area are permitted to sell at the Taste of Falls Church. Food trucks are barred outright. Taste Tickets were $3 each, presales began September 14 at the Community Center, and organizers had expected the closed stretch of Little Falls Street, between Park Avenue and Great Falls Street, to fill with over 90 crafters, businesses, and civic organizations for the milestone 50th year.
The stated criteria cover brick-and-mortar restaurants and breweries located in the City of Falls Church or the greater Falls Church area. They do not specify how long a business has operated, whether it is independently owned, or whether its food was developed on-site or licensed from a restaurant group.
Wonder is a brick-and-mortar tenant inside city limits. Under the stated criteria, it would have fallen within the listed location and business-type categories, whether or not it applied for a Taste booth. The concept offers dishes from a national roster of restaurant brands, including brands with locations across the D.C. area. The same criteria apply to 2941, where Chef Bertrand Chemel has worked in the kitchen since 2008.
The festival has run for half a century, and its food-vendor criteria specify business type and location. Those criteria do not define how long a business has been part of Falls Church or how its food is developed; "local" and "brick-and-mortar" describe different attributes.
Local Restaurants and New Dining Concepts
Other dining options sit along the same stretch of Broad Street. Little Beast opened April 29, 2026, at 119 East Broad Street on the ground floor of Broad & Washington, bringing Detroit-style pizza and pasta from restaurateur Aaron Gordon into a block that had spent years trading on Whole Foods foot traffic and Creative Cauldron's marquee next door. A few blocks west, Harvey's at 513 West Broad has become the restaurant residents mention first when asked where to eat, built around chef Thomas Harvey's live-edge ash bar for a solo lunch and a sixty-person all-season patio for dinner, with a Honey Cake pulled from his wife's family recipe that's turned into the neighborhood's default celebration dessert.
Little Beast and Harvey's are single-location, chef-driven restaurants, while Wonder uses a multi-brand concept designed to operate in multiple cities with sufficient delivery density. All three are within the same 2.2-square-mile city limit, and the festival's stated criteria apply to brick-and-mortar restaurants and breweries in the City of Falls Church or the greater Falls Church area.
The Rest of Broad Street Isn't Standing Still Either
Downtown isn't the only corridor that changed shape this year. Founders Row, the mixed-use block at 930 West Broad, spent roughly two years leasing its ground floor before the food component finally landed as a set in 2026: Cheese Cartel opened at the end of February with artisan cheese and charcuterie, Fish Taco brought a coastal counter with beer-battered and blackened fish next door, and Stratford Garden opened as a full-service raw bar with a $2.50 coffee-and-pastry breakfast and an outdoor drink garden. Two summers of Founders Groove, the free Thursday-night concert series at Founders Row, wrapped its ten-week third season on August 13, so that particular Thursday habit is on pause until next June.
Meanwhile West Falls Station, the redevelopment next to the West Falls Church Metro, is turning into the corridor most residents haven't built into their week yet. Dok Khao Thai Eatery is opening at 180 West Falls Station Boulevard, and Best Buns Bakery & Burgers, the fourth location for the locally owned Great American Restaurants group, is under construction as a stand-alone building in the Commons Park green space, still without a confirmed opening date. Add Grocery Outlet's first Virginia location, which opened at 500 South Washington Street, and the south end of the city has a second grocery option that didn't exist a year ago.
Three corridors, three different personalities: downtown has a former hardware store now occupied by a multi-brand dining concept alongside chef-owned restaurants; Founders Row has its ground-floor food lineup; and West Falls Station is adding restaurants with international menus.
A Few Local Dates and Recurring Options
If you're looking for local activities, here are a few dates and recurring options:
- Any night this week: Wonder has been open at 100 West Broad since September 3, so the opening-week crowds have thinned out. Order from the app or one of the in-store kiosks and you'll get a sense of what a 44-seat, multi-kitchen concept feels like in a building that spent 140 years selling hardware.
- Saturday mornings, year-round: the Falls Church Farmers Market runs 8 a.m. to noon in the City Hall parking lot at 300 Park Avenue.
- September 25: Sunset Cinema returns to Cherry Hill Park for a free outdoor movie, with one more date on October 16 to close out the series.
Together, Wonder and the festival's published eligibility rules offer two September 2026 snapshots of Falls Church: a multi-brand dining concept in a former hardware-store building and a civic event whose food-vendor criteria focus on location and business format. The contrast shows that "local" can mean more than a business address.
If you've lived on this stretch of Broad Street long enough to remember when 100 West Broad still smelled like a hardware store, you've watched more change happen this year than most residents track in five. If you're weighing what that kind of change means for your own address, whether you're thinking about your home's value on a block that's rewriting its food identity in real time or you're just curious what your street looks like to someone shopping the area right now, TSR Homes knows this part of the DMV block by block. A conversation costs nothing and there's no pressure attached to it.
