Wednesday Nights Around the Avalon Theatre in Chevy Chase DC
October 1, 2026
October 1, 2026
The marquee at 5612 Connecticut Avenue lights up every night of the week. On Wednesdays, the Avalon Theatre runs its weekly members' series and has a Business Member Program for participating nearby businesses. Saturday brings the farmers market, another regular event on the corridor.
In the past eighteen months, several new businesses have joined the corridor. Their arrival adds options around the Avalon's Wednesday series.
The Avalon is Washington's only nonprofit, independent movie house and the oldest continuously operating neighborhood theater in the city, a run that traces back to its opening as the Chevy Chase Theatre in 1923. The Avalon Theatre Café at the same address serves espresso, beer, wine, sandwiches, soups and ice cream daily, and anything bought there can be carried straight into a screening. The weekly Wednesday series is the piece that turns a single-purpose trip to the movies into a recurring night on the calendar. The theater's Business Member Program then extends that same membership relationship past the box office, connecting Avalon members to participating neighborhood restaurants and retailers along the corridor.
The theater itself nearly didn't survive. Loews closed the Avalon in March 2001 during a bankruptcy reorganization and stripped the projection equipment, seats and screen before neighbors organized to save it. The nonprofit that emerged, led by retired librarian Bob Zich and a small group of neighbors who first met in his living room, reopened the theater on April 22, 2003. Getting the marquee lit again was the fight.
New options have arrived on the block south of the Circle, and the timing of what's arrived is specific enough to matter.
BirdSong opened at 5507 Connecticut Avenue NW in 2025, replacing Blue 44. Chef Kitima Boonmala built the modern Thai restaurant out of her own noodle pop-ups and a family connection to Ayutthaya, where her relatives ran a noodle shop. Washingtonian ranked BirdSong No. 84 on its January 2026 list of the region's 100 Very Best Restaurants, calling out the midnight fried rice, khao soi and roasted cabbage specifically. That's a review of a full year of cooking, not an opening-week write-up, which is the kind of ranking that tends to hold.
Wheelhouse opened June 10, 2026, at 5714 Connecticut Avenue NW, just south of the Circle in the former Wine & Organic Market space. It comes from Bo Blair's Georgetown Events Hospitality Group, the same team behind Millie's in Spring Valley, and Blair has said directly that he wanted Wheelhouse to do for Chevy Chase what Millie's already does for Spring Valley: function as a room people default to rather than a place they discover once. The 4,500-square-foot space seats 211 around a 33-foot bar, and it added something the corridor had been missing before June, a walk-up takeout counter that also serves ice cream, plus weekend brunch.
A few doors down, Skin Stories opened as an appointment-only facial studio at 5506 Connecticut Avenue, tucked between Parthenon and Mamma Lucia. It's a small business, not a destination restaurant, but it's one more storefront on the strip that wasn't there a year ago, and it fills in the daytime side of a corridor that used to go quiet between lunch and dinner.
None of these three arrived because of the Avalon's Wednesday series. But all three now sit within walking distance of the Avalon, and 2025 and 2026 brought new dining and shopping options to the corridor before and after its 7 p.m. showtimes.
Skip's on the Avenue runs its own trivia night on Mondays. The Avalon offers a Wednesday members' series, and nearby restaurants provide options for people who want dinner before a show.
A version of the night, using only what's actually on the block:
Saturday brings another regular event. The Chevy Chase Farmers Market runs 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. year-round at Lafayette Elementary School, and it's a genuine anchor for anyone doing a morning errand run. The Avalon's Wednesday series and Business Member Program offer a different option for people spending an evening on the corridor.
The strip is adding storefronts alongside the Avalon, which opened as the Chevy Chase Theatre in 1923. BirdSong, Wheelhouse and Skin Stories are among the newer businesses on the corridor.
If you're weighing what it's actually like to live within a few blocks of this stretch of Connecticut Avenue, that's the kind of detail worth knowing before you tour a single house. Wydler Brothers works this corridor block by block and can walk you through it in person.
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Wydler Brothers have been selling residential real estate for over 20 years in the DC metro area. Along the way, they’ve achieved numerous awards and recognitions, including being recognized as “The Most Innovative Real Estate Agent in America” (Inman, 2014), written several articles for The Washington Post, authored a book, “Inside the Sell”, co-founded a real estate tech company which sold to Move, Inc. in 2013, and built Wydler Brothers into a highly respected boutique brokerage with 70 agents and employees which they sold to Compass in 2019. Currently, Wydler Brothers is among the top 3 teams in the DMV and was the #1 Compass Team in 2022.