Two Italian Kitchens Just Replaced Kentlands' Persian and Mexican Spots. Here's What That Actually Tells You
August 13, 2026
August 13, 2026
Walk down Market Street past the old Caspian House of Kabob storefront and you'll find brown paper still taped inside the windows. A few blocks over, on Center Point Way, the space that used to smell like fresh tortillas at Cinco de Mayo sits in the same limbo. Both restaurants are gone. Both spaces are about to become something else. And both replacements happen to be Italian.
That's not a coincidence you'd notice from a "new restaurants in Kentlands" listicle, because those lists treat every opening as its own headline. But look at where these two Italian kitchens are landing, and where a very different kind of business is landing at the same time a few hundred yards away, and a real pattern shows up: Kentlands' walkable core keeps replacing restaurants with restaurants. Its anchor shopping center is quietly becoming something the original Main Street was never built to hold.
Compari Trattoria is coming to 72 Market Street, the longtime home of Caspian House of Kabob. The Persian restaurant, known for its kabobs, rice dishes, and stews, closed earlier this year and the property went up for lease. Compari has said only that it will offer modern Italian dining, but the address alone tells you something: a ground-floor Main Street storefront that closed as one full-service restaurant is reopening as another. No gap year as a phone case kiosk. No conversion into office space. Restaurant in, restaurant out.
The same thing is happening at 640 Center Point Way, where Gina's Cucina Siciliana is preparing to open in the space Cinco de Mayo vacated after closing in September 2025. Gina's traces its menu to a specific person: a Sicilian mother and grandmother named Gina, who died in 2014. Her son began cooking her recipes so his daughters could feel connected to a grandmother they were too young to remember, and what started as family dinners turned into more than 45 dishes drawn from the Agrigento and Messina regions of Sicily.
The concept grew out of a family's effort to preserve the recipes of Gina, a Sicilian mother and grandmother who passed away in 2014. Her son began regularly preparing more than 45 family recipes so his young daughters could connect with the grandmother they were too young to remember.
That's not a chain filling a vacancy. That's a family story picking a Main Street address on purpose, the same way Compari picked one two blocks away within weeks of the announcement.
At 295 Kentlands Blvd, inside the Kentlands Market Square shopping center, the former Party City is being cut into three separate storefronts. One of them is about to be occupied by Wonder, a delivery-first food hall opening its doors on August 13, three days from now, at 10:30 a.m. Wonder describes itself as a "mealtime platform" rather than a restaurant. There's no single chef and no dining room built around one cuisine. Instead the kitchen prepares dishes licensed from more than 20 restaurant brands, and most orders leave through a delivery app or a pickup counter. This is Wonder's second Montgomery County location, after North Bethesda, and it's arriving in a subdivided big-box space, not a Main Street storefront.
Right next to it, in another slice of that same former Party City footprint, VEG ER for Pets is opening its first Montgomery County location. It's a 24-hour, 365-day emergency veterinary hospital, walk-in only, no appointment required, treating everything from dogs and cats to birds, reptiles, and rabbits. It's the kind of business a resident hopes never to need on a Tuesday night, which is exactly why it makes sense in a parking-lot-facing anchor center instead of a sidewalk cafe row.
Put those two next to each other and the anchor center's role becomes obvious. It's absorbing the businesses that depend on a car, an app, or an emergency, not a stroll.
Kentlands was designed as a New Urbanist community, with small ground-floor storefronts meant to be walked to, not driven to. That original design intent still seems to be steering what replaces what, and it's happening without anyone planning it that way this month. Nobody at the city issued a memo saying delivery concepts go in the shopping center and family restaurants go on Main Street. The market just keeps landing there anyway.
Here's the short version of what changed and where:
That last one matters more than it looks. Andy's Pizza, the DMV chain known for its 72-hour cold-fermented dough, opened its second Montgomery County location in Kentlands after building a following in Bethesda. The Baltimore Banner talked to a Kentlands resident, Steven Shen, who used to drive upwards of 45 minutes to the chain's Tysons Corner location for a slice. Now it's a few minutes from his own front door. That's a genuinely different Tuesday night, not a marketing headline.
None of this changes what Kentlands is. It sharpens it. If your version of a good night involves parking once and walking to dinner, that experience just got stronger, not weaker. Two new full-service kitchens with actual points of view, one Italian, one Sicilian, are opening on Main Street within weeks of each other, joining Andy's Pizza and the neighborhood's existing sit-down spots. If your week also includes ordering delivery on a night nobody wants to cook, or, worse, a 2 a.m. scramble because the family dog got into something it shouldn't have, those needs are being solved a few hundred yards away, in a shopping center built for cars, not a sidewalk built for strollers.
Two different kinds of errands, two different physical answers, both inside the same zip code. That's worth knowing if you already live here and have been wondering why Main Street feels like it's filling back in while the shopping center feels like it's turning into something new. It's not your imagination. It's two separate retail economies, sorting themselves the way this neighborhood was actually built to let them.
If you're weighing what any of this means for your own home's value or timing a move around it, that's a different conversation, and one worth having with someone who tracks these blocks the way you'd expect a Kentlands neighbor to. For now, next time you're deciding between a walk to Market Street or a drive to the shopping center, you'll know exactly why both options just got better in different ways.
Curious what a changing Main Street means for your own plans in Kentlands? Valerie D Harnois would love to connect.
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