Two Stuck Corners Of North Potomac Just Got Unstuck

For most of the last five years, the storefront at 9755 Traville Gateway Drive was the kind of place you stopped noticing. The old Nantucket's Reef sign came down not long after the restaurant closed, and after that the windows just sat dark, season after season, while everything around it in Traville Village Center kept turning over. You'd drive past it on the way to Giant or Trader Joe's and register it the way you register a pothole you already know how to avoid. Empty since 2020, no news, no signage, nothing.

Then this spring the lights came back on. El Patio Argentine Restaurant, a Rockville institution that has served the area since 2001, took the space and opened it in mid-May 2026 as a second location, keeping its longtime restaurant at Loehmann's Plaza on Randolph Road running as well, complete with the same back-of-house bakery and market that regulars know from the original. Around the same time, a few miles up Quince Orchard Road, a very different kind of stuck property finally moved too. The 41.6-acre site of the former Potomac Horse Center, closed since July 2024, is now officially being treated by Montgomery Parks as permanent trail infrastructure rather than an open question.

Those two facts don't look connected on the surface. One is a restaurant lease. The other is a county parks decision. But if you live in North Potomac and you've watched both properties sit in limbo for years, the real story isn't that a new restaurant opened or that an old barn is finally coming down. It's that two of the corridor's longest-running vacancies both resolved in the same year, in opposite directions, and that pattern tells you something about how this stretch of Darnestown Road actually moves.

The Space Nobody Thought Would Fill

Five years is a long time for a nearly 5,000-square-foot restaurant space to sit vacant in a shopping center anchored by a grocery store that pulls foot traffic every day. Retail brokers who track Traville Village Center will tell you that kind of gap usually means a landlord holding out for the wrong tenant, or a space with a layout that scares off anyone but a very specific concept. In this case it turned out to be both. El Patio wasn't chasing a generic restaurant footprint. The family that has run the business since it opened on Twinbrook Parkway in October 2001 needed room for a full kitchen, a dining room built for family-style parrillada platters, and enough back-of-house space for the bakery and specialty market that has always been part of the concept, stocked with imported Argentine wines and pastries. That combination isn't easy to slot into an existing box, which is likely a real part of why the space sat empty as long as it did.

The wait ended when El Patio signed on for the location, and the restaurant kept its longtime Randolph Road spot running while the Traville build-out finished. Two locations now, one legacy and one new, both under the same ownership. For North Potomac residents whose closest option for empanadas and milanesas used to mean a drive to Rockville, the practical change is a shorter loop. For anyone who has watched that particular storefront go dark year after year, the bigger change is what it says about the corridor's appetite. A landlord and a tenant were both willing to wait five years to get the fit right, which is a different story than a space nobody wanted.

The Centers Around It Are Filling In Too

The Traville Gateway lease isn't an isolated data point. Traville Village Center itself, the Giant Food-anchored center where El Patio now sits, has also signed on ISI Elite Training, a fitness studio built around small-group strength and conditioning, for its first Montgomery County location. A few minutes away on Darnestown Road, Travilah Square, the shopping center anchored by Trader Joe's, has added Playful Pack, a dog daycare and boarding operation, at 10016 Darnestown Road.

Neither of those is a flashy addition. No line out the door, no local news coverage beyond a short mention. But that's part of what makes them worth noticing. Restaurants come and go on buzz. Dog daycares and fitness studios come in when a neighborhood's household base is stable enough and dense enough to support a recurring, unglamorous service. Boarding a dog or showing up for a 6 a.m. training session is not a novelty purchase. It's a sign that the people filling these centers expect their customers to still be around next year, and the year after that.

Put together with El Patio's move, the picture of this corridor stops looking like a place waiting for something to happen and starts looking like a place where the slow pieces have quietly clicked into place at the same time.

What Happened To The Horse Center Land

The other side of this story sits on the opposite end of Quince Orchard Road, and it moved in the opposite direction: from private commercial use back toward public open space.

Potomac Horse Center operated on that 41.6-acre parcel for more than three decades under a lease with Montgomery Parks, and the facility itself traced its roots back to the early 1960s. The center closed permanently on July 22, 2024, after a lease dispute that came down to money. Structural assessments in 2023 found significant safety concerns in the aging barns and arena, and Montgomery Parks asked the horse center's operators to fund the repairs needed to keep the lease viable. The operators chose to close instead.

For a while after that, the future of the land was genuinely unclear. Montgomery Parks kept the parking lot open for access to the Muddy Branch Greenway Trail but left the rest in a holding pattern while it decided what came next. That holding pattern has now ended. Montgomery Parks' current project page for the site describes an active plan: remove the buildings that have reached the end of their structural life, relocate the Muddy Branch Greenway Trail trailhead closer to the existing parking lot, and make other improvements aimed at expanded public access. The parking lot remains open from sunrise to sunset for trail users right now, and the demolition and trail work are the next visible steps.

That's a meaningfully different status than "closed, future undetermined." It means the county has committed to a direction for a landmark piece of North Potomac land that residents watched go quiet for more than two years without a clear answer.

Same Corridor, Two Answers

Seen side by side, the two ends of this corridor tell a consistent story even though they're moving in different directions. One property got more commercial. One got more public. Both spent years in limbo before something finally moved. If you've lived in North Potomac through that whole stretch, that consistency matters more than either headline on its own. It suggests the pauses on this corridor aren't signs of decline. They're just how long it takes for the right tenant, or the right public plan, to show up.

A Weekend Loop Worth Trying

If you want to see the change firsthand, here's a route that touches all three spots in one afternoon.

1. Start with lunch at El Patio's new Traville Gateway location and try the parrillada if you've never had it, then peek at the new ISI Elite Training studio signing on in the same center.
2. Head a few minutes up Darnestown Road to Travilah Square and check out Playful Pack if you've been looking for dog daycare closer to home.
3. Finish at the old Potomac Horse Center parking lot on Quince Orchard Road, still open sunrise to sunset, and pick up the Muddy Branch Greenway Trail for a walk through the section of land that's finally getting a real plan.

None of this changes what North Potomac is. It's still the same mix of quiet streets, Darnestown Road shopping centers, and a trail network that connects more of it than most people realize. But the corridor just proved it isn't frozen. Watch the spaces that seem stuck. They tend to move all at once.

If you're a longtime North Potomac resident curious what your home might be worth in a market shaped by changes like these, or if you know someone eyeing the neighborhood from the outside, Valerie D Harnois knows this corridor block by block. Let's connect.