EatLoco Farmers Market is preparing to open a location at the Halley Rise mixed-use development, bringing a new weekly farmers’ market to Reston.
The new market will be held Sundays, from 9 a.m.-1 p.m. in the parking lot of Halley Rise near the intersection of Reston Parkway and Sunrise Valley Drive. March 29 will be the opening day.
This will be the first Fairfax County location for EatLoco Farmers Markets, which operates two Loudoun County markets and one in Arlington’s Metropolitan Park.
Halley Rise’s property management company approached EatLoco about bringing a farmers market to the development, which has apartment and office buildings and a Wegmans grocery store. The new farmers market could get foot traffic from on-site apartment buildings and Reston Town Center Metro station.
“It’s a great place for a market. There is another Reston market, but it’s kind of on the other side of Reston, and it’s on Saturdays,” Lauren Katz, director of operations for EatLoco Farmers Markets, told FFXnow. “This will be a Sunday market, and we will have more artisans and other things, as well as just food and farmers. So we’ll have a little bit of everything.”
EatLoco’s markets provide a variety of small business vendors, from farm goods to hot food and baked goods to arts and crafts, and personal care products. The operator is aiming to have 50 vendors to start at the Reston market and already has drawn interest from numerous vendors.
Katz said there is room to grow the market to as many as 200 vendors due to its location in a large parking lot.
“We try to do we try to focus more on larger markets rather than the smaller ones, because we feel like having a large variety of vendors brings out more customers and creates more of an experience for them,” Katz said. “It almost has a festival feel to it, but we pride ourselves in how professionally we’re run.”
While Reston Farmers Market at Lake Anne Plaza and other Fairfax County Park Authority-run farmers markets do not allow pets aside from service animals, EatLoco welcomes well-behaved, leashed dogs at its markets.
EatLoco operates several of its markets throughout the year. The Halley Rise market in Reston will start out running in the spring, summer and fall, ending the week before Thanksgiving.
“Some of our other markets do run year round, but usually we don’t start that until we’ve been around for a couple, two, three years successfully during the regular season,” Katz said.
As EatLoco expands into Fairfax County, one of its Loudoun County markets will not be returning. The EatLoco Open Air Market at Dulles Town Center, which operated in 2025, can no longer happen as plans for an expo center at the mall will make the parking lot unavailable. The market operator will have a renewed focus on locations that are both walkable and car-accessible.
“The problem we had at Dulles Town Center was that it was a destination market,” Katz said. “Nobody could really walk there. We really love the feel of having people that live in the neighborhood walk over to the farmers market to enjoy it.”
Katz, who will take ownership of EatLoco from founder Dan Hine in the next week, said it will consider other future locations in Fairfax County.
“I grew up in Burke Centre, so we would like to move in that direction as well,” Katz said. “Even though we have Loudoun County markets, we also have a couple in Arlington, so this sort of bridges the gap between Loudoun and our Arlington market.”
Halley Rise parking lot photo via Google Maps
