Two longtime family-owned restaurants in the Chantilly Park Shopping Center have closed their doors for good.

Located side-by-side to one another, Bravo Peruvian Chicken (14513 Lee Jackson Memorial Highway) and Picante! (14511-B Lee Jackson Memorial Highway) have both recently announced permanent closures.

Mexican restaurant Picante has serviced the area for the last 29 years, according to a statement released by owner Guillermo Manoatl on Instagram last Monday, July 31. The statement was also posted in the former storefront’s windows.

Dear Picante Loyal Customers,

Picante has closed its doors permanently as of today! We would like to thank you for letting us serve you for the past 29 years! It has been an honor to have been able to share my grandmother’s recipes with all of you!

Unlike Picante, Bravo Peruvian Chicken has yet to publicly confirm its closure or remove its signage from the shopping center, but it has been marked permanently closed on Google, and its phone number has been disconnected.

“We are a group of Peruvians who came to the United States to conquer the ‘American Dream’ while maintaining our roots and love for our culture!” Bravo Peruvian Chicken’s website reads. “Bravo Chicken is a proud example of it.”

A new shop in Old Town Fairfax hopes to spark fresh joy with its shelves of vintage wares.

Lucy Loves celebrated its official grand opening and ribbon-cutting ceremony yesterday (Thursday) after initially opening its doors at 10414 Main Street on Saturday, July 1.

With its eclectic, handmade items, the vintage shop is appropriately located down a small alleyway tucked behind the Vietnamese restaurant East Wind, offering the impression of a hidden gem.

Though narrow, the hallways of the store managed to fit local residents, Old Town Fairfax Business Association members, Fairfax City Economic Development Authority officials and Fairfax City Mayor Catherine Read.

“This kind of business is the kind of business that Old Town Fairfax has been missing,” Read said.

Lucy Loves is an outgrowth of the Fairfax Funky Flea, an outdoor flea market that operates on the last Saturday of every month from April to November. Owner Sharon Buttram says she and longtime friend Kathy Hackshaw decided to launch the now-popular flea market in 2021 after bonding over a mutual love of hunting for vintage odds and ends at thrift shops and estate sales.

“I love mixing old stuff and new stuff, and I like making it current,” Buttram said. “…I don’t want my house to be a museum of old stuff. I like to mix it up and be really eclectic in my approach. So we just thought we should do a flea market. We love going to flea markets.”

Lucy Loves currently sells a mix of items like clothing, jewelry and pottery from 16 commissioned local vendors, many of whom Buttram recruited from Fairfax Funky Flea. But in the future, Buttram hopes to also use the cozy space for community gatherings.

“I’d also like this to become a cornerstone of the community as well as an event space,” Buttram said. “Like, if you want to have a conversation about something, let’s have conversation nights. I think after a couple of years of isolation with Covid, we were starved for person-to-person [interaction]. We want to touch things…Everything you see here, you can find online, but it’s a different experience when you go, and you can touch it, and you’re supporting somebody small.”

Read sees Lucy Loves as “exactly the kind of business that people want in a historic downtown.”

“They want some place where they can go to lunch or go to dinner and wander around and pop their head into shops and spend 30 minutes looking at everything in the shop,” she said.

According to Read, Fairfax City has been working to attract more businesses and shoppers so it can better compete with major shopping centers like Fairfax Corner, Mosaic District and Tysons Corner Center.

“I think Lucy Loves is the beginning of seeing more of this kind of retail want to come to our downtown,” Read said. “This is a very promising turn of events for the City of Fairfax because we want to attract visitors. But we also want our residents to stay here. We want our residents to dine here, shop here, attend our events here and to support businesses just like this one.”

In the future, Buttram envisions collaborating with George Mason University students to further engage them in the creative process.

“I’m really excited about a bigger partnership with GMU, and I’ve talked to them about doing workshops for students in their makerspace,” Buttram said. “But I’m also talking to them about even [giving] makers on campus that want to sell things [an opportunity to sell here].”

But for now, Buttram is proud of what she’s accomplished, finally cutting a ribbon on a shop named after her grandmother — “an original thrifty soul” who loved everything, she says.

“I’m really proud of the shop and the turnout today and of all my friends and family in the city,” Buttram said. “I love doing it here in the city. I’ve lived here for 30 years, and it’s just my absolute favorite place here in Virginia. So to have this here is the culmination of all the things I’ve wanted and then to have all my friends come out and support me, it’s been really meaningful to me.”

“This is a small shop, and I fully expect that one of these days, they will outgrow this space,” Read said. “But for now, having a space that’s over full of things is a good thing.”

Fairfax County will bolster its capabilities to respond to and resolve emergency calls related to mental health this fall.

The Fairfax County Police Department and the Fairfax-Falls Church Community Services Board presented plans to roll out a fourth co-responder team and a telehealth pilot program at a Board of Supervisors safety and security committee meeting on Tuesday (Aug. 1).

Active since its pilot in March 2021 and made permanent in 2022, the co-responder program pairs a Crisis Intervention Team-trained law enforcement officer with a CSB crisis intervention specialist to respond to behavioral health calls. The duo rides together in the same patrol cruiser and either self-dispatch proactively to behavioral health calls or are dispatched by emergency services, FCPD Lieutenant Joanna Culkin explained during the meeting.

Co-responder teams aim to de-escalate situations involving an individual with a mental health crisis without use of force, incarceration or hospitalization to decrease instances of individuals being harmed by law enforcement.

Currently, three co-responder teams operate in the county, according to CSB Division Director of Emergency and Crisis Care Services Laura Maddock.

Two of the teams are active from noon to midnight seven days a week. The third team currently works from 2 p.m. to 11 p.m. three days a week but will expand its coverage to match the other two teams on Aug. 15.

The fourth co-responder team that Maddock expects to join in late September or early October will follow a similar trajectory, starting with three-day coverage before transitioning to operating for a full week.

The continuing expansion of these mental health crisis services comes after the program showed measurable success in a June 30 data pull, Culkin says. She noted that the co-responder program has successfully increased timely on-scene assessment, with the presence of a clinician often de-escalating situations.

“Sometimes just having the clinician show up paired with our law enforcement counterpart puts people at ease and lets them know that, really, behavioral health is the main focus of our response,” Culkin said.

Culkin cited increased linkages to behavioral health services and higher levels of care, decreased rates of incarceration and arrest, and decreased visits to emergency services as benefits of the program. She said the program helps address “the [psychiatric] bed capacity issue across the state of Virginia” by resolving many cases in the field so fewer individuals need further care.

Of the 1,300 calls that got a co-responder response since the program began, 50% were resolved in the field, 30% were diverted from arrest or hospitalization, 26% resulted in higher level of care and 17% resulted in an Emergency Custody Order and/or Temporary Detention Order, Culkin said.

“That 17% is a really good number for us,” Culkin said. “When we’re looking at if a regular patrol officer had responded…without the ability to do those timely on scene assessments or come up with a safety or care plan, we’re looking at a significantly higher number of ECOs and TDOS.”

To further illustrate the co-responder program’s impact, Culkin recounted an instance where a clinician successfully worked with officers to “talk down” a “distraught subject” who was standing atop a ledge on a parking garage in Dunn Loring and “get him the help he needed.”

On another occasion, a co-responder team responded to a behavioral health call from a man “in emotional distress who indicated that nobody had ever celebrated his birthday.” After helping the man, the pair came back the next day with a birthday cake and enjoyed a belated celebration with him.

“These are good examples of both of the ways the co-responder program has had a positive impact with our community,” Culkin said.

The FCPD and CSB will additionally pilot a new telehealth program following the same fall timeline as the fourth co-responder team. Two police stations in Reston and McLean will receive iPads that officers can use to remotely contact a trained clinician at the Merrifield Crisis Response Center around the clock to fill gaps in coverage, since the co-responder teams don’t operate 24/7.

Maddock hinted that the county is working on implementing a follow-up team, which would consist of a peer and clinician going out to subjects of co-responder cases for check ins and referrals.

FCPD is also striving to increase the number of police officers who have undergone CIT training from 40% to 42% by the end of the year, Culkin said. The number has been slowly increasing over the last couple of years after less than a third of officers had received CIT training in 2021.

As the upcoming school year approaches, many families face the difficult task of purchasing a lengthy list of school supplies when money for housing, food and other life necessities is already stretched thin.

One local organization is working to alleviate this stress for thousands of Fairfax County families.

Fairfax-based nonprofit Britepaths is seeking community donations for its Back to School Drive, which can be made through its website until Aug. 31. Checks, made out to Britepaths, can also be mailed to 3959 Pender Drive, Suite 200, Fairfax, Virginia 22030 with “BTS23” as the memo line.

The funds will provide new backpacks and school supplies to 2,500 Fairfax County Public Schools students in need, according to a press release. A donation of $25 will provide supplies and a backpack for one student.

“It is incredible to think about the fact that Fairfax County is one of the five wealthiest counties in the country, and yet one in 14 children in our community lives in poverty,” Britepaths’ Executive Director Lisa Whetzel said. “…Community members who sponsor students in our Back to School campaign are doing so much more than providing supplies and backpacks. They’re helping young people whose lives can be stressful start off the school year with confidence, dignity and the tools they need to succeed.”

Recipients of these supplies include elementary schools — Daniels Run, Eagle View, Providence, Willow Springs, Bailey’s Upper and Glen Forest — as well as high schools like Fairfax, Fairfax Adult, Justice, and Lewis.

Organizations may also choose to sponsor or cosponsor all students at a specific partner school. This year, local car dealership Jim McKay Chevrolet chose to sponsor Willow Springs students.

“Our personal connections to Willow Springs Elementary School and knowledge of the work that Britepaths does made it an easy decision to become a sponsor for Britepaths’ Back to School program,” Jim McKay Chevrolet President Kathy McKay said. “We hope the community will join us in supporting this effort to ensure that students are ready to learn at the start of the school year.”

Britepaths has been supporting Fairfax County and Northern Virginia residents in need since 1984. It aims to “stabilize families with supplemental food and financial assistance” and “build resilience through financial education and workforce development coaching and IT training,” the press release says.

In 2023, the nonprofit assisted 11,000 individuals in over 7,000 households using community funding and volunteer support.

For more information, Britepaths can be reached by phone at 703-273-8829 or by email events@britepaths.org.

A different kind of Vietnamese restaurant, Pho Towda, has taken over the former Pomodoro Pizza at 12151 Fairfax Towne Center.

Co-owners and brothers-in-law Nhan Nguyen and Chi Phan moved into the shopping center after selling their original restaurant Pho Bytes (11211 Lee Hwy), which was just a few miles away. The duo sought a fresh start after experiencing complications with their previous third partner and the restaurant’s setup.

“The kitchen [at Pho Bytes] was run down so bad, and we couldn’t afford to renovate the kitchen, so we sold that, and we build a new one here,” Phan said.

After a difficult, long renovation process, Pho Towda finally welcomed customers for a soft opening from July 10 to July 13.

Nguyen, who also owns a cybersecurity company, says Pho Towda staff were “overwhelmed” by the customers that arrived after a friend advertised the soft opening in Northern Virginia Foodies, a Facebook group with over 100,000 members.

“We didn’t expect to have that many people show up for two, three days,” Nguyen said. “…We [sold] out all the food on the first day, and we had to close an hour early, and then the second day, the same thing.”

Unprepared for so many customers, the restaurant descended into chaos. Customers complained about long wait times, as young, inexperienced servers struggled to handle the rush, and the kitchen, led by Phan, became backed up with constant orders, Nguyen says.

After three days, the pair knew they had to regroup and adjust their strategy, so they shut down and delayed their grand opening to Monday, July 17. They worked to implement the feedback they received from friends, family and customers — namely, improving wait times.

“We had to look at how to improve our process,” Nguyen said. “…We did a taste test, and we [re-trained] all the servers to make sure that they knew all the food inside and out.”

Since reopening, Nguyen says operations have been “a lot smoother,” though they had to forgo some beloved practices, such as offering hand-cut noodles, to shorten wait times.

Pho Towda cooks “authentic Vietnamese food” with a modern American “twist,” specializing in banh mi and pho, according to Nguyen. Its name comes from the signature dish, pho tho da, a noodle soup served in a hot stone bowl.

“A lot of customer request hot soup…so I kept thinking and come up with the hot stone bowl,” Phan, the head chef and innovator behind Pho Towda’s menu, said. “It takes at least 10, 15 minutes to heat the stone bowl and make it hot, and it keeps the soup hot for longer.” Read More

Centreville shoppers may have experienced a bit of déjà vu stepping into the recently opened Cafe Bdan at 13814 Braddock Road.

That’s because the new Korean-Japanese fusion dessert shop is a rebranding of fan-favorite Iron Ice, which closed down for six weeks before reopening as Cafe Bdan on Saturday, July 15, according to shop owner Charlie Shin.

Cafe Bdan is still currently in its soft opening period, offering what Shin says is approximately 85% of the full menu.

In honor of the recent opening, the cafe is giving out 10% off coupons to use at Cafe Bdan or either of Shin’s other two businesses in the Old Centreville Crossing shopping center — Japanese restaurant Kazone and women’s clothing store The Style by Coco.

Cafe Bdan’s predecessor Iron Ice was best known for its Instagram-worthy dessert commonly dubbed “puffle ice cream,” consisting of scoops of ice cream nestled in a Hong Kong egg waffle.

Though customers can still order puffle ice cream at Cafe Bdan, Shin spent the temporary closure devising an expanded menu that caters to “all four seasons,” rather than serving only one specialty item.

Shin says customers have called the refreshed menu’s croffle — a mix of a croissant and a waffle — “the best in town.” He takes care to use higher-end French croissants to elevate patron’s experiences.

Cafe Bdan’s bingsu, or Korean snow ice, topped with a special whipped cream has similarly been a smash hit amongst customers, according to Shin.

Shin also highlighted the cafe’s new bubble tea, which he says is brewed at his home and then brought into the store, taking over three hours to make.

“It’s really good,” Shin said. “It’s more than premium — it’s triple premium.” Read More

Hunt Club Cluster residents in Reston are pushing back against a potential redevelopment of a 9-acre property just north of Lake Fairfax Park that encompasses a possible slave cemetery and a 1790s-era log cabin.

SEM Fairfax Land Associates has been working to secure approval from Fairfax County to build Fairfax Hunt Estates, a community of eight single-family homes, at 1321 Lake Fairfax Drive and preserve the log cabin known as Fairfax Hunt Club, according to the application submitted on Nov. 22, 2022.

Tonight (Wednesday), the Fairfax County Planning Commission will decide whether to green-light the developer’s ambitious construction plans at a public hearing.

Hunt Club resident and former Associated Press reporter Heather Greenfield has been following the story since she and her next-door neighbor discovered several gravestones in the greenscape behind their townhome complex in 2013.

Greenfield says she and her next-door neighbor worked with the Fairfax Cemetery Preservation Association from 2013-2015 in hopes of preserving the site as the Johnson cemetery, named after its 1860 owner Mildred Johnson. While researching the land’s historic 19th-century roots, she learned that Johnson was a Union abolitionist and mother to 11 who played a large role in “protecting African Americans” by housing at least one freedman named Courtney Honesty.

“Reston was founded on this principle of diversity…so I found it fascinating that [the Johnson family was] sort of living the principles of Reston before Reston was even created,” Greenfield said.

Though the county still refers to the area as unnamed cemetery #FX242, Greenfield feels strongly that the area is a burial site for individuals enslaved by the Johnson family and their descendants. The site includes an engraved marker for Mildred’s husband, Thornton Johnson, and gravestones that Greenfield believes belong to several African American individuals.

“We think the rest of the two acre cemetery were African American graves because even though the [Johnson] family all had headstones, African Americans likely did not,” Greenfield said. “And [what we found] were mostly headstones and footstones that were more crude stones arranged in kind of wheel patterns around some of the cedar trees.”

The developer began scouting out the site in May of last year, sending contractors to landscape the area “in order to facilitate locating the graves during their archaeological survey,” according to a statement from Fairfax County Park Authority Public Information Officer Benjamin Boxer.

Even over a year later, Greenfield vividly recalls the day developers came in “bulldozers blazing and chainsaws going.”

“I woke up at 6:30 in the morning to chainsaws, and they continued for 12 hours that day and then they came back and did the same thing the next day,” Greenfield said.

Though Greenfield suspected that contractors were not authorized to cut down trees in the area, the county says permits from Land Development Services for vegetation removal are only required when the land disturbance exceeds 2,500 square feet.

“It appears vegetation was removed in May 2022 in order to complete the archeological delineation of the cemetery,” a county urban forester wrote. “Urban Forestry’s Forest Conservation Branch was not aware of the vegetation removal at this time and would not have reviewed it.” Read More

Boba enthusiasts anxiously waiting for the popular Tiger Sugar boba chain to land in Northern Virginia will finally have the opportunity to try its specialty drinks soon.

One Tiger Sugar location is set to come to 5704 Pickwick Road in a Centreville shopping center best known for housing Sō Korean BBQ. Signage at the window did not indicate an exact opening date but announced that the shop was accepting hiring applications.

Tiger Sugar’s second Northern Virginia location is slated to be at 4363 John Marr Drive in Annandale’s EastGate Shopping Center next to thrift store B-Thrifty and K Market International. The Annandale location will be housed with L&L Hawaiian Barbecue and a beer garden in the same storefront, both of which have yet to open as well, according to Annandale Today.

An exact opening date was also not made available for this location.

Originating in Taichung, Taiwan, Tiger Sugar is best known for its black sugar bubble tea made using a “proprietary” eight-hour cooking method, its website says. Tiger Sugar’s drinks are especially popular on social media, where online users show off their creamy concoctions lined with brown, hand-poured syrup streaks reminiscent of “tiger stripes.”

Since its launch in 2017, Tiger Sugar has expanded to over 50 storefronts across the U.S. but has yet to come to Virginia, which makes these two openings particularly noteworthy for locals.

Tiger Sugar did not respond to FFXnow’s request for comment before press time.

(Updated 10:55 a.m. on 7/26/2023) The ongoing redevelopment of Richmond Highway (Route 1) in Fairfax County has sparked a larger discussion over whether the benefits of road widening projects outweigh their potential harm.

The Virginia Department of Transportation plans to bring improvements to a three-mile stretch in the Richmond Highway corridor in two phases: first from Jeff Todd Way to just north of Frye Road, then from just north of Frye Road to Sherwood Hall Lane.

Notably, the changes will widen Richmond Highway from four to six lanes, which will pave the way for bus rapid transit in the corridor but has garnered some pushback from local community members.

The Coalition for Smarter Growth, which advocates for more “sustainable” transportation methods such as walking, biking and transit in the D.C. region, claimed in a recent press release that “wider roads fail, and the public knows this.”

CSG’s Northern Virginia Advocacy Manager Sonya Breehey says road widening projects create induced demand, arguing that adding more travel lanes incentivizes more people to drive and increases congestion in the long run, despite offering short-term relief.

“The idea is, we get stuck in traffic, so we add travel lanes,” Breehey said. “It’s easy for a few years, but then those travel lanes fill back up and then everybody’s clamoring again for more road widening. It’s a cyclical problem.”

Rep. Don Beyer, who represents the county’s Route 1 area in Congress, told FFXnow in an exclusive interview that he supports road widening projects.

“I think [road widening projects] are an important part of congestion relief,” Beyer said. “There’s an alternative argument…that they will fill up as fast as you build them. That’s certainly been largely true in the metro D.C. area for a long time…but at the same time, I don’t know if it’s still true today.”

In addition to adding travel lanes, the Richmond Highway project reserves median space for future lanes dedicated to The One, a bus rapid transit system that aims to outpace traditional bus services with dedicated lanes and fewer stops.

With the BRT expected to be operational in 2030, the Northern Virginia Transportation Commission announced last month that the Commonwealth Transportation Board approved $10 million to help implement the bus system from Fort Belvoir to the Huntington Metro station.

“This billion-dollar investment in a new state-of-the-art transportation system and in the communities along Richmond Highway will revitalize the area and provide more safe, convenient and dependable transportation options for the people who live here,” Mount Vernon District Supervisor Dan Storck wrote in a statement.

Storck says road widening can only be “done right” if it is “in coordination” with “walkable, bikeable communities and mass transit.” Read More

A new cupcake business has landed at Fair Oaks Mall, adding a sprinkle of delight to visitors’ shopping experience.

Located near the mall’s upper-level food court next to a smoothie shop, Irresistible Cupcakes (11750 Fair Oaks Mall) celebrated its soft opening on Thursday, June 29.

Though Sunday, July 1 marked Irresistible Cupcakes’ official grand opening, founder and owner Fatima Reid has decided to extend the celebration through the entire month of July.

Until Aug. 1, Irresistible Cupcakes is sweetening the deal with a discount in honor of its grand opening: buy four or six cupcakes, get one free. Purchases of a dozen cupcakes are also discounted.

Reid says her cupcakes are freshly baked in the morning, and she hand-makes all of the cupcake batter and buttercream.

“Irresistible Cupcakes does everything from scratch,” Reid said. “So we use high-quality products and whatever I think are the finest products to produce a good quality cupcake and cake. I don’t cut any corners on that at all.”

Reid turned to baking cupcakes as her full-time career after losing her job in 2017, inspired by friends and family who insisted that there was something “special” about the cakes she would make during the holidays, she says.

Though Reid didn’t initially believe in her ability to perform physical labor and questioned whether her cupcakes could truly stand out against the pack, her husband and a higher calling gave her the final push to pick up a whisk and get to work.

“My husband said if you’re going to do this, you’ve got to be all the way in,” Reid said. “So I just researched and prayed about where I should go next.”

Launching her cupcake business out of her home kitchen, Reid went from selling baked treats at her local Bible study to opening her own store, which migrated across the D.C. region from Joint Base Andrews in Maryland to Fort Belvoir to Springfield Mall.

Reid settled on Fair Oaks Mall as Irresistible Cupcakes’ next spot after her storefront in Springfield Mall closed, because she would have access to an in-store kitchen, something she has long sought.

“My wonderful big fat oven that I love so dearly has brought me much joy in this last month here,” Reid laughed.

Now, she makes the 26-mile commute from Upper Marlboro, Maryland, to Fairfax every morning to open the store at 11 a.m. and close at 8 p.m.

“I’m excited at being welcomed at Fair Oaks Mall and to the Fairfax community,” Reid said. “It’s a wonderful community, and it seems like the people are very kind and very welcoming to us.”

Reid says she’s observed over the last five years that, wherever her business operates, the residents seem to gravitate towards different cupcake and cake flavors, creating different lineups of best-sellers.

“Here, they love pineapple upside-down, strawberry shortcake, strawberry cupcakes,” Reid said. “And definitely the red velvet and the caramel. The caramel is a huge hit…and the rum is a great cake as well.”

In the future, Reid hopes to expand her menu to include more vegan options, and she is seeking another store manager to help run day-to-day operations when she isn’t there.

Until then, she’s focused on “figuring out what works best for Irresistible to flow” seamlessly and giving her customers “a great experience” when they come into the mall, she says.

“It’s not just a bite of heaven, but it’s a good experience,” Reid said.