Bartaco's own tagline is "Your Everyday Escape," and its One Loudoun location has been in the works since the restaurant was first announced for Ashburn in December 2024.
The taco bar started its soft opening on September 24, 2026, joining a stretch of Exchange Street at One Loudoun that Kite Realty Group broke ground on back in October 2024. Bartaco was one of the first tenants announced for that new block, named in a December 2024 report alongside Arhaus, Van Leeuwen Ice Cream, and Tatté Bakery & Cafe. Nearly two years later, it's the last of that original group to unlock its doors. That gap is not a coincidence, and once you see the pattern behind it, you can guess with some confidence what opens next at One Loudoun and roughly how long you'll wait.
The furniture store beat the taco bar by more than five months
Arhaus opened first, on April 3, 2026, taking a nearly 20,000-square-foot corner at Exchange Street and Endicott Drive with a covered outdoor showroom for patio furniture. Alo Yoga and Van Leeuwen Ice Cream followed within the same construction window. Tatté Bakery & Cafe opened June 10, drawing a crowd for coffee, tartines, and pastries on its outdoor patio.
Bartaco kept slipping. By February, its exterior was nearing completion while Arhaus got the new phase's first store signage next door. Two months later, in early April, Bartaco's building was standing, but the inside was still filled with gravel, waiting on utility hookups and a poured concrete floor. That same week, Tatté's space a few doors down was described as nearly finished, with fixtures in place and floor tile down. Tatté opened ten weeks later. Bartaco needed more than five months from that same starting point, and it wasn't until late July that the restaurant finally got its own exterior signage, with a company representative quoted by The Burn as saying the opening was coming "sometime between now and the end of the year."
The difference comes down to what each business actually has to build. A furniture showroom or an ice cream counter needs shelving, refrigeration, and a point-of-sale system. A full-service restaurant with a bar needs a commercial kitchen, grease traps, gas lines, walk-in coolers, and life-safety systems sized for a much bigger crowd. Bartaco's One Loudoun location runs roughly 5,200 square feet with seating for about 168 guests between the dining room, bar, and patio, noticeably larger than the brand's Reston Town Center location at around 4,200 square feet. It's also only the third Bartaco in Virginia, joining locations at Reston Town Center and the Mosaic District. More square footage and more infrastructure means more inspections, and more inspections mean more months.
What's actually open right now, and what's still waiting
| Business | Type | Status as of September 24, 2026 |
|---|---|---|
| Arhaus | Furniture retail | Open since April 3, 2026 |
| Alo Yoga | Activewear retail | Open |
| Van Leeuwen Ice Cream | Ice cream counter | Open |
| Tatté Bakery & Cafe | Full-service bakery cafe | Open since June 10, 2026 |
| Bartaco | Full-service restaurant and bar | Soft opening underway |
| Madewell | Apparel retail | Lease signed, no date announced |
| Williams-Sonoma | Home and kitchen retail | Lease signed, no date announced |
| Pottery Barn | Home furnishings retail | Lease signed, no date announced |
| Anthropologie | Apparel and home retail | Planned for a nearby vacant unit, no date announced |
| Tempo by Hilton | Hotel | Planned, no date announced |
If the pattern holds, Madewell should move faster than the remaining home-goods stores. Its roughly 4,300-square-foot space, a couple of doors from the future Williams-Sonoma, is a straightforward apparel buildout, closer in complexity to Alo than to Bartaco. Williams-Sonoma and Pottery Barn will likely take longer, since both carry more fixtures, plumbing for demo kitchens, and heavier merchandising. The Tempo by Hilton hotel is the biggest unknown on the list. Hotels layer in guest room construction, elevators, and fire suppression on top of everything a restaurant needs, so it's reasonable to expect that one to be the last domino to fall in this phase, well past whenever Pottery Barn cuts its ribbon.
The plaza in front of Bartaco has a second act
The same stretch of gravel that sat outside Bartaco's unfinished building all spring is being built into a park-like plaza, and renderings show it converting into an ice rink once the weather turns. Watching a taco restaurant and a seasonal ice rink go up side by side has been part of the same construction timeline since the early renderings came out, so residents who've been driving past the fencing for two years are getting both payoffs close together: tacos this fall, skating once it's cold enough.
Recent events at One Loudoun
One Loudoun didn't wait for the new block to finish before keeping its regular programming going. On September 24, the plaza hosted an outdoor screening of Paddington in Peru with popcorn from Alamo Drafthouse Cinema. Two nights later, on September 26, the DC-area cover band Keeton played a set of 90s and alternative hits on the same plaza. Both events were free and open to anyone who wanted to bring a chair.
That's on top of a summer that already ran a full calendar: the Rocknoceros kids' concert series played the plaza every Monday from June through August, and a carnival took over the Uptown section of the center for three weeks in early June. An Asia in a Bite food festival with dozens of vendors has also been part of the fall lineup, and One Loudoun runs an annual pet event each year with trick-or-treating, adoptable dogs from local rescue groups, and a costume contest.
None of that depended on Bartaco opening. The plaza, the movie nights, and the band bookings run on their own schedule, independent of which storefront has its lights on. That's worth knowing if you've been holding off on an evening at One Loudoun until "everything" is finished. Most of what makes a Tuesday or Friday night there worthwhile has been running the whole time.
What this actually settles
The lesson from watching this block fill in isn't that Bartaco was unlucky or that the developer dragged its feet. It's that the order buildings open in tells you something real about what's inside them. Retail opens first because retail is simpler to build. Restaurants with full kitchens and bars come next, and they take noticeably longer, even when they break ground on the same day as the store next to them. Hotels come last. If you're waiting on Pottery Barn or wondering when the Tempo by Hilton will have a lobby, that's the order to expect, not because anyone announced it, but because that's how construction on a project like this actually works.
If you're weighing whether this stretch of Ashburn fits the way you want to live day to day, not just what it looks like on a map, Shepherd Homes Group knows this corridor well enough to walk you through it block by block.
