A wine-soaked national restaurant chain is staking a claim in southern Loudoun County's newest retail project, signing on for an 11,212-square-foot storefront at The Shops at Arcola even though ground has not yet been broken on the site. Cooper's Hawk Winery & Restaurant will bring its scratch-kitchen menu and in-house wine program to the development off Loudoun County Parkway at Dulles West Boulevard, joining an unnamed organic grocery store as the project's only two signed tenants so far.
The lease was first reported by whatnow.com, which noted that Cooper's Hawk will bring modern casual dining to a corner of the county that has spent years waiting for its full-service dining scene to catch up with its growth. The chain is known for pairing a scratch-kitchen menu with proprietary wines, and each dish on the menu lists a bin number to guide diners toward a matching bottle, according to the outlet. Cooper's Hawk already operates locations in Ashburn and Reston, so the Arcola spot would mark a third Northern Virginia outpost squarely inside the Dulles-Loudoun dining corridor.
The bigger catch for shoppers eyeing the development is patience. Construction at The Shops at Arcola has not yet begun, and Atlanta-based developer SJC Ventures is targeting a Q1 2027 groundbreaking with a 14-month build timeline, putting the realistic opening window in early 2028, according to The Burn. Future Cooper's Hawk customers in South Riding will simply need to wait for the restaurant to open, with no predictable timeline yet because construction hasn't started.
An Anchor Grocer Still Shrouded in Mystery
The other signed tenant at The Shops at Arcola is an organic grocery store that inked a lease in early 2026 for a 30,012-square-foot anchor building, and speculation has settled heavily on Whole Foods. The Burn's reporting points to developer SJC Ventures' extensive East Coast development history with the chain as the basis for that guess, though SJC Ventures principal Jeff Garrison has declined to confirm or deny Whole Foods' involvement, citing active lease confidentiality. That question remains unresolved, and so does the pace at which SJC Ventures can fill the roughly 28 remaining retail spaces across the planned 86,545-square-foot center, which is designed to eventually hold up to 30 storefronts across nine buildings.
The development sits directly next to a Target that opened in October 2025, and that store's arrival is widely credited with unlocking renewed commercial interest in the tract. It wasn't always destined for Target and a wine bar, though — earlier site plans for the same parcel centered on a Wegmans grocery store and a Kohl's department store before Wegmans formally pulled out of the project in 2020, leaving a multi-year gap in anchor tenant planning for the area.
A Corridor Finally Catching Up on Dining
South Riding and Arcola have quietly become one of the busier restaurant expansion zones in southern Loudoun, with Silver Diner, Ford's Fish Shack, First Watch, Sense of Thai and Pitango Gelato's Loudoun debut all landing in recent years in a corridor that historically lacked upscale sit-down options. Cooper's Hawk, founded in 2005 in Orland Park, Illinois by CEO Tim McEnery, has grown to more than 70 locations nationally by combining a full-service restaurant, bar, Napa-style tasting room and retail marketplace under one roof, according to background compiled on the company. Private equity firm Ares Management acquired the chain in 2019 in a deal valued at approximately $700 million, fueling its continued expansion into suburban commercial corridors.
The chain's roughly 110-item American-fusion menu is built around fresh, peak-of-season ingredients prepared daily in its scratch kitchen, paired with proprietary wines through a wine club that has grown to nearly 300,000 members nationwide. Loudoun County's demographics help explain why chains like Cooper's Hawk keep circling the map here: the county reported a median household income of $181,765 in 2024 and a projected 2026 population topping 450,000 residents, making it one of the wealthiest and fastest-growing counties in the country.
Cooper's Hawk has been on a national tear lately, with similar suburban signings reported this year in South Charlotte, Dunwoody, Minnesota and Pleasant Prairie. For South Riding and Arcola residents, though, the more immediate reality is a long wait: the grocery anchor's identity is still unconfirmed, dirt has yet to move on the site, and the earliest anyone will be sipping wine at a bin-numbered table in Arcola is roughly two years away.
