Black Lion Café is finally closing in on a College Park opening date, with the Ethiopian coffee shop now targeting December for its debut on the ground floor of the Union on Knox student housing complex. The new café will seat more than 100 people, including a quieter mezzanine study area built for students who want a spot to camp out with their laptops.
Permits Push Back the Timeline, Again
According to dbknews.com, permitting delays pushed back the opening, though construction has gone smoothly toward a winter launch. The café signed its lease at Union on Knox in 2025 and leases the space directly from Greystar, the same outlet reports. That December target marks the latest shift in a timeline that has moved more than once: an earlier dbknews.com report predicted the location would open sometime in spring 2026, while a separate account from thefoleygroupofcompass.com said the café was expected to open in the Union on Knox complex before fall. The permitting delays cited in the most recent reporting help explain that gap between predictions and reality.
Per Patch, the College Park café will occupy a 2,973-square-foot space at 4350 Knox Road. Patch describes Black Lion as a family-owned Ethiopian coffee shop with roots stretching back five generations to coffee growers in Harar, Ethiopia — a lineage that runs through the beans the shop sources today.
Third Location Builds on Rockville and Silver Spring Roots
The College Park café will be Black Lion's third, joining existing locations in Rockville and Silver Spring, as The Diamondback reported on October 6, 2026, before the Hyattsville Wire report on October 7. Owner Abdu Tuku, who is Ethiopian, took over the original Rockville business in 2020 and opened the Silver Spring location in 2023, the newspaper's report notes. Black Lion Café also lists its Rockville address as 9705 Traville Gateway Drive and its Silver Spring address as 8240 Fenton Street, Unit A&B, according to the company's own locations page.
Emmanuel Manoles was the owner of Black Lion Café in Silver Spring, according to Source of the Spring, which notes the shop specializes in Ethiopian coffees from the Sidama, Harrar, and Yirgacheffe regions. The business has grown well beyond a single storefront in recent years: the same dbknews.com report says the chain opened a roasting facility near Dulles, Virginia, in 2025, and now imports specialty coffee directly from Ethiopia and roasts it every week before distributing it to its cafés.
What Students Can Expect on the Menu and in the Room
Food will be part of the pitch for the College Park location, which the report describes as offering pastries alongside 20 to 30 food options, including paninis, tuna melts and chicken sandwiches. The seating plan leans into the campus crowd too — the mezzanine alone will hold about 38 people and is designed as a dedicated quiet-study space, included in the café's total capacity of more than 100.
Black Lion also plans to offer students a monthly subscription for drip coffee at a flat fee, though the price has not yet been set, the outlet's report notes. Staffing will lean local as well: the café plans to hire mostly students to staff the location, outside of management positions.
Joining an Already Busy Coffee Corridor
Black Lion won't be the only option on the block. College Park already has a thriving local coffee scene, and Vigilante Coffee operates a locally owned outpost in town — the chain's second brick-and-mortar café, which opened near the University of Maryland campus at 8200 Baltimore Ave., according to Daily Coffee News. That café runs about 1,300 square feet at street level with another 1,300 square feet below, and founder Chris Vigilante said at the time the goal was simple: “We're going for the best coffee shop in any college campus/town in America.”
Whether Black Lion can carve out its own niche alongside Vigilante and the rest of the neighborhood will likely come down to timing and execution over the next couple of months. For now, students and Route 1 regulars have a December target to watch — with the understanding, given how many times this opening date has shifted, that plans in College Park have a way of evolving.
