Why did it take a year and a half for anyone to open a café in a storefront the Palisades had already said it wanted kept as a café? The space at 4885 MacArthur Boulevard NW went dark when Black Coffee closed on March 31, 2025. Today it is a Maman, open seven days a week in blue and white. What happened in between was a fight about apartments. It ended with the building looking exactly as it did before, and that outcome is what put a café back on the corner.
A gas station lot that was never easy to build on
The building at 4885 MacArthur is a single story on what ANC 3D called "an awkward, oddly-shaped property inside a small block." According to the commission's 2023 letter to the Board of Zoning Adjustment, it was a gas station from at least 1938 until 2000. When the current retail building went up, zoning rules required 12 on-site parking spaces. That explains the odd feature longtime neighbors know well: 17 parking spaces on the roof, reached from V Street.
In 2023 the ground floor held Black Coffee, the already closed Café Vino, and the photo and framing shop Dodge Chrome. The owner wanted to build apartments on top. At ANC 3D's March 1, 2023 meeting, the project team described roughly 22 units above the existing retail and said it planned to keep the shops open for as long as possible during construction. The formal application, filed as BZA Case 20946 by 4885 MacArthur Boulevard, LLC, settled on 21 units. UrbanTurf later reported that Teass\Warren Architects designed it, with one- and two-bedroom apartments and three units set aside for Inclusionary Zoning.
The lot's history is the reason the owner needed a zoning hearing at all. In ANC 3D's words, "nothing practical can be built there without violating the zoning code," so the owner asked for exceptions covering the rear setback, the loading zone and the location of parking.
What the neighborhood asked for in October 2023
Those exceptions gave the neighborhood something to negotiate with, and ANC 3D measured the community's position before it voted. Its online survey drew 471 respondents, and 260 of them left written comments. The commission's October 16, 2023 letter reported that respondents wanted the ANC to oppose the project by a seven-to-one margin if it meant losing Black Coffee. Only eight percent approved of the project if the café left. Counting "somewhat important," nearly 90 percent wanted the Black Coffee and Café Vino spaces kept as restaurants.
The commission voted 3-1-3 to support the exceptions, "but with serious reservations." Its support was tied to four conditions the applicant agreed to:
- Apartment tenants would not be eligible for residential parking permits.
- The two existing restaurant spaces would be built out for restaurant tenants, and the applicant would try to lease them for restaurant use for two years unless there was no practical way to find such a tenant.
- The applicant would donate $10,000 toward improving the triangle of public space at MacArthur Boulevard and V Street.
- Construction crews would park off-site.
The letter also listed concerns that had little to do with coffee. About 15 cars would lose their rooftop spaces, and the commission estimated roughly 20 more would come with new residents. All apartment access would run off narrow V Street, across from the Palisades Library. The site's old leaking underground gasoline tanks were documented in 1999, and nobody involved could say whether they were still in the ground.
What the zoning board actually ordered
The Board of Zoning Adjustment approved the project 4-0-1. It decided the case on February 14, 2024 and issued the final order on February 23. The order handled the neighborhood's restaurant condition differently from how the ANC letter framed it. BZA Order No. 20946 says the Board did not adopt the ANC's four recommended conditions. It noted only that the applicant had testified it agreed to them. The single condition the Board imposed came from the Office of Planning and required parking to be built according to the applicant's plans.
The restaurant pledge was therefore a promise attached to the apartment project. It was not a rule attached to the property, and it would only matter if the apartments were built.
The building stayed one story
Black Coffee did not wait to find out. It closed on March 31, 2025, after nearly seven years on the corner, as Hoodline recounted. Ten weeks later, the apartments were gone too. UrbanTurf reported on June 6, 2025 that the developer had told ANC 3D he was no longer pursuing them. The outlet quoted commissioner Tricia Duncan's email:
"I spoke with the owner yesterday and he informed me that he is pivoting away from building the apartments and is pursuing leasing the spaces. He cited tariffs and interest rates as the driving force behind this decision to not build the apartments."
The same UrbanTurf piece reported that Black Coffee planned to move into retail space at The Fitzgerald, the senior living community a few blocks away at 4865 MacArthur Boulevard.
Once the apartment plan was dropped, the old fight stopped mattering. No construction would close the shops, and the owner had nothing left to trade for neighborhood support. What remained was a one-story building whose landlord, by his own account, was now in the business of leasing storefronts. The corner's path from gas station to bakery runs across eight decades.
| When | What happened at 4885 MacArthur |
|---|---|
| 1938 to 2000 | Gas station with underground storage tanks |
| March 1, 2023 | Project team presents roughly 22 apartments to ANC 3D |
| October 16, 2023 | ANC 3D supports the zoning exceptions with four applicant-agreed conditions |
| February 14, 2024 | BZA approves 21 units and adopts only a parking condition |
| March 31, 2025 | Black Coffee's last day |
| June 2025 | Owner drops the apartments and turns to leasing |
| Late August 2026 | Build-out underway and Maman hiring |
| November 2026 | Maman open daily |
Maman's version of the corner
The build-out showed up in late August 2026. A reader told PoPville about "serious progress" inside the old Black Coffee space, and a neighbor said it was "going to be a Maman." Hoodline added that Maman was hiring and that this would be its 14th location, after 13 open outposts across the D.C. region. The chain started in New York in 2014. Benjamin Sormonte and Elisa Marshall founded it, and it is built around French-inspired pastries, coffee and family-recipe cooking.
On the Palisades location's page, Maman lists hours of 7:30 a.m. to 6 p.m. on weekdays and 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. on weekends. The kitchen is open 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. daily, and the café offers pickup, delivery, and indoor and outdoor dining. Maman describes the room as having its "signature blue and white décor" and calls it "a cozy neighborhood gathering place."
That is close to what the 2023 survey respondents asked for. The neighborhood got its café back because the developer dropped the plan its restaurant pledge depended on, not because anyone enforced the pledge.
The same rule holds down the boulevard
If an empty storefront on MacArthur already has a working kitchen and a visible front door, it tends to get another restaurant. The rest of this year's changes on the boulevard fit that pattern.
Two blocks of change in 2026, in addition to Maman:
- 4828 MacArthur Boulevard NW. Momo's Cafe's last day was October 31, 2025, according to PoPville. Less than a year later, on September 3, 2026, N.H. 48 Indian Kitchen opened in the space. The restaurant is named for the 1,744-mile national highway that links Delhi and Mumbai. Washingtonian reported that owners Prady Rana and Bhakti More bring experience from Rasika West End, Chai Pani and Tamashaa. Their menu features vada pav, dahi ke kebab, chicken lollipops and mutton ghee roast.
- 5125 MacArthur Boulevard NW. Conduit Road Public House opened in the former Salt & Pepper space in December 2024. It appears to have closed for good after an August "holiday break" that never ended, Hoodline reported in October. In the opinion of commenters on PoPville's closure post, the location is a hard one for a restaurant, with street frontage they described as "almost too subtle."
Momo's became N.H. 48 within a year. The Black Coffee space came back as Maman once nothing was going to be built on top of it. In both cases, a storefront built for food went back to food.
On Sunday mornings, the block around the old Black Coffee corner stays busy whatever the storefronts are doing. The Palisades Community Association lists the year-round, growers-only Palisades Farmers Market at 48th Place and MacArthur Boulevard from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. The listed dates run every Sunday through the end of the year, starting with November 22 and 29 and continuing through December 27. From the market, Maman is a short walk up the boulevard and N.H. 48 is a block or so the other way.
The one-story building at 4885 MacArthur still carries its rooftop parking deck, its gas station past and a zoning approval that was never built. If you own a building on the boulevard, or a home nearby with records like these behind it, Ethan Carson can help you trace that history and present it to buyers. Explore the Portfolio.
