Bao Li turns five today. If you live within a few blocks of the National Zoo's Connecticut Avenue entrance, you already know this without checking a calendar, because you've watched him grow from an awkward two-year-old fresh off a FedEx cargo flight into the loudest, most talkative panda the Zoo's keepers say they've ever worked with. Everyone else finds out from a headline. That gap, between what a resident already knows and what a visitor has to be told, is most of what makes Woodley Park worth writing about this month.
The neighborhood is running on two overlapping schedules right now. One belongs to the Zoo, where the pandas' behavior has flipped completely since spring. The other belongs to Connecticut Avenue, where three storefronts have changed hands or reopened in the past two years, each on its own timeline. Neither schedule is posted anywhere. Both are things a person who actually lives here would notice before someone driving in for a day trip.
The zoo's clock just flipped
In March, keepers were watching for something specific: Bao Li scent-marking, running laps around his habitat, and vocalizing at Qing Bao through the "howdy" window that separates their yards during the panda equivalent of courtship. Assistant curator Laurie Thompson and keeper Mariel Lally described his behavior that month as more intense than the year before, with more scent marking and louder, more frequent calls, while Qing Bao alternated between chirping back and moaning him off when she wasn't in the mood. Giant panda rut typically runs from November through May, which means by the time August rolls around, that entire performance is over.
What replaces it is quieter and, for a neighborhood resident with somewhere to be, more useful to know. Pandas conserve energy in heat, and during the hottest stretch of the year they spend more time asleep and more time indoors than they would in cooler months, according to Zoo keeper Mariel Lally. Qing Bao has staked out a favorite spot in the grotto near the exhibit's lower entrance, where vents release cool air, and she'll happily eat the vines growing over the cave mouth while she waits out the afternoon.
"But when you're a panda and you're wearing a winter coat, you're probably going to choose to be inside the air conditioning."
That's Lally's explanation for why the pandas disappear indoors once the sun is high. Her advice for anyone who actually wants to see them outside: get to the habitat before 9 a.m. That's not a tip for tourists staying at the Omni Shoreham for the week. It's a tip for someone who can walk to the Zoo's Connecticut Avenue entrance and back home before the rest of the day gets going, which is most of Woodley Park.
Connecticut Avenue's slower clock
The dining strip runs on a different rhythm, measured in storefronts rather than seasons, and it's worth tracing because the turnover has been more interesting than it looks from the sidewalk.
Start with 2619 Connecticut Avenue NW. Woodley Cafe closed there in February 2021, and the closure notice at the time was uncertain about whether it was even temporary, with the restaurant's phone going to a full voicemail box and no clear word on what came next. The space sat dark for four years. In July 2025, Yours Cafe grand-opened in that same storefront, serving all-day breakfast and brunch with an Ethiopian influence, roasting its own coffee beans on site, according to the opening writeup on PoPville. Four years is a long time for a storefront on a Metro-adjacent commercial strip to sit empty. That it reopened as a neighborhood breakfast spot rather than something built for foot traffic from the Zoo says something about who actually keeps this stretch of the avenue alive on a Tuesday morning in February, long after the tourist season has thinned out.
A few doors down at 2623 Connecticut Avenue, Sofra took a different kind of risk. Chef Kenan Cetintas, who grew up in Izmir, Turkey and built his résumé running restaurants in Dubai and Qatar before landing in Woodley Park, runs the entire kitchen on a charcoal grill, with no gas or electric ovens at all. That's not a marketing detail. It's a real operational commitment in a restaurant that also bakes its own bread every morning, and it shows up in the food rather than the signage. More than one reviewer has noted that the exterior barely announces itself, which means the restaurant is filling seats almost entirely on the strength of the food and word of mouth rather than street presence, an unusual position for a newer name on the strip to be in.
Then there's New Heights, the strip's longest-running fine dining anchor, which recently changed management. The Michelin Guide's own review calls it a restaurant that under-promises and over-delivers, noting that under new leadership it "cooks with delicious confidence" despite a dining room that reads as understated rather than showy. A menu built around broccolini with black garlic Caesar dressing and halibut in coconut broth is not the kind of food that needs a loud room to sell itself.
And running underneath all of that turnover is LiLLiES Restaurant & Bar, which hasn't changed hands since it opened in 2011. The family that owns it has lived in Woodley Park for 17 of the nearly 40 years they've called D.C. home, and they source their ingredients only from Maryland, Virginia, and D.C. vendors. In a strip where storefronts go dark for years and come back under entirely new ownership, LiLLiES is the fixed point everything else gets measured against.
Reading both clocks at once
Put the two schedules together and a practical morning writes itself, without any of it requiring a car or a reservation made weeks in advance.
- Walk to the Zoo's Connecticut Avenue entrance before 9 a.m., while the pandas are still likely to be outside rather than napping in the air conditioning.
- Cut over to Beach Drive for the run or ride back, using the stretch of Rock Creek Park that's been closed to car traffic in large sections since 2022, one of the few car-free corridors this close to a Metro stop.
- Land at Yours Cafe or Open City for breakfast once you're back on Connecticut Avenue, before the avenue's own day gets going.
None of this requires knowing the neighborhood's history. It just requires knowing that the Zoo's animals and the avenue's restaurants are each running on a schedule that rewards showing up early and paying attention, which is a different skill than knowing where to find good food, though Woodley Park happens to reward both.
The neighborhood's other fixed points are easy to miss if you're only watching the restaurant strip. The Marilyn Monroe mural at Connecticut and Calvert, commissioned decades ago by a salon owner to mark his partner's birthday, still looks out over that intersection. Rock Creek Park itself was designated by Congress in 1890, and its lower entrance near the Zoo still leads down to Pierce Mill, a working 19th-century grist mill that most of the joggers on the Valley Trail walk past without stopping, according to Washington.org's neighborhood guide. And the Woodley Park Community Association, founded in 1965, still functions as the forum where residents raise issues with the city, free to join, a much older institution than any restaurant currently open on the avenue.
That's the actual shape of the neighborhood this August. A five-year-old panda who's louder than any Zoo animal before him. A storefront that came back to life after four dark years under a new name. A charcoal grill with no backup plan and no signage worth mentioning. And a community association older than every restaurant on the strip put together, quietly keeping track of all of it.
If you're the kind of person who wants the story behind a D.C. block, not just the listing on it, that's the lens Ethan Carson brings to every neighborhood he covers. Explore the Portfolio to see how that same attention shows up in the historic homes and renovated townhouses across Woodley Park and the rest of central D.C.
