How does a twelve-seat kitchen on a working hilltop farm land on the New York Times' 2026 list of America's 50 best restaurants in the same year Clarksburg Town Center's long-awaited grocery anchor finally secured its site?
Both stories are unfolding in Clarksburg right now, on timelines that have little to do with each other. The Chef's Counter at Burnt Hill Farm, a wood-fired tasting counter set inside a working vineyard on Burnt Hill Road, became the only restaurant in Maryland to make the New York Times' 2026 list of America's 50 best restaurants. It did that within months of opening to the public. Meanwhile, the Clarksburg Town Center retail core, the development residents have been told since the 1990s would give the community an actual downtown, only got its grocery anchor under contract this spring, and ground still hasn't broken on the store itself.
One project moved fast because it had been quietly building for a decade before anyone outside the county knew it existed. The other has been publicly promised for three decades and is only now catching up to its own announcement. That gap says more about how Clarksburg actually functions right now than either story does on its own.
A Farm That Took Ten Years to Get Loud
Burnt Hill Farm sits on 117 acres of the Piedmont Plateau, inside Montgomery County's Agricultural Reserve, a protected farming landscape that covers more than 93,000 acres. The family behind it, siblings Drew Baker, Lisa Hinton and Ashli Johnson, spent close to a decade planting vines, orchards and heirloom grains before opening a public tasting room in September 2025. The Chef's Counter, a nine-seat-turned-twelve-seat kitchen led by chef Tae Strain, opened to the public this spring, running Friday through Sunday as a three-hour, seven-to-nine course tasting menu built around ingredients grown on the farm and sourced from the Chesapeake Bay region.
Strain is not a local unknown dabbling in fine dining. He spent years in kitchens that included David Chang's Momofuku in Washington, D.C., the Michelin-starred Progress in San Francisco, and PUBLIC in New York, before bringing that résumé back to Maryland. The menu he built at Burnt Hill runs through his own Korean American identity alongside Mid-Atlantic ingredients: dishes like Chesapeake yellowfin tuna crudo and braised Mangalitsa pork curry, paired with the farm's own low-intervention wines in flights that run $40 to $55.
The recognition arrived in two waves. In July 2026, Wine Enthusiast named the Chef's Counter one of the best winery restaurants in the world, a list of just 57 properties globally and only 13 in the entire United States. By September, the New York Times had added it to its 2026 list of America's 50 best restaurants, the only Maryland restaurant to make the cut. Reservations, released monthly through the farm's mailing list, have sold out within hours since.
None of this required a highway interchange, a parking structure, or a national retail partner. It required a decade of unglamorous farming most of Clarksburg never noticed, followed by a few months of public attention it couldn't have engineered on a marketing calendar.
A Grocery Store Fifteen Years in the Making
The Clarksburg Town Center has been trying to happen since long before Burnt Hill Farm's first vines went into the ground. The master plan was approved in 1994. Site plans for the retail core went through in 1998 and again in 2002. Between 2007 and 2011, the developer tried and failed to attract grocery anchors and retailers to a retail plan that kept getting revised. In 2011, Elm Street Development acquired a large portion of the future town center property for one dollar, a number that reflects how little confidence the market had in the project at the time.
The next decade moved in fits and starts. Weis Markets signed a letter of intent to anchor the grocery component back in 2022. The Planning Board approved project, preliminary, and site plan amendments in March 2024. A conditional use approval for the store's gas pumps came through in May 2025. By November 2025, Elm Street was still describing the project in terms of what was about to happen rather than what had happened, with Washington Gas needing to relocate a line at Clarksburg Square Road and St. Clair Road before land development could even begin.
The milestone that finally landed came in April 2026, when Weis Markets paid $5 million to officially purchase the 4.5-acre grocery pad site on St. Clair Road, just off Stringtown Road. The company's plan calls for a roughly 56,000-square-foot standalone store with gas pumps, three pumps and six fueling positions built into a separate corner of the lot. With the grocery site sold, Elm Street is now moving on the rest of the plan: about 190 apartment units and roughly 50,000 additional square feet of retail space, some of it built into the ground floors of the apartment buildings themselves.
Elm Street marked the moment with a free concert on June 20, 2026, at the Clarksburg Town Center Amphitheater on Clarksburg Square Road. The headliner was Mindy Miller, a Damascus native who had just reached the Top 16 on Season 28 of NBC's The Voice competing under coach Snoop Dogg. Chris Compton and Karen Jonas performed as well, alongside food trucks and family activities. Organizers described the evening as a celebration of the next phase of retail development coming to the town center, with the grocery site sale as its backdrop.
What's Actually Turning Over at the Outlets
While the town center works through its own construction sequence, the retail churn that's visibly changing Clarksburg is happening at Clarksburg Premium Outlets, the only outlet mall in Montgomery County. North Face is opening a storefront on the upper level near the Old Navy entrance, across from Lacoste, giving residents outdoor gear they'd previously had to drive to Hagerstown or Leesburg to find. Hollister is coming as well. On the other side of the ledger, Saks Off 5th announced in February 2026 that it would close its Clarksburg location, part of a broader exit from the D.C. region tied to parent company Saks Global's Chapter 11 bankruptcy.
A Chick-fil-A near the outlets spent the summer as an infill project on a portion of the existing parking lot between Cabin Branch Parkway and the outlets' upper lot, with hiring underway ahead of an opening targeted for late summer 2026. It's one of two Chick-fil-A locations planned for up-county Montgomery, the other slated for the Milestone area of Germantown.
None of this retail turnover depends on the town center finishing. The outlets have their own tenant cycle, running on national retail leasing timelines that move independently of Elm Street's fifteen-year buildout a few miles away.
Two Clocks Running at Once
Put these threads side by side and the picture of Clarksburg that emerges isn't the one either story tells alone. The town center was supposed to be the thing that finally gave this part of the county a center, a promise repeated across three decades and multiple developers, and it's still, as of this fall, a grocery store under permit rather than a grocery store with a roof. The restaurant nobody was promised, built quietly on farmland by a family that had already proven itself once at Old Westminster Winery, became a national dining story inside a single year of being open to the public.
For anyone living here now, that means the calendar looks different than the town center's opening date would suggest. A Saturday in Clarksburg already includes a globally recognized tasting menu that requires booking a month ahead, a Chick-fil-A opening this year, and new apparel retail at the outlets, all running well ahead of the retail core that was supposed to define the neighborhood first. The grocery store will come. Weis has the land, the permits are moving, and Elm Street has already thrown one concert to celebrate progress. But it arrived second, behind a farm that took its time and got there first.
If you're thinking about what a neighborhood like this is worth, or what its next few years might look like once the town center actually opens, The AG Group tracks Clarksburg and the rest of Montgomery County closely enough to talk through it in plain terms. Reach out when you're ready for that conversation.
