Columbia's Concert Season Arrives With a Restaurant Row Built to Catch It

Walk out of a show at Merriweather Post Pavilion this fall and you don't have to drive anywhere to eat. That's new. For most of the venue's history, the amphitheater sat inside Symphony Woods like an island. You parked in one of a dozen lots, you watched the show, you left. The district around it didn't have much reason to stay open past the last encore.

That's shifting this season, as a busy stretch of shows approaches. The All Things Go Music Festival just wrapped its three-day run at Merriweather Post Pavilion on September 27, and it's barely a breath before the next wave arrives: the Power to the People Festival hits October 3, Logic and G-Eazy's Endless Summer Tour Part II plays October 4, and beabadoobee's Powerlines Tour closes out the stretch on October 10. Power to the People sold out across every ticket tier before the run even started. That's a heavy volume of people converging on one stretch of Little Patuxent Parkway inside a single week, and the restaurants opening around the venue this year are adding dining options near that foot traffic.

Two stages where there used to be one

The bigger structural change is that Merriweather Post Pavilion is no longer the only place in downtown Columbia built for a crowd. The Columbia Association cut the ribbon this year on the new CA Lakefront Stage, a permanent replacement for what had been a temporary seasonal setup at Lake Kittamaqundi. The project ran close to a million dollars, with $750,000 of that coming from Maryland state financing, and it now anchors the Lakefront Live series, which the Columbia Association runs with more than 50 free events a summer and draws upward of 50,000 people to the lakefront each season.

That gives downtown Columbia two active performance venues working at the same time for the first time in its history: the 19,319-capacity Frank Gehry amphitheater built in 1967 for national touring acts, and a brand-new, free, community-programmed stage about a mile away overlooking the lake. One draws people in from outside the region for a ticketed show. The other is built for residents to walk over on a Tuesday night with a blanket and watch a movie or a local act for nothing. Having both running in the same season is what's turning downtown Columbia from a place you visit for one event into a place where an evening out doesn't require picking a single destination.

A restaurant row is filling in the walk between them

The businesses signing leases in the Merriweather District this year are adding to the dining options along the walk between them. Nash and Smashed, a Virginia-based fast-casual concept known for Nashville hot chicken and smash burgers, is taking 1,557 square feet at the base of Marlow, Howard Hughes' newest multifamily building, sitting right next to Color Burst Park. The owner has described the location as a chance to grow alongside a development he called a cornerstone project for the district, and the address puts the restaurant directly on the walking route between the Merriweather Post Pavilion parking lots and the rest of downtown.

That same plaza does double duty beyond concert season. Color Burst Park runs an outdoor ice rink from November through January, which means the district isn't betting its new restaurant space on one packed concert calendar alone. It's building around a plaza that stays busy through the holidays too, which is a different kind of bet than opening a restaurant purely to catch a touring act's crowd once and hoping for repeat business.

Here's what's left on the Merriweather Post Pavilion calendar this fall, for anyone still planning around it:

• October 3: Power to the People Festival (sold out)
• October 4: Logic & G-Eazy, The Endless Summer Tour Part II
• October 10: beabadoobee, The Powerlines Tour

The mall two miles away is upgrading too

The growth isn't confined to the blocks immediately around the pavilion. The Baltimore Sun reported in July that Fogo de Chão and the Michelin Guide-recommended Nan Xiang Soup Dumplings are both expected to open inside The Mall in Columbia, which puts a Michelin-flagged name in the same shopping center as the Cheesecake Factory and P.F. Chang's locations that have anchored that food court for years.

Closer to Snowden River Parkway, a new Chick-fil-A opened on April 2 this year under longtime local owner-operator Joe Dinoto, who has run Chick-fil-A locations in Columbia for 35 years and previously operated the Columbia Mall and Executive Park Drive restaurants before taking on this new site. It's a smaller story than a Michelin name landing at the mall, but it says something similar: the operators who know this market best keep choosing to add locations here rather than elsewhere.

The traffic the calendar didn't wait for

None of this growth solved the one problem that actually affects how easy it is to get to a show. As of July, the eastbound ramp from Broken Land Parkway to southbound US-29 near the venue was closed, and that ramp has been one of the more common approach routes to Merriweather Post Pavilion for years. Anyone letting GPS pick the route for one of the remaining October shows should expect it to try sending them through a closure that's been in place for months, not a new detour it just discovered.

The upside is that parking itself hasn't gotten harder. It's still free with every ticket, spread across more than a dozen lots around downtown Columbia, with ADA parking held in Lots 2 and 4 and gates opening an hour before showtime. The friction this fall isn't finding a spot once you arrive. It's the one ramp a lot of regular concertgoers have driven on autopilot for years, now closed while the calendar is at its busiest.

Merriweather Post Pavilion spent decades as a destination you drove to and left. This fall is the clearest version yet of it becoming something else: a stage with a second stage down the road, a restaurant row filling in the walk between them, and a mall two miles out adding its own names to the list. The amphitheater didn't move. Everything around it did.

If you're curious what any of this means for property values or timing in downtown Columbia, Michelle Willis has been watching this market for 21 years and is always glad to talk it through. Let's start a conversation.