College Park Loses Award-Winning Chinese Restaurant to Route 1 Redevelopment

Crowds turned Northwest Chinese Food's final Saturday into something between a farewell and a protest, filling the Route 1 dining room for one last meal at a restaurant closing not because business had slipped, but because a developer wants to build 93 apartments on the site.

The restaurant at 7313 Baltimore Ave. had been a College Park fixture for a decade: a 2024 Business of the Year winner, a regular in The Washington Post, Washingtonian, and Bon Appétit, and a place that Washington Post food critic Tom Sietsema once counted among his five favorite restaurants in the region. Its landlord, Greenhill Capital Corporation, has other plans for the 0.89-acre strip at the corner of Hartwick Road and Route 1.

Greenhill's Terrapin House project, approved by the Prince George's County Council in 2023, will demolish the existing single-story retail building and replace it with a six-story complex: 93 apartments totaling 298 bedrooms, 4,800 square feet of street-level retail, and a two-level parking garage. Northwest Chinese is one of five operators being displaced. Jerk at Nite and Ritchie's Colombian Restaurant are also being pushed out; Tokoa Cheesesteaks and Kung Fu Tea vacated the strip before them.

The closure did not come smoothly. Brand manager Xue Ling said the restaurant received a letter from Greenhill in September 2025 directing it to vacate by December 31, even though its lease runs through 2027. Ling disputed the landlord's claim that an earlier notice had been sent, saying the restaurant never received the one-year advance notice its lease requires. The owners spent months consulting attorneys, and the dispute fueled sustained community pressure on city officials to intervene.

Owner Hua Wang opened Northwest Chinese in 2015 after moving to College Park and finding no restaurant serving the bold-flavored cuisine of Shenyang in northeastern China. In the decade since, the restaurant built a following well beyond the University of Maryland campus it borders.

Wang had already anticipated the displacement by opening Li Chun Café at City Hall's plaza, 7401 Baltimore Ave., in March 2025. The new spot serves handmade bing flatbreads, rice dishes, and traditional teas rooted in Shenyang cooking. The city's Business Retention and Attraction Fund helped cover build-out costs, a tool it also used when Taqueria Habanero survived the Campus Village redevelopment and when Pho Thom relocated to the Union on Knox complex after being pushed off this same block.

Avipsa Hamal, a University of Maryland senior who made the trip to Northwest Chinese on its final day, put the tension plainly. "Housing is important for students to live here," she said, "but it's also sad to see small businesses have to shut down and relocate when they're very loved by the community."

Whether the owners will reopen a second Northwest Chinese location is unresolved. In the meantime, Terrapin House's 4,800 square feet of new retail space, priced at newly constructed building rates, will need tenants capable of absorbing costs that have historically crowded out the kind of small, independent operators currently leaving the block.