After 34 years of serving its titular dessert on Wisconsin Avenue, the Cheesecake Factory in D.C.’s Friendship Heights will close its doors next month. It comes as the neighborhood has drastically changed over the last five years with numerous retail closings and a shift to residential properties.
“It was certainly a disappointment. We’ve had actually some really good news in Friendship Heights lately, so we were frustrated to hear bad news mixed in,” said Tom Quinn, an Advisory Neighborhood Commissioner for the area, about the Cheesecake Factory closure.
“The restaurant’s been there for a long time,” he continued. “But hopefully we’ll find a new tenant that will also work for the space.”
The last day of business for the Cheesecake Factory will be Jan. 24, 2026. The company said it will try to move staff to other locations. The nearest other stores are on H Street and in the Westfield Montgomery Mall in Montgomery County, Maryland.
“I didn’t know it was shutting down until I came today,” said Benjamin Hall, who works in the area and dined at the Cheesecake Factory for lunch.
Another resident in the neighborhood told WTOP that she was never a fan of Cheesecake Factory, but she was sorry to see it shutting down along with many of the other businesses that have left the area.
Changes in the neighborhood
It has been half a decade of transformation for the Friendship Heights area, Quinn said.
The Mazza Gallerie mall, shut down in 2022 after most of its stores and AMC movie theater closed in the preceding years.
The Marshalls next door to the Cheesecake Factory cleared out of the space earlier this year.
“Friendship Heights has always had a structural problem, and this predated COVID, which is the neighborhood has typically had a lot of retail and not enough residential to support that retail, and COVID sort of exacerbated that,” Quinn said.
While the mall is gone, it has been replaced by a new luxury apartment building, Residences at Mazza. And retail space that was once occupied by luxury stores is now occupied by more residential-friendly businesses like the newly-opened Trader Joe’s and Total Wine and More.
“I’ve watched this building go up over the last couple of years, and so I noticed a lot of the changes,” Hall said.
“This will be useful for providing homes close to metros for elderly people,” one passing resident told WTOP, but she feared it may be too expensive to live there for most. The cheapest apartments listed on Residences at Mazza’s website are around $2,500.
Quinn told WTOP that while more residential building will likely help the area, he hopes to lure back one business that left years ago.
“We used to actually have four movie theaters within walking distance in Friendship Heights, and they’re all gone,” Quinn said. “We just have not had any luck.”