A long-time, family-owned Chinese restaurant in Ballston has announced plans to close after four decades of business, leaving its location to a West Coast-based gym chain.
Hunan Gate Restaurant will close next month, the restaurant announced in a storefront message at 4322 Fairfax Drive, near the Ballston Metro station. The owners expressed gratitude and said the restaurant will be selling all its equipment.
“It’s happy to have served our customers for more than 40 years,” the message reads. “Unfortunately, we are permanently closing in early Dec. 2024 … It was our pleasure to have served everyone this long. We will miss all our customers.”
The Ballston restaurant has different owners than Hunan Village on Langston Blvd, a recently shuttered Chinese restaurant by a similar name that also opened about 40 years ago.
Hunan Gate’s owners are planning to retire, property manager Joel Dinkins said.
“We wanted them to stay,” he told ARLnow. “We’re just going to move on and hopefully have another good tenant that everyone loves in the area.”
Performance360, a gym offering group strength training classes, is on track to replace the restaurant in June, Dinkins said. The webpage for the company’s Arlington location, meanwhile, lists a planned opening date of early 2025.
“Our waitlist is growing fast and is the only way to secure one of our exclusive pre-launch memberships, which have sold out at every location we’ve opened,” the website says.
