It was December 2025, and Christian Puccio was hunched over a laptop at 39285 Little River Turnpike, waiting on a utilities rep while Route 50 traffic crawled past at the village's posted 25 miles per hour. Tucker Withers walked in. For 43 years Withers has run the Little River Inn across the road, a business his great-grandparents once lived above, which makes him about as close to an institutional memory as Aldie village has.
"When ya opening?" Withers asked.
"January 2," Puccio told him.
That exchange, reported by Middleburg Life, is a small moment. But it sits inside a bigger story that anyone who drives Route 50 through Aldie has half-watched unfold for the better part of four years: one storefront, repeatedly renamed, repeatedly rumored about, finally settled. The assumption that's easy to make from the road is that this building simply can't hold a business. That assumption is wrong, and the actual sequence tells you something more useful about how a small commercial building in a historic crossroads village actually changes hands.
What Residents Remember Versus What Actually Happened
Ask around and you'll hear that this building has burned through three or four restaurants. It hasn't. Only one concept ever opened its doors before the current one, and it lasted under a year.
The building was, for a long stretch, the Aldie General Store, later referred to locally as the Aldie Country Store. When word got out in 2022 that it had sold, The Burn reported it received nearly a dozen reader messages asking what was coming next. The answer, announced that October, was Rubanos: an upscale, farm-to-table Italian restaurant from a family who also owned Seaspice Brasserie & Lounge on the Miami River and who had a farm of their own a few miles down the road from Aldie. Housemade pastas, a signature Porcini Ravioli, ingredients from the family's own land and neighboring farms. It sounded settled.
By July 2023, the name had changed. Permit filings with Loudoun County showed a working title of Caccia, Italian for "hunting," with plans for 68 indoor seats and 69 more on an L-shaped outdoor deck split between dining tables and a lounge area facing the highway. That's a real project at a real stage, seats counted and submitted to the county.
Neither name ever served a plate. Somewhere between that 2023 filing and the next confirmed news out of the building, ownership changed again. When the doors actually opened in October 2024, the restaurant inside wasn't Rubanos or Caccia. It was The Black Market, an entirely different concept under Miami restaurateur Carlos Miranda, built around charcuterie boards, raclette, and a market stocked with what the restaurant itself described as international and European specialty products.
So the timeline residents remember as chaotic is really two distinct planning cycles that never became businesses, followed by one that did.
The Business That Actually Ran
The Black Market opened for real in the fall of 2024, and it wasn't a placeholder. The Burn's first look inside described large communal tables threading through a space that functioned as both dining room and retail market, an outdoor patio, and a menu that included Virginia Ham Croquettes, Rabbit Meatballs, Oxtail and Short Rib Ravioli, and Seafood Risotto. In April 2025 the restaurant added a weekend brunch service, Black Market Benedict with braised ham hock, a Jumbo Lump Crabcake Sandwich, served Saturdays and Sundays from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. That's a business investing in itself, not coasting toward an exit.
It closed anyway. The Burn reported the closure in late September 2025, less than 12 months after opening, with no announcement of what would come next.
Why Puccio Got the Building This Time
Here's the detail that reframes the whole sequence. Puccio told Northern Virginia Magazine that before Miranda bought the building and turned it into The Black Market, Puccio had already had his sights set on that exact address. Timing wasn't on his side then. Instead he spent the next several years building a career that ran almost entirely through Loudoun County: he opened Puccio's New York Deli in Leesburg in 2002 at age 25, sold it in 2009, then moved through leadership roles with the Metropolitan Hospitality Group, Creighton Farms, and eight years at Ahso in Brambleton. In 2023, he partnered with Ahso's chef and owner Jason Maddens on plans for an Italian steakhouse in Brambleton. Contract negotiations fell through, and Puccio was back to searching.
When The Black Market closed in September 2025, the building he'd wanted years earlier finally became available again. "This one is special," he told Northern Virginia Magazine. "It feels like it was meant to happen. It's unusual how it came circling back to me." Oak & Ember Tasting Room and Market opened January 2, 2026, with an official grand opening the following week.
The difference between this operator and the two that came before him isn't ambition. Rubanos had a farm-owning family behind it and a fine-dining pedigree in Miami. The Black Market had a real menu and a real customer base for nearly a year. What Puccio has that neither of them did is two decades already spent inside Loudoun's restaurant industry before he ever touched this address, plus an actual prior relationship with the building itself.
That shows up in how the market side of the business sources its goods. The Black Market marketed itself around an international and European product mix. Oak & Ember's supply line, according to Middleburg Life, runs through Village Cheeseworks in Upperville, Chilly Hollow Farm in Berryville, and Misty Meadow Mushrooms in Leesburg, with plans to forage ramps and morels in season and bring in rockfish as it becomes available. Oak & Ember's market shelves carry the names of producers within a short drive of the village, a regional focus that gives the space a different character from the concept before it.
What You'll Actually Find If You Walk In
For anyone deciding whether to swing by this week, the practical details as of this fall:
- Closed Mondays
- Tuesday: lunch only, 11:30 a.m. to 3 p.m.
- Wednesday through Sunday: lunch 11:30 a.m. to 3 p.m., dinner 5 to 8:30 p.m. (until 9:30 p.m. Friday and Saturday)
- Ember Hour, daily specials, Wednesday through Sunday, 3 to 5 p.m.
- Reservations run through Tock in 90-minute blocks for the dining room
- Dogs under 60 pounds are welcome on the patio
- No children under 5 after 5 p.m.
The market counter still sells the grab-and-go items Puccio described when the place was still under construction: sandwiches and salads for anyone heading to a winery rather than sitting down, plus the honey, jams, cheese, and charcuterie sourced from those same regional producers.
The Building as a Read on the Village
None of this makes Aldie's historic core unusual in a bad way. A building on a state highway through an unincorporated village, one that predates most of the subdivisions built around it, is always going to attract outside investment interest precisely because it's visible to every driver moving between the DC suburbs and horse country further west. What the last four years actually show is that visibility alone doesn't carry a concept to opening day. Two well-funded plans stalled before they ever seated a guest. The one that made it past a year belonged to someone who'd been trying to get into that exact building since before The Black Market existed, and who had a specific, nameable set of regional suppliers lined up before he flipped the sign.
Next time you're stopped at that 25 mph crawl through the village, that's the building on your right, and as of this fall, it's the same name it was in January.
The Matt Elliott Home Selling Team tracks these kinds of hyperlocal shifts across Loudoun County because they tell you as much about a place as any listing sheet does. If you're curious what else is changing in Aldie or want to talk through what a village like this one actually offers day to day, reach out to Matt Elliott.
