Old Town Fairfax's Farmers Market Has to Share the Calendar Three Saturdays in a Row This Fall

Most years, the Fairfax Saturday Farmers' Market at 10500 Page Avenue just runs its own show. Vendors set up, regulars show up for produce and baked goods, and the morning wraps by 1 p.m. without competing for attention. Somewhere in October, one festival usually breaks that rhythm for a single Saturday, and then things go back to normal.

This year the rhythm breaks three times in a row. Between September 25 and October 10, sixteen days on the calendar, Old Town runs five separate events, and the weekly market ends up sharing its own Saturday morning with something bigger on three consecutive weeks. The 50th Annual City of Fairfax Fall Festival is the headline of that stretch, but it is the last of five things happening, not the only one.

Three Saturdays, Doubled Up

Pulling from the City of Fairfax's own event listings and the Old Town Fairfax Business Association calendar, here is what actually lands on the schedule:

Three Saturdays running, the market that has quietly served Old Town for more than 25 years shares its morning with something else entirely. If you already treat Saturday mornings at Page Avenue as routine, this is the stretch to plan around rather than work through.

What Fifty Years Actually Looks Like

The City of Fairfax Fall Festival started as a small artisan market and has grown into more than 400 arts, craft, food, and gourmet vendors spread across historic downtown, with three stages of live music running from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. on October 10. Admission is free. The Main Street Community Band opens the day with an outdoor concert in Old Town Square from 10 a.m. to noon, and after the vendor booths pack up at 5, a separate evening concert runs in Old Town Square from 5:30 to 8:30.

Families get their own anchors too: a Children's Area, Sparky's Harvest Bash at Fire Station 3, and free open houses at the City of Fairfax Museum and Visitor Center and the Ratcliffe-Allison-Pozer House, the brick building on Main Street that has stood since 1807 and quietly holds the title of the city's oldest residence. Expect street closures around Old Town for the day. Fifty years in, this isn't a festival finding its footing. It's one that knows exactly what it is.

A Newer Tradition, Right Down the Block

One week before the anniversary, Old Town Square hosts something with a much shorter history. Fiesta Fairfax lands on October 3 as the city's Hispanic Heritage Month celebration, with folkloric dance performances, a salsa demonstration followed by a live band, and Latin food vendors from around the region. The event's own organizers describe it as a tradition that has only taken shape over the past couple of years, which makes the calendar's placement almost poetic: seven days before a festival marking its 50th year, Old Town runs one that's barely out of its own toddler years and already drawing a crowd. Latinos make up roughly 20 percent of the City of Fairfax's population, and Fiesta Fairfax is one of the few events on the calendar built specifically around that community.

Restaurants and Restaurant Week in Old Town

Old Town has also seen restaurant additions. Kelly's Oyster House & Bar opened in spring 2024 two blocks from the town square, owned by Bill Hamrock as a sister restaurant to his existing Hamrock's, which has operated out of the 1842 Moore-McCandlish House for years.

Bellissimo tells a similar story. Chef Omar Lavayen has run the kitchen since 2004, and he and his wife Mary have owned the restaurant on the corner of Main and East since June 2009, seventeen years now in a building that looks out at Old Town Hall.

Fairfax City Restaurant Week, which ran August 20 through 30 this year, offered participating restaurants some flexibility, according to FFXnow. Instead of requiring every restaurant to build a three-course prix-fixe menu, organizers let 21 participating restaurants highlight a signature dish however made sense for their format, from set-price dinners to simple two-for-$10 specials. Mayor Catherine Read framed the shift around the restaurants themselves, saying, as quoted by FFXnow, that the week exists partly because it "brings people together around great food while celebrating the entrepreneurs and families" who run Old Town's kitchens.

Where to Actually Eat Around All of This

If you're stringing together any of these five dates into an actual evening out, here's a spread that showed up in this year's Restaurant Week lineup and reflects the range on Main Street and just off it:

• Bellissimo for Northern Italian, corner of Main and East, with outdoor seating that looks straight at Old Town Hall
• Hamrock's inside the 1842 Moore-McCandlish House for a menu rooted in the building's own history
• Kelly's Oyster House & Bar for Atlantic and Chesapeake seafood, across from the courthouse
• Baku Delicious for Azerbaijani food on Braddock Road
• Meokja Meokja for Korean barbecue
• The Auld Shebeen on Chain Bridge Road for an Irish pub option
• The Wine House for a full retail wine list alongside dinner, a repeat Best Wine Bar pick from Northern Virginia Magazine

Parking runs through the Old Town Plaza garage on Chain Bridge Road, the lot behind United Bank on University Drive, and the public lot behind the Victorian Square Garage on Sager Avenue. On any of the three doubled-up Saturdays, arriving before 11 gets you a spot without circling.

The Market Underneath It All

None of this replaces the Saturday market itself. It runs every week through October 31, 9 a.m. to 1 p.m., with about 45 vendors selling produce, baked goods, crafts, and flowers. The Washington Business Journal has ranked it among the top ten markets in the entire DC area, and Virginia Living Magazine put it in Virginia's top three. It's been running more than 25 years, longer than most of what's sharing its Saturdays this fall, which is worth remembering when the festival banners go up. The market isn't the backdrop to the bigger events. The bigger events are landing on top of it.

The Short Version for Your Calendar

Rock the Block on the 25th, the market and Funky Flea on the 26th, the market and Fiesta Fairfax on October 3, the Main St. Market on the 4th, and the market alongside the 50th Fall Festival on the 10th. Five events, sixteen days, three Saturdays where the usual routine gets company. Old Town doesn't often stack its calendar this tight, and the surrounding restaurant scene includes both long-running establishments and newer additions.

If you're the kind of person who tracks what's actually happening in Fairfax City rather than what a generic events list says, that's exactly the kind of neighborhood detail Brandon Foy pays attention to day to day. Whether you're planning a weekend around Old Town or just curious what else is worth knowing about this part of Fairfax County, Let's Get You Started.