By Justin Rude

After only a year in operation, the Againn Tavern in Rockville closed its doors last night. The 250-seat spinoff of the chic downtown gastropub replaced the venerable Houston’s on Rockville Pike last July, but couldn’t manage to carve out a permanent niche for itself in the Maryland Suburb.
In his August 2010 First Bite column on the Rockville location, Washington Post restaurant critic Tom Sietsema found a memorable shepherd’s pie, but other pub classics were lacking, including an offering of potted pork that was “a faint version of the spread served in the city.”
Owner Mark Weiss doesn’t fault the food or the location.
“Our food was great and our service was great,” he says, “but it’s not an easy concept to align anywhere in the world, except probably in Britain. And we had some items on the menu that weren’t really part of the concept. So the concept came up diluted, and we may have not done a good enough job making sure it was really understood.”
Despite Againn Tavern’s closing, Weiss has no plans to abandon the neighborhood. He is
working on a concept in the same location, though he is tight-lipped on what that might be.
“We do have plans to put a different concept there eventually, but it’s a little bit early to fully allude to it,” he says.
Not all remnants of the restaurant’s brief stay in Rockville are disappearing. Some of the service staff will move to the downtown location, and chef Chris Lewis is working with Weiss’s Whisk restaurant group on future projects.