There Are Two Waugh Chapels in Gambrills. This Fall Is a Good Time to Learn the Difference.

Ask three people in Gambrills where they're headed for groceries and you might get three different answers that all sound like the same place. "Waugh Chapel" gets used as shorthand for two separate shopping centers that sit across Route 3 from each other, and the confusion is old enough that even longtime visitors have complained online about the road access getting rerouted mid-development, leaving drivers unsure which entrance leads where. That mix-up isn't trivia. It's the reason this fall's biggest local openings landed where they did, and understanding the split tells you more about how Gambrills actually runs than any single new restaurant does on its own.

The Two Centers, Side by Side

The Village at Waugh Chapel came first: a 71-acre, grocery-anchored development built around Safeway, with HomeGoods, TJ Maxx, Marshalls, LA Fitness, Chick-fil-A, and Newk's Eatery filling out the rest. It's the errand-running side, the place you go for a Target run's less glamorous cousin: shoes, workout classes, a haircut.

Waugh Chapel Towne Centre sits nearby and plays a different role. It's the entertainment and big-anchor side, built around Target, Wegmans, Regal Cinemas, and Dick's Sporting Goods, and it's the one where people go to make an afternoon of it rather than just check something off a list.

Both sit along Crain's Highway within about 20 miles of Washington, D.C., Baltimore, and Annapolis, which is part of why Gambrills keeps drawing new tenants in the first place. But the two centers don't function as one continuous strip. They function as two separate gravitational pulls, and this fall, the pull toward Towne Centre just got stronger.

Why Big Chicken Chose the Towne Centre Side

Shaquille O'Neal's Big Chicken opened its first standalone Maryland restaurant at Waugh Chapel Towne Centre on August 8, at 1407 South Main Chapel Way. It's a meaningful choice of location, not an accident of available square footage. Towne Centre is already the side built for people staying a while, the side with a movie theater and a sporting goods store that turns a grocery run into a half-day outing. A fast-casual concept built around Shaq's own comfort-food memories and a menu that leans into shareable sides fits that destination pattern better than it would fit the Village's quicker-in, quicker-out errand crowd.

The Gambrills location is run locally by Pratik Patel, who has more than 15 years of hospitality experience operating multiple quick-service restaurants across Howard and Anne Arundel counties. That's not an out-of-state franchise group testing the market. It's a regional operator who already knows the customer base on Route 3, betting on Towne Centre specifically.

The grand opening leaned into the Shaq connection directly: the first 100 guests in line received three free tenders and four signature dipping sauces, a nod to O'Neal's number 34 jersey, with the same offer available for five dollars after the first hundred. The restaurant runs 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. Sunday through Thursday and 10 a.m. to 11 p.m. Friday and Saturday, and the brand has said it plans a new limited-time dipping sauce each month, starting with a Root Beer BBQ pairing for the Gambrills opening.

If you've been meaning to check it out, a practical note: GPS directions sometimes route drivers toward the Village side first, since both centers share the "Waugh Chapel" name in mapping data. If you find yourself pulling into a Safeway parking lot instead of a Wegmans one, you're one center off, not lost.

The Third Node: The Farm Gambrills Was Actually Named For

Here's the part that gets lost when people treat Gambrills as just its two shopping centers. Down Gambrills Road, away from both retail strips, sits the Maryland Dairy Farm, and every September it becomes the setting for one of the region's longer-running fall traditions.

The MD Corn Maze opens its 2026 season on September 12, an eight-acre maze cut into a Toy Story theme timed to the Toy Story 5 release, and it will run through November 8 on select weekdays and weekends. This year marks two decades of the maze operating as a fall fixture for Maryland families, since the tradition started in 2006. The maze itself was planted in late June and cut into its final shape about two weeks later by designers from The MAiZE, Inc., a company that has built more than 4,000 corn mazes worldwide. The address, 389 Gambrills Road, is a reminder that underneath the retail development, Gambrills is still named for actual farmland, and that farmland still does its own thing every fall regardless of what's opening at the shopping centers a few minutes away.

This is the piece of the puzzle that makes the two-Waugh-Chapels story interesting rather than just confusing. Gambrills isn't one commercial center pretending to be a town. It's three distinct places that happen to share a ZIP code: an errand-side shopping center, a destination-side shopping center, and a working farm that turns into a seasonal attraction. Each one runs on its own calendar.

A Fall Weekend That Actually Uses All Three

If you're trying to make a weekend out of what's new in Gambrills this fall, the three nodes suggest a natural order rather than a random list. Start at the farm on a Saturday morning while the maze is fresh and the crowds are thinner, since the season only just opened. Move to Towne Centre in the afternoon, where Big Chicken's new hours mean you can grab a late lunch and still make an early movie at Regal without rushing. Save the Village side for whatever errand-running you'd normally do on a Sunday: the Safeway trip, the LA Fitness class, the TJ Maxx browse.

None of this requires treating Gambrills as a single walkable downtown, because it isn't one. The honest way to use the neighborhood is to accept that it has three centers of gravity and to plan around whichever one matches what you're actually trying to do that day.

Why the Split Matters More This Season Than Last

The reason this is worth writing down now, rather than as a general "here's what's in Gambrills" overview, is that this fall is the first time in a while that all three nodes have something genuinely new happening at once. A new restaurant tied to a recognizable brand chose a side deliberately. A twenty-year-old seasonal attraction opened its next chapter on schedule. And the split between the two shopping centers, which has always existed, is more visible than usual because Big Chicken's opening makes the Towne Centre side feel like the livelier of the two right now, at least until the next tenant announcement shifts the balance again.

If you're new to the area, or you've lived here long enough that you stopped noticing the distinction, this is a good season to relearn it. Knowing which Waugh Chapel you actually mean saves you a wrong turn, and knowing the farm down the road still runs on its own clock rounds out the picture of what Gambrills actually is this time of year.

For those exploring more of what makes this stretch of Anne Arundel County distinct, our Gambrills neighborhood page rounds up additional local context, and readers who found their way here while thinking about a move should also see our earlier look at new construction versus resale options in Gambrills.

If a fall visit to Gambrills has you thinking further ahead about buying, selling, or simply understanding what a specific block or shopping corridor means for day-to-day life here, the Thomas Team is glad to talk it through. Schedule a Consultation whenever you're ready.