This is a place for BMWs and Benzes now, for beautiful people in tailored suits, cell phones chirping in their pockets and martini glasses sloshing in their hands.

At eCITIE Restaurant & Bar in Tysons Corner, there's a new Northern Virginia on display.

The cachet that defines Washington has spread westward across the Potomac, from the clubs of D.C. and the restaurants of Bethesda to places like Herndon, Reston and Oakton Fairfax County locales that not so long ago were thought of as slow, semirural and, often, just plain out of it.

Now these communities of minivans and soccer moms are also places of faux Tudor mansions with luxury sedans parked outside, poetry slams and Internet company billboards, top-of-the-line shopping and edgy music clubs.

"We work hard, we play hard and we want to have a really good time, but we don't want to spend all of our time going in and out of the city," said Pamela Sorenson, 28, an eCITIE regular who is senior account manager at Herndon's Net2000 Communications. "This used to be the sticks, but now it's the total center of it all."

Fairfax County now has more people, jobs and money than any other jurisdiction in the Washington area. More than one in eight Virginians live in the county, according to U.S. Census Bureau figures released last week that show its population grew by 18.5 percent in the past decade. And Fairfax leads the nation's counties in median household income.