Coming Soon: Hill's Kitchen

If you're looking for a new frying pan or a special cooking utensil, chances are you have to trek out to a chain retailer like Sur La Table or Williams-Sonoma. I'm lucky to have Home Rule up the street, but overall, DC is lacking in the boutique kitchen shop department.

Capitol Hill native Leah Daniels will help fill that void when she opens Hill's Kitchen at 713 D St. SE later this month. “People are trying to do a lot with food [on the Hill] but there are no kitchen stores,” Daniels told me in an interview for Roll Call newspaper.

The two-story shop will be stocked with pots and pans (including brands like All Clad, Lodge, Staub and Mauviel), bakeware, cookie sheets, measuring cups, cookbooks and cookie cutters in the shapes of all 50 states, plus one for DC.

Daniels, who sold tomatoes at Eastern Market as a child, is finishing up renovations to the 1884 row house she purchased for the shop. The first floor will house the retail operation, while the second floor — equipped with a luxurious kitchen — will eventually be used for cooking classes and parties.

“I don’t want to be a big box store,” she said in the Roll Call interview. “One of the things I think I’m going to be able to do really well is be responsive to my customers.”

The name, by the way, was inspired by the Manhattan neighborhood Hell's Kitchen, not Gordon Ramsay's reality show.