The Watergate, After Peacock Room and the Avery
• March 28, 2016

Two hotels and a restaurant are slated to either open or reopen in the neighborhood.

The Avery Georgetown Hotel will open on P Street this spring, while the Watergate Hotel and After Peacock Room restaurant are expected to reopen soon. Though, when contacted, neither the Watergate nor After Peacock Room provided dates for their openings. This is the third time the After Peacock Room restaurant has opened. The Avery will be accept reservations on their website, with reduced rates, by late April for May travelers.

Rosewood Hotels to Buy Capella in Georgetown
• March 24, 2016

The Capella Hotel in Georgetown, a 49-room hotel that opened in 2013, will be purchased by Rosewood Hotels & Resorts, a Dallas-based luxury chain, reported the Washington Business Journal. The price was undisclosed. The property, at 1050 31st St. NW, was once the headquarters of the Trial Lawyers Association and is assessed at just over $30 million. The current owners are Castleton Hotel Partners I LLC.

Rosewood owns the Carlyle in Manhattan and the Mansion on Turtle Creek in Dallas and other properties in Mexico, the Caribbean, Europe, the Middle East and Asia, where the company plans to open several hotels over the next few years.

Parker’s Exxon Bought by Hamood Abutaa
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Hamood Abutaa has expanded his D.C. business empire, having acquired Parker’s Exxon garage at 4812 MacArthur Boulevard. Abutaa now has eight locations in the D.C. area.

Abutta referred to Lynn Cook, the former owner of the gas station, “a mentor of mine” and says he’s happy to continue to serve the neighborhood and run the garage as it is. He has plans to make only “minor improvements” to the running of the station.

Mykita Opticians Welcome to Georgetown
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Upscale opticians and eyewear store Mykita has opened up its second D.C. branch, here in Georgetown. The new store is on the corner of 30th and M Street, at the previous location of a frozen yogurt vendor. The Georgetown branch boasts the “largest selection of Mykita frames in the Washington DC area.” The Germany-based company produces their handmade frames in Berlin. Mykita’s other locations in the metro area are at Tysons Galleria and the corner of 14th and T Street.

Business Ins and Outs
• March 16, 2016

IN: Glover Park Hardware Store

Glover Park Hardware owners Gina Schaefer and Marc Friedman reopened a new 7,500-square-foot location at 2233 Wisconsin Ave. NW on Feb. 25, taking the place of the neighborhood hardware store that closed in January of 2015. The store is in the lower front level, next to the bar, Breadsoda. After losing its lease after 10 years, the business left its old location at 2251 Wisconsin Ave. NW. The store’s general manager is Noe Delgado, who has worked there since 2010.

IN: Rite Aid in Glover Park

The 24-hour Rite Aid Pharmacy in Glover Park at 2255 Wisconsin Ave. NW has opened. The Rite Aid drugstore chain is set to be acquired by Walgreens Boots Alliance, an American holding company that consists of Retail Pharmacy USA (Walgreens), Duane Reade, Retail Pharmacy International (Boots UK) and Alliance Healthcare. It will become part of the largest retail pharmacy in the United States and Europe. The new Glover Park location is across the street from a CVS Pharmacy.

IN: Hinckley Pottery in Blues Alley

Hinckley Pottery has moved into 3132 Blues Alley NW, next to the Blues Alley jazz club. A message on the website of the 40-year-old pottery studio, which was in Adams Morgan for decades, but was first opened by Jill Hinckley in Georgetown, says: “Our doors will open in late March or early April. Until then, we will get our wheels, kilns, shelves, pots and tools ready to welcome you to this wonderful, larger space. Our second floor studio will make it possible for us to expand beyond our ongoing wheel classes to provide space for potters who prefer to work independently. We also will offer two hand-building classes later this spring.”

IN: 2501 M St. to Open With Condos — and Nobu

The former office building at 25th and M streets NW is being reconstructed into condos — now being marketed as The 2501, Residences on M Street (“mixed-use luxury condos in Georgetown”) — with its ground floor going to the famed Nobu, one of the most acclaimed Japanese restaurants in the country. With private dining rooms and patios in the back overlooking Rock Creek Park, Nobu should be ready by the end of 2016; the condos, next year. It seems that Japanese chef Nobu Matsuhisa was convinced that the West End corner is the sweet spot between Georgetown and downtown.

While it’s not exactly in Georgetown, it is next door to Francis Park and the Embassy of Qatar, and two blocks east of Georgetown — and fewer than three blocks from The Georgetowner’s office and the Four Seasons Hotel.

“PRP Real Estate Investment Management purchased 2501 M Street NW in 2014 and moved forward with converting the Class B office building into residences,” according to Urban Turf. “Specifically, the lower six floors of the nine-story building are being converted into five levels of high-end condominiums and ground-floor retail space. The top three floors, which were already condos, will not be changed. CORE is handling the design of 2501 M, and the Mayhood Company is managing sales and marketing.”

Expanded: T.J. Maxx

Clothing discounter T.J. Maxx celebrated a grand re-opening on March 3 with a ribbon-cutting ceremony and store specials. The store will be open from 8 a.m. to 9:30 p.m. At 3222 M St. NW since 2012, the store expanded into space previously shared with Home Goods, also part of the T.J. Maxx company.

Business ins and Outs
• February 24, 2016

IN: Bar à Vin, at Chez Billy Sud
First, in 2012, there was Chez Billy in Petworth. Then, in 2014, there was Chez Billy Sud in Georgetown. Now, on Feb. 29, there will be Bar à Vin at 1035 31st St. NW, a long-vacant space adjacent to Chez Billy Sud. All three, and more, are the creations of Eric Hilton (of electronic music collective Thievery Corporation) and his younger brother Ian. The new space, expected to feature a large, carefully curated, mostly French wine list, will be open from 4 p.m. to 2 a.m., accommodating those waiting for a table at Chez Billy Sud and others. The smaller of two rooms has a working fireplace.

IN: Dean & Deluca’s Patio, Now With Alcohol, Music
The Dean & DeLuca food market at 3276 M St. NW will soon sell beer and wine to be consumed at its outside plaza, with limited music allowed. (The store has always sold beer and wine, but alcohol could not be consumed on the premises.) The cafe, the Citizens Association of Georgetown and the Advisory Neighborhood Commission 2E have entered into a voluntary agreement, with expected approval by the D.C. Alcohol Beverage Control Board.

IN: Bedrock Gets Gtown Park Place
Restaurant entrepreneur Geoff Dawson has signed a lease for space at Georgetown Park on the canal level with a Wisconsin Avenue entrance. Dawson’s many Bedrock Management Company ventures include Bedrock Billiards, Ripple and Penn Social.

IN: 3 Eateries Share Space on Grace Street
Georgetown’s mini food eruption continues. Grace Street Coffee Roasters, South Block Juice Co. and SundeVich will soon be checking into a shared space at 3210 Grace St. NW, near Dog Tag Bakery and across from Chaia Tacos. The coffee shop will be joined by the Arlington micro juicery’s sixth store. The global-sandwich maker from Shaw will also set up in Georgetown. Wow, it’s a wholly trinity of Millennial tastes, just half a block from Wisconsin and M.

All D.C. Boathouses Now Under Single Management
Under a new 10-year agreement with the National Park Service, NCR Guest Services will take over operation of all three of D.C.’s public boathouses along the Potomac River. Visitors will now be able to rent boats and bikes from any boathouse and drop them off at any other boathouse. Other features of the new management include instructional programs for rowing, canoeing, kayaking and stand-up paddleboarding; storage and rental of non-motorized watercraft; programs for the disabled; canoe and kayak development programs for youths; and junior fishing programs.

OUT: Yes to Drugs, No to Liquor for Glover Park Rite Aid
At its Feb. 11 meeting, Advisory Neighborhood Commission 3B voted 5-0 to oppose a request made in January by the soon-to-open Glover Park Rite Aid to lift the neighborhood’s existing ban on new Class A licenses, which permit retail sales of beer, wine and spirits. The Glover Park Citizens’ Association previously voted to oppose the request. Rite Aid — which under existing law cannot get a beer-and-wine-only license (Class B) because a nearby business, Whole Foods, already has one — is expected to contest the decision. A public hearing will be held March 30. The new Rite Aid occupies the former Glover Park Hardware location at 2251 Wisconsin Ave. NW.

A Bunker for Scary Times
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Suppose there was a financial instrument — with a track record stretching back 1,400 years — that was so solid that it: survived the Great Depression intact; earned untaxed interest at a competitive rate; could provide cash at will, regardless of one’s current financial situation; and could be used by individuals, as well as by major corporations and banks, as a safe harbor during economic turmoil?

The instrument I’m talking about is participating whole life insurance, the kind of insurance our parents and grandparents owned before the stock market began to boom in the 1980s and 1990s. After mutual whole life saw our elders through thick and thin, it went through several decades of being muscled aside by the allure of the stock market. It’s making a big comeback.
I’m astonished at how few people and investment professionals I meet understand how these policies work, or don’t offer them to clients because they aren’t sexy or new.

Today, these contracts are the favored investment vehicle of the wealthy. But too often, when sold by the financial industry, they are sold in the wrong form. Term insurance is still the most economical life insurance option for most people. For clients looking for a better place to accumulate cash than a bank account or the Wall Street casino, however, mutual whole life insurance, done correctly, is the closest thing to owning your own bank.

The concept is rather simple.

You own the bank. Unlike most products, which are created and sold to benefit stockholders, these contracts are owned by the policyholders, the sole constituency they serve.

Ironclad guarantees. The cash value and death benefit are tightly regulated and insured by the states. And many policies today provide benefits for chronic long-term care.

Even banks and corporations buy them. Major corporations and banks buy these policies and utilize them as a safe place to accumulate their cash. They invest with other people’s money but protect their own money. Instead of doing what banks say, do what banks do.

In the end, mutual insurance is only one part of a financial plan, the bunker you can retreat to when the rest of the world is falling apart and you can’t sleep.

These policies got our grandparents through the Great Depression, and if structured correctly they can get you through those scary times in your life.

John E. Girouard, author of “Take Back Your Money” and “The Ten Truths of Wealth Creation,” is a registered principal of Cambridge Investment Research and an Investment Advisor Representative of Capital Investment Advisors in Bethesda, Maryland.

OUT With the Old: Five Guys, Jack Wills, Sweet Frog—and the Town’s Liquor License Moratorium
• February 18, 2016

*Updated Jan. 15.*

Five Guys hamburger restaurant at the corner of Wisconsin Avenue and Dumbarton Street will close Sunday, Jan. 24, after years at its Georgetown location. For decades, the 1335 Wisconsin Ave. NW address held the French bistro Au Pied du Cochon, known for a Soviet spy escape and a Mike Tyson incident, before Five Guys arrived about 10 years ago. Founded in Arlington, Va., in 1986, Five Guys has often received top burger prizes and now has more than 1,000 locations in North America. It opened its first United Kingdom spot three years ago. It also has franchises in Ireland and Saudi Arabia.

Jack Wills has vacated its store near the corner of Wisconsin Avenue and M Street, but get ready for Lilly Pulitzer, the “Queen of Prep” clothier, to arrive at 1079 1/2 Wisconsin Ave. NW, to be exact. The Jack Wills store at 1079 Wisconsin Ave. NW closed Christmastime. “Life’s a party, dress like it,” according to Lilly Pulitzer. As for departed Jack Wills, it remains “fabulously British” in other locations, such as Philadelphia, Nova Scotia and, of course, the U.K.

Sweet Frog frozen yogurt shop at 1737 Wisconsin Ave. NW, which opened in October 2013, has closed. It was a fun spot for kids around the neighborhood and for hanging out after sports at Jelleff Boys & Girls Club center.

Noodles & Co, the fast casual restaurant with dishes from mac ‘n cheese to pad Thai at 1815 Wisconsin Ave. NW, has closed as did the nearby Rooster’s barber shop a couple of months ago. Other businesses in this fairly new, small retail complex— next to the Social Safeway—include Drybar, a blow dry bar, and Cardinal Bank. These two favorites are doing quite well, thank you.

Also, gone soon will be Georgetown’s liquor license moratorium. In effect since 1989 and due to expire April 3, it has gotten a no vote from Georgetown groups, which have come to view it as a big restraint to the restaurant business and a hinderance to business in general.

Last month, the Georgetown Business Association, which represents businesses throughout all of Georgetown, added its own unequivocal take on the debate: let the Georgetown liquor license moratorium expire, with no strings attached.

The Georgetown-Burleith Advisory Neighborhood Commission unanimously voted at its Jan. 4 meeting to ask that the Georgetown liquor license moratorium be allowed expire by spring, allowing for a so-called “Georgetown Settlement Agreement Template.”

It resolved: “. . . ANC 2E requests that the Alcoholic Beverage Control Board recognize the community’s action to adopt a Settlement Agreement Template aimed at addressing issues of hours of operation, noise disturbance, public space cleanliness and maintenance, and general concerns to ensure peace, order and quiet in the community . . .” and “. . . that the [board] adopt a protocol for reviewing CR and DR license applications in Georgetown consistent with that available to other jurisdictions in the city . . .”

On board with the template idea is the Georgetown Business Improvement District, which wrote up its concept first a few months ago, and the Citizens Association of Georgetown. The BID will have its final vote on the revised template Jan. 21.
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A Sense of Rich Surprise at L’Enfant Gallery
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In 2000, when Peter Colasante decided to move in, the once-elegant storefront on the corner of Wisconsin Avenue and P Street, formerly an Italian men’s shop, was boarded up. The art gallery he was relocating from Connecticut Avenue was named for architect and engineer Pierre Charles L’Enfant (Colasante didn’t consider the 1960s office complex—L’Enfant Plaza—a fitting tribute to the designer of the District of Columbia).

Colasante, 67, is still pleased with his choice of location, calling Georgetown — outside of New York, which he says is “a different universe” — “the best place in the best city in the country to be.” The gallery’s window displays, meant to be “visual out-of-the-box experiences,” draw in the avenue’s enviable foot traffic. “I find out who they are later,” he says.

By now, the gallery has an international network of clients, a “nuclear family.” Dealers look to L’Enfant Gallery for Chinese art and Asian ceramics, and the Civil War is a focus (Colasante lent items to a major Lincoln exhibition recently), but the overall mix is eclectic in genre, origin and price.

Stepping inside, visitors face a red wall of paintings hung salon-style, assorted chandeliers above. That sense of rich surprise extends throughout the gallery’s four levels.

In November, after a volunteer archivist went through what was in storage, Colasante opened the gallery’s basement to the public. It is now set up to resemble a Victorian viewing parlor, complete with a carved chief’s throne from Borneo.

Having decamped for Vienna, Virginia, Colasante no longer gets up at 3 in the morning to move paintings around. But he and his business partner (and former spouse) Maureen Taylor rearrange the display and host special exhibitions every few months. From total holdings of roughly 4,000 objects, he says they sell 200 to 300 per year.

Colasante’s eyes twinkle behind stylish frames when he recalls starting out with a much smaller inventory. In December of 1973, he opened Calvert Gallery in an English basement on Connecticut Avenue, putting four things purchased at apartment sales in the window. The gallery grew as it moved from one location to another in the vicinity of Connecticut and Calvert, becoming L’Enfant Gallery in 1990.

Raised in Cliffside Park, New Jersey, Colasante attended Catholic University, where he failed to shine, as he tells it, either as an actor or a philosopher. He learned about art working in Oxon Hill, Maryland, as an eccentric collector’s cataloguer, then curator. His boss’s advice: Never specialize.

Colasante can remember three recessions, but calls the last five years “the worst it’s ever been.” The threshold for bread-and-butter purchases, formerly $10,000, has dropped to $3,000, he says. The good news is that he owns his building, having finally been able to purchase it from a trust in 2012. He also does appraisal work and counsels owners of art and antiques (he advises those wishing to hang on to treasured possessions to avoid the three Ds: death, divorce and downsizing).

In the end, Colasante explains, the business is about matchmaking. You can have the finest example of something in the world, but “unless the right person comes to buy it, it doesn’t matter.”

Scheele’s Market: A 120-Year Neighborhood Bond
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When Donguk Kim first came to America from South Korea in 2003, he never dreamed he would one day be the proprietor of a storied market in Washington’s most historic neighborhood. But he did have dreams.

“I wanted to be a successful businessman in America and I heard there were many chances there,” he said.

He came to Maryland in 2004 with his wife and son. They lived in a homestay and attended church with their host. Through a church connection, he began running a dollar store a few months later. After that, he ran a deli in Silver Spring. That’s what Kim was doing in 2012 when he saw a listing in the Korea Times for Scheele’s Market, at 1331 29th St. NW.

Considering the market’s loyal customer base, taking over Scheele’s was no simple matter. The 120-year-old market has been a staple in the neighborhood for generations. Indeed, a few years ago, neighbors contributed to a special fund to ensure that the building remain a market through an agreement with the property owner.

Kim has taken the initiative to maintain the market’s strong relationship with the customers who come for groceries, beer and wine and fresh deli sandwiches. The blizzard of 2016 also gave him a chance to shine: he was open throughout the weekend. “I’m always listening to what my customers want and I try to get it soon,” he said, referring to his plan to add requested merchandise to the shelves.

Kim’s customers, meanwhile, love the quality of the food, the dedicated service and the friendship the quaint market fosters. Scheele loyalists include senators and the Secretary of Energy, who once posed for a photo with Kim.

They are just as devoted to Scheele’s as Kim is to them. One customer described the recent attempts to get a few tables and chairs out front, allowing customers to eat their sandwiches while enjoying the scenery and the buzz of life in Georgetown (that plan has not yet been approved by the District).

Kim believes that the market has the potential to become more profitable. Grocery purchases currently account for about half of sales, he said, and new customers are few. Though the work is hard and the hours are long, he enjoys interacting with the community and getting the chance to experience life in the nation’s capital.

“I’ve liked adventure all through my life. South Korea is not a bad country, but I was always longing for America.”

Along with running a business, Kim has managed to fulfill that desire for adventure by visiting places such as the Grand Canyon, Las Vegas, Mexico and Miami. And he also has Scheele’s, which, though quiet and unassuming at first glance, has certainly been an adventure of its own.