"Everything comes from, you know, 20 years of savings, like myself, my wife," Daniel Petitta told a reporter last year, describing how he and his wife emptied their savings to open a grocery and deli on California Street. "Those are our sacrifice. So, like, put everything in one plate."
That plate turned out to matter more than anyone expected. Petitta, the former sous chef at the two-Michelin-starred JÔNT, opened Kalorama Market in the spring of 2025 in the old Opendoor Market space at 2160 California Street NW. More than a year later, it has become the place where Kalorama actually runs into itself: neighbors at the counter around one o'clock, a rotating hot menu that might be pizza one day and polenta with short rib the next, an owner who knows regulars by name. Meanwhile, a short walk away, the neighborhood's only real public park has been stuck in design review for the better part of a year, with a construction start date that the District still lists as TBD.
That gap says something true about how Kalorama functions right now. The formal civic process is slow, contested, and largely invisible to daily life. The informal one, built around a handful of small businesses, is where the neighborhood's actual community happens.
A Three-Acre Triangle Everyone Agreed to Fix, Eventually
Kalorama Park sits on the triangle formed by Columbia Road, Kalorama Road, and 19th Street NW, about three acres of the only shared green space most residents in Kalorama Triangle and Sheridan-Kalorama have that isn't a private garden or an embassy lawn. The city's Department of General Services has been trying to fix drainage and erosion problems there since at least 2010, when an earlier remediation effort failed so badly that the original contractor was released from the project.
The current attempt started design work in the fall of 2025, backed by a $2 million budget for stormwater management and landscaping. The process that followed looks, on paper, like exactly what you'd want: six public meetings, input collected through surveys and email, plans posted online, a presentation to the local ANC-1C that won approval, and a review by the Historic Preservation Review Board that also came back approved. A community meeting on the stormwater stabilization plan was held on March 26, 2026.
And yet construction still has no start date. A petition circulated in support of the project makes the friction explicit, arguing that "the actions of a vocal minority should not replace the fair and full process our community has already undertaken" and asking that the district move forward "as soon as possible." Read plainly, that's a group of residents who backed a plan through two rounds of official approval, only to watch it stall anyway.
None of this makes Kalorama Park unusable today. The basketball courts and playgrounds at the adjacent Kalorama Recreation Center still run on their normal schedule. But the park itself, the drainage fixes, the plaza work, the parts meant to make the space actually pleasant to sit in, remain paused. For a neighborhood with this little public land to begin with, that pause has weight.
Where the Sidewalk Traffic Actually Goes Now
Which brings the story back to California Street. Petitta had been eyeing the old Opendoor Market space for a year before it went up for sale, watching what he described as neglect from the previous owners. When the opportunity came, he and his wife put in the work themselves, tiling the counters with help from a father-in-law who does construction and came up from Miami for the job, unpacking boxes until two in the morning before opening day.
What they built is closer to a neighborhood table than a standard grocery run. The shelves carry imported pasta, a serious wine selection, and produce from local farms, but the draw is the daily hot special that Petitta cooks himself and posts to Instagram each morning. One day it's a chicken scaloppine sandwich finished with a hot iron brand on the brioche, a small personal signature. Another it's lasagna, or a breakfast parigina, or Roman-style pizza on weekends. Regulars have started timing their visits around the noon rush, when the counter fills and, as one visitor put it, "you can see the excitement in people's faces."
Petitta has said outright that he wants the shop to function as a point of community for Kalorama-Sheridan, not just a place to grab dinner ingredients. A year in, that's more or less what it has become: the informal gathering spot the neighborhood's actual park is currently unable to offer.
Dinner Still Means Something Formal
Not every meal in Kalorama runs through a deli counter. For the occasion dinner, the neighborhood still defers to Annabelle, the Florida Avenue restaurant created by restaurateur Ashok Bajaj, where the kitchen is led by chef Frank Ruta, previously of Palena and, before that, a White House chef who served three presidents. Washingtonian named Annabelle one of its 100 Very Best Restaurants for 2025, describing it as the kind of moderate, reliably excellent room that works for every generation at the table.
The contrast is worth sitting with. Annabelle is table service, a wine list, an evening you plan around. Kalorama Market is a stop on the way home, a sandwich eaten standing at a counter. Together they map the two speeds Kalorama actually runs at day to day: the deliberate, formal version the neighborhood's reputation is built on, and the faster, more casual version that's quietly taken over daily life.
The Museum That Moved Forward While the Park Didn't
The Woodrow Wilson House, the 1915 Georgian Revival at 2340 S Street NW where the twenty-eighth president lived after leaving office, has spent decades functioning as a fairly settled kind of museum: a preserved 1920s interior, artifacts from Wilson's presidency, tours on a fixed schedule. That changed in November 2025, when the house opened a new exhibition, "Wilson's Washington, America's Struggle: Race and Civil Liberties in the Capital," featuring remarks from historian and preservationist Kim Hoagland and funded by Humanities DC. The exhibition looks directly at the more difficult parts of the Wilson era and how Washingtonians of different backgrounds shaped civic life in the city at the time.
It's a small irony that a house dedicated to sitting with complicated history managed to open a new, more honest exhibition on schedule, while the neighborhood's stormwater plan is still waiting on a construction date. Kalorama seems more comfortable confronting the past than finishing a landscaping project in the present.
What This Adds Up To
None of this changes the postcard version of Kalorama. The Spanish Steps still cascade down from S Street to Decatur Place, the way they have since 1911. Mitchell Park still gives dog walkers a quiet patch of green closer to Dupont. The embassies along Massachusetts Avenue still open their doors each spring for public tours. That part of the neighborhood's identity holds.
What's shifted is where the actual social weight sits. A shared civic project, the one piece of public land meant to belong to everyone, is moving slowly and unevenly through a review process that's already cleared every formal hurdle it was supposed to clear. In its place, a single owner who put his savings into a corner storefront has built something closer to a commons than the commons itself currently offers. That's not a complaint about Kalorama. It's just a more accurate account of how the neighborhood works right now than the Spanish Steps and embassy tour version everyone already knows.
If you're weighing what a specific block or building in Kalorama actually offers day to day, not just the historical footnotes but the texture of a normal week, HEIDER at TTR Sotheby's International Realty can walk you through it directly. Get in touch.
