RESTAURANT NEWS | WASHINGTON, D.C.
Asheville’s Spicewalla Spice Shop Lands in Georgetown
The chef-driven spice brand from Chai Pani’s Meherwan Irani opens its second shop, with a bazaar built for tasting.
SPICEWALLA | MAP | INSTAGRAM
By Eric Barton
8:35 a.m. ET, Nov. 9, 2026
AUTHOR BIO: Eric Barton is editor of The Adventurist and a freelance journalist who has reviewed restaurants for more than two decades. Email him here.
Marigold garlands run across the walls at Spicewalla’s new Georgetown shop, and a chandelier made of marigolds hangs over the middle of the shop. The store opened Nov. 6 on Wisconsin Avenue in Washington, D.C., diagonal from Martin’s Tavern, and it is the spice brand’s second shop, after its flagship in Asheville’s Grove Arcade.
Spicewalla is the small-batch spice brand chef Meherwan Irani, who founded the Indian street food restaurant Chai Pani in 2009 and won the James Beard Foundation’s Outstanding Restaurant award in 2022. The tins on the Georgetown shelves carry the same flavors his restaurants cook with, from garam masala and chaat masala to tandoori masala and Kashmiri chile powder.
The shop is built around an interactive spice bazaar, a display of open bowls where shoppers can smell and taste before they buy. The shelves hold individual spices, exclusive blends, and gift-ready collections, plus collaboration products that run from T-Pain’s wing rubs to chef Shuai Wang’s chilli crunch. Snacks, condiments, chocolates, hot sauces, coffee, and other pantry goods from makers around D.C. and beyond fill out the shelves, and the drinks fridge stocks sparkling lemonades, tepache, and kombucha.
The hand-painted signage comes from local artists, and the shop carries the spirit of Chai Pani and its sister concept Botiwalla, in its colors and its marigolds. A display in the shop holds his new book, No. 1 Best Indian Cookbook in the World, released in September with co-author Jamie Feldmar, alongside a 10-pack of the spices its recipes call for.
The timing is deliberate: the shop opened at the start of the holiday season, and the gift collections run from stocking stuffers under $5 to an 18-tin set.
Spicewalla is the third business Irani and his wife Molly have opened in Washington in just over a year. Chai Pani opened at Union Market in August 2025, and Botiwalla, the Indian street food spot, opened in Tenleytown last month, two miles north of the new shop on Wisconsin Avenue.
The shop offers in-store pickup for online orders and ships nationwide from the store. The rest is the shop itself: spices in open bowls, marigolds overhead, and a door on Wisconsin Avenue for anyone who follows their nose in.
