The Happy Cook — Attraction in Charlottesville

February 3, 2025 - The Happy Cook is a wonderful niche store, tucked amongst many big name brands at a shopping mall in downtown Charlottesville. There’s a lot of positives about this cute little store 😃👍🏼

I love to cook, and needed a special gadget to prepare pork loin medallions for an up-coming dinner. Since my wife & I are new to the area, we phoned a friend. . . An hour later my wife & I are at this shopping mall, walking into The Happy Cook !

Enjoyed walking through the aisles of cutlery, wine bottle openers, whisks, color enamel cast iron pots, and much more! I approached the front counter, and inquired about the circle medallion cuter? Drats. . . I guess I need to invent one, none existed ? I found similar Kitchen/Culinary stores in several small Maine cities ( Portland, and Bath).

Kudos to the original owners who established The Happy Cook in 1978. The current owners ( Monique Moshier & Steve Belcher) purchased this business in 2005. They likewise deserve “Praise” for investing time, money, new ideas to continue the rich impact of this niche store . During COVID the store added local delivery, on-line cooking classes, on-line registries for weddings, birthdays, and big events!

As I read several reviews, some folks mentioned steep prices. Keep in mind top notch quality brands are pricey, but worth the extra money. Also I purchased a simple liquid strainer, for $18 . . . later noticed Amazon sold the same item for $13. It’s important to support the niche smaller stores that offer personal customer services & expertise . . . that big distributors don’t! Amazon and big distributors often hurt our communities, and neighbors who need jobs.

Hopefully those who enjoy cooking will continue to support these niche community stores. 🦞👍🏼😃🍤 I did check out a beautiful red...

They sold a damaged item at full price. I didn't really notice at first, they opened the box to "check" the item. I gave it a glance but didn't think much about it. I get home, open it, gave it a closer look and noticed damage on both the lid and pan/handle. I didn't and still don't care, it's going to get put in a stack of other heavy metal pans. FYI, It's a demeyere atlantis 3qt saute pan. Attached is a picture of the box, seal removed with a new one right below showing how it should look.

It's when I went back and bought a 9+11" frying pan and opened those boxes. That's when I noticed there's a piece of tape with a description used as a seal, there was a booklet, a handle cover and cardboard info that wrapped around the pan with insulation. This saute pan came with non of this besides insulation. The box seal was completely removed, and then they reglued the box to make it look like it was never opened... it's funny thinking back with the cashier, not being able to open the box, having the owner pull it open for her...

You're part of the reason to just buy online for less. I'd rather not have to drive through Charlottesville to be...

Throughout our wedding planning process, we made the intentional decision to support small businesses as much as we could. When putting so much money and business into weddings, we wanted to support our community as much as possible.

When it came time to build our wedding registry we wanted to find a local store and give our business there opposed to the big box stores that are more typical (while we did have a few things from them). The Happy Cook is a local store in Charlottesville, Virginia that had all the kitchen and baking items we needed. We were able to registry online and pick our products without having to travel all the way there, and they easily shipped us all the registry items. They team has been super communicate and they have a site super easy to navigate.

We have been very satisfied with all the beautiful items we’ve received from this store and as a gift, we received 10% of the total sales from our registry to buy more items from them. When building your registry, I highly recommend The Happy Cook, or if you’re not in the DMV, finding your own local...