The clock is ticking. A dishwasher furiously scours knives as the grill chef checks the fryer by his station. Amidst the loud intermittent clank of utensils and pans against stainless steel countertops, Tim Burgess, co-owner of Bang and chef for the night, swiftly dices mint in preparation for the many Thai carrot salads and peanut-sesame vinaigrettes he’ll serve this evening. It’s 4:30pm and in less than one hour Bang will be a flurry with Charlottesville’s hippest. They’ll devour Pacific Blue snapper, grilled oyster mushrooms and 60-second sirloin. The trademark cosmopolitans and boutique martinis will flow, if not exactly freely in this upscale, see-and-be-seen restaurant, then liberally. Burgess and partner Vincent Derquenne are the brains—and the whisks—behind the operation.
Meanwhile, outside on the Downtown Mall, it’s a typical Saturday night. Weekend tourists and locals flock to the pulsating heart of Charlottesville. By nightfall, the eight blocks of pedestrian promenade will be transformed into a kind of ocean-less boardwalk. Vagabond musicians set up their drum circles and guitars as street vendors refold and re-pile their tables of T-shirts, scarves and sweaters. Waiters set tables at any one of the 20 outdoor cafés. One by one, moviegoers flock to buy tickets for the early show.
At some point during the evening, the same thought will cross many Mall visitors’ minds—dinner. That’s where Burgess and Derquenne step in.
They are the co-owners of three of the most popular and successful Downtown restaurants—all within two blocks of each other. Together, the duo has created Metro, with its new Mediterranean flair reigning over Water Street; Bizou, Burgess and Derquenne’s flagship diner directly on the Mall; and the youngest in the restaurant trio, Asian-infused Bang on Second Street around the corner from Metro.
On this night while Burgess directs Bang, Derquenne will baby-sit Metro, creating appetizers like antipasti, charcuterie platters and mozzarella tarts smeared with caramelized onions. He’ll also be in charge of the fish—gulf shrimp swimming in creamy polenta, pan-fried soft shell crabs dunked in remoulade cream sauce and salmon-wrapped phyllo with roasted polenta under a layer of rich tomato.
Bizou, which by design is staffed by veterans of the Derquenne-Burgess team, will be taking care of itself. There, chef Sean Lawford, in his sixth year at Bizou, will serve up such longtime local favorites as homemade meatloaf with chipotle ketchup and banana bread smothered under praline sauce and vanilla ice cream.
He won’t have a second to sit down once the patrons start pouring in and lining up for outdoor tables, but Lawford has no complaints. “Vincent and Tim have been mentors and give me a lot of culinary freedom and support,” he says. “I doubt I’ll ever work for anyone else again.”
It’s 5pm and Burgess has just finished typing the evening’s menu for Bang. Clad in clingy black halter tops and tight slacks, the bartenders and waiters arrive. By 5:30pm, Burgess will have pored over the selections for the evening with the staff. By 6:30pm, five waiters, two bartenders, one dishwasher and two chefs will be knocking elbows in the 13’ X 20’ kitchen that harks back to the former house’s Depression-era roots.
A waiter vacuums beneath the black booths, brushing off the faux, slightly tattered leopard-skin seat cushions as a bartender wipes down a lime-green shellacked counter. Someone clicks on the stereo, and the lilting beat of Macy Gray reverberates off the maroon-veined wallpaper (which is also beginning to show a few signs of wear—perhaps a symptom of Bang’s life in the fast lane). During the course of the evening, this tight, dimly lit space will serve upwards of 70 people. With the same number expected to visit Metro, and a whopping 220 at Bizou, Derquenne and Burgess will please the palates of nearly 400 diners on a single night. Burgess and Derquenne may be riding a wave of success that is the envy of every would-be restaurateur in the City, but it’s a far cry from where they started.
Theirs was a chance meeting in the late 1980s, when both worked in a Crozet restaurant known as The Gallery. How could the then-20somethings know that at the intersection of routes 240 and 250, Derquenne’s Parisian upbringing and Burgess’ West Virginia roots would eventually become ingredients in one of the longest lived and most successful restaurant partnerships in the City? Could they have any idea, moreover, that together they would stumble upon what would soon become a trait of Charlottesville cuisine—the new French-Southern cuisine?
In 1991, Derquenne, who had by then been out of The Gallery for one year, began to work at one of the few restaurants on the deserted Downtown Mall. It was an upscale diner named Fat City. The menu evidenced some culinary strides, such as meats nouvelle, a fine wine list and gourmet desserts, but internally, the Fat City partnership was falling apart.
“Those guys were doing some very interesting things,” says Derquenne.
“Fat City was a great concept, with a great chef,” adds Burgess, “but a horrible business partnership.”
After what Derquenne describes as an impromptu board meeting at the Dragon Lady restaurant, he and Burgess decided to purchase Fat City. In those days a location on the barren Mall came at just the right price, but it was still a lot to the fledgling entrepreneurs. They combined a $10,000 loan from Derquenne’s father with another $10,000 that Burgess had saved and the proceeds from a home-equity loan that Burgess and his wife took on their house to launch the business. Scared to death of the recession, and worried about coming off as too high end, Burgess and Derquenne took their time transforming Fat City into their first baby, Metropolitain.
“We had no pricey cuts of meat, nothing too fancy,” says Burgess. ”There was even a burger on the menu. We very slowly removed certain things, while adding others.”
Nevertheless, the first two-and-a-half years were little more than a struggle for the partners. Neither the sparkle of Burgess’ bright blue eyes nor Derquenne’s Gallic charm (“dees dish is some-ting spectaculahr”) could conquer the Mall’s declining economy.
Downtown shops and boutiques were failing, upper floors of nearly every building were vacant, and most merchants shut their doors at 6pm. In terms of dining, Eastern Standard on the west end and C&O on the east end were upscale bookends on either side of nothing.
Among local companies and establishments, The Michie Company (later Lexis-Nexis), the National Ground Intelligence Center and SNL Securities made their home Downtown. Nearby employees came out for lunch, but rarely hung around for dinner.
“Lunch was packed every day,” recalls Terry Shotwell, who has owned the Nook since 1990. “There was nothing else down here to eat. For lunches, it was us and the Hardware Store.
“The thing is, no one was open for dinner except for maybe Miller’s and Sal’s.”
Shotwell, who had previously owned Terry’s Place around the corner on Fourth Street from the present-day Nook, even recounts the point when City Council approached the proprietors of Sal’s Pizzeria, The Hardware Store and Miller’s to sell them on the idea of “café-style,” or outdoor, seating.
“They were doing everything they could to draw people Downtown, make it more inviting,” she says.
Burgess and Derquenne had no illusions about what they were facing. Indeed, even in robust settings, one-third of new restaurants go out of business in less than a year, according to the National Restaurant Association. By year five, the figure jumps to 70 percent.
“We worked and cooked out of fear, period,” says Burgess. “It definitely wasn’t going to our heads.”
More than once the thought crossed their minds that they had made a mistake.
Derquenne and Burgess waited until well into Metropolitain’s third year to add the sort of culinary delights they had their sights set on from the beginning. It took that long to build up an adventurous clientele.
At the end of 1994, a fancy new restaurant named Brasa opened at 215 W. Water St., the current location of Oxo. Brasa was the first to bring big-city flashiness to Charlottesville. The interior was a spectacle and the glowing restaurant reviews in major newspapers were attractive, to say the least.
“They were the first outfit to dump a bunch of money into a big space like that,” says Burgess. “Up until then, everyone else was just sort of winging it, including us.”
During the same period, Doug Smith and Sean Concannon purchased and re-opened Eastern Standard (which had been shuttered by its first owners, Ken and Betty Jane Mori). Trying to peel off Standard’s former reputation as having “the slowest service in town,” like Derquenne and Burgess, Smith and Concannon were struggling to make themselves known with little money.
“We were sort of the poor stepchild of Brasa when we opened,” says Smith. “We just didn’t have the big splash.”
“We had to look at this like it was our contribution to Charlottesville,” says Concannon, who recounts going out every morning to pick up trash in the empty parking lot across the street where the ice park is now located just so customers wouldn’t see it while dining.
Ever nervous about business, Burgess and Derquenne methodically continued to add new dishes to Metropolitain’s menu, while wiping away conventional stand-bys like hamburgers. Inside, the act of embellishing the menu with dishes like whole quail, potato chevre croquettes and blackberry gastrique may have spurred massive anxiety attacks in the partners. But outside, those same dishes were beginning a buzz—one Burgess and Derquenne wouldn’t apprehend for some time.
“Not only was Metropolitain sort of the new place in town,” says Concannon, “but they were really setting the standard for fresh food and new ideas.”
By 1995, the partners saw the light at the end of the tunnel—or at least saw it as well as their bleary eyes would permit, given the exhausting hours they were putting in at Metropolitain. The economy was flush again, and Downtown development was becoming the new name of the game.
“We had a talk with [high-profile developer] Lee Danielson,” says Burgess, “and he said, ‘Hang around, don’t go anywhere, we’re going to be changing this Mall.’
“And, so we stuck it out.”
Indeed, in the couple of years to follow a renewed vitality began to simmer on the Downtown Mall—and restaurants soon followed.
The Charlottesville Ice Park (a project of Danielson and then-partner Colin Rolph) broke ground, with a new movie complex and the Second Street crossover next on the to-do lists (also Danielson-Rolph projects). High-tech companies moved to Downtown buildings instead of renting Lysol-laden cubicles in the County. Live music, street vendors and packed outdoor cafés attracted more and more visitors to the Mall.
In 1996, Bill and Kate Hamilton gave birth to Hamiltons’ in the former H & M shoe store, whose renovation was the brainchild of another high-profile developer, Gabe Silverman. Barbara Shifflett (now of Station and Mono Loco) walked past the present Mono Loco location on Water Street (then Rose’s Burritos) and asked the power man what business he was cutting off. The rest is crazy monkey history. Christian Tamm opened the highly successful Sylvia’s Pizza next to the Hardware Store (later he relocated his business and dubbed it Christian’s Pizza).
As Shifflett went on to transform Mono Loco into a Caribbean-style eatery, Hamiltons’ became the airy, brightly colored destination for New American cuisine. These business owners, like other up-and-coming restaurateurs, looked to Derquenne and Burgess.
“They were already players,” says Bill Hamilton. “They figured in heavily on how we were going to market ourselves, but really we wanted to complement what they were doing.”
But that would prove difficult, for Burgess and Derquenne were already growing restless with the state of Metropolitain.
Amidst the rising tide of Mall rejuvenation in 1996, Derquenne and Burgess decided to expand. They would add another restaurant to their assets, and add more formal, innovative cuisine to their repertoire.
They moved Metropolitain to its Water Street location (now Metro). With the upscale endeavor came a dressier space, an open kitchen, white coats and a new menu: Eclectic and artistic dishes emerged, like coq au vin with sautéed arugula and rabbit livers with toasted brioche.
But the site of the first Metropolitain would remain their flagship restaurant. They renamed it Bizou (meaning “sweet kisses”after the parting words Derquenne regularly uttered to his mother, “Bizou, Bizou”) and hired a chef. They would retain most of the diner-style favorites on the menu, like cornmeal-crusted catfish quesadillas and ice cream soda floats. With their personal drive for variety and excitement, they now offered Charlottesville one elegant diner, and one elegant dining experience.
“Before I met Tim,” says Derquenne. “I had never even seen a grit. When I go home, even today, I try to explain what grits are and people have absolutely no idea what I’m talking about.”
Early last year, Derquenne and Burgess made another purchase: the former Memory & Company space on Second Street. They set out to make their third restaurant, Bang.
A few days before opening night in March 2002, with characteristic aplomb, Derquenne and Burgess decided to scrap the entire Bang menu and go strictly for appetizers, pursuing another dream—to invent and serve Asian-influenced food. On top of that, they would create a drink menu as spectacular as the food.
“We really wanted to distance this place from the other two,” says Burgess.
They were also in the process of completing renovations at Metropolitain, eventually creating an ultra-colorful, geometric, “Romper Room”-style space, including a Mediterranean-infused menu. They reduced prices, and the name. The space would now be called Metro. It would feature dishes like duck prosciutto, pecorino pizzas and tuna stuffed with caponata.
Expanding to three establishments carries some risk, as many agree that part of the success and charm of the first two restaurants lies with Derquenne and Burgess themselves. Juggling minor and major details alike is a task the two carry seamlessly—all three restaurants tallied in at zero critical food violations in recent State health inspections. Personality and the human touch are essential ingredients in the restaurant business, says Concannon, whose Eastern Standard has now become Escafé.
“That’s the most important part to owning a successful restaurant,” he says. “Tim and Vince had it, naturally.”
Tamm concurs. “It’s the look on the owner’s face, him greeting you, the consistency of that, in general, that makes or breaks a restaurant,” he says, adding that Bizou (where neither owner cooks regularly anymore) is the absolute best meal on the Mall for the money.
“When an owner’s not there, the customer can feel there’s a different atmosphere in the store,” Tamm says.
And then there are the dangers of handling too many projects at once.
“Your focus can get distracted,” says Shifflett, who also opened Rapture. “You move your eye to a different area of interest.
“But, when you have a lot of energy, it’s hard to limit yourself when you feel limitless.”
Still, on this busy Saturday night, 12 years after they first hung out their “Open for Business” sign, both Burgess and Derquenne are confident that Bizou is in good hands.
“You always want every restaurant to be self-sufficient,” says Burgess. “Right now, that’s Bizou.”
Back at Bang, as the bartender slides behind him to rinse a bucket from the bar, Burgess whisks the remaining chocolate chips into the mousse for the popular Chocolate 3 Way dessert. He puts it into the fridge and pulls out another handful of mint.
“At any moment,” he says with a wisdom born of years of working Charlottesville’s best kitchens, “a customer may pop their head through this curtain and say, ‘Hey, what’s good tonight?’”