For a small Southern town, Charlottesville’s looking mighty international these days. Locals can taste chicken souvlaki, examine a Panamanian carving, sip Indian tea, and watch a weaver repair a Persian rug—all within a couple of blocks of the east end of the Downtown Mall. In fact, the area is growing into an enclave of internationally themed businesses that arguably lend it a different atmosphere than the Mall’s western arm. As Scottie B. (born Scott Williams), who is a partner in Garden of Sheba, an African diaspora-themed restaurant soon to open, puts it, “Once you pass the fountain there’s a whole other culture going on.”
Take, for instance, the Twisted Branch Tea Bazaar, universally called “the teahouse” by devotees. Whereas on the Mall’s west end, the favored places to sit and sip are coffee-centric, the teahouse flavors the east end with rooibos tea and plates of pistachios and dried mango. Ed Luce says that when he and Matteus Frankovich opened the teahouse on the second floor of 414 E. Main St. last fall, the east end of the Mall seemed like the best fit. “It made more sense to us to put the teahouse here,” he says, “because it’s tranquil, it’s serene, and that would get lost and consumed on the west end.”
As it evolves and new businesses settle in, the feeling on the east end can escape definition. Geographically, the cultures represented there are far-flung, from the Middle East (the falafel bar at Bashir’s Taverna, for example) to the Caribbean (jerked fish at the Garden of Sheba). Trying to corral these places under labels like “Third World” or “non-Western” misses the mark. There are too many cultural and economic factors involved to fit one tag.
Yet there’s no mistaking the evidence on a busy summer night. Walk past the Second Street crossover on the Mall’s west end, and likely you’ll notice movie marquees, the smell of pizza and menus filled with Euro-continental or American cuisine. Meanwhile, up on the east end the trees seem a bit shadier, the crowds a bit mellower. Storefronts glow softly with the patterns of tribal textiles. “There is something exotic, something ethnic on this side of the mall,” says restaurateur Bashir Khelafa of the eponymous Taverna.
Luce likes to call the Mall’s east end “the front of the bus,” an apt description, it turns out, as the City undertakes a major development project in the area of the Amphitheater, namely, a $6.5 million bus transfer center. If Luce is right regarding the private enterprise on the east end, then that “bus” is headed for a diverse and sophisticated future, and a group of passionate businesspeople are at the wheel. Both Saul Barodofsky, owner of Sun Bow Trading Company, and Frankovich at the teahouse use the phrase “missionary work” to stress the educational aspects of their businesses.
“It’s our passion,” says Frankovich of the surprisingly large body of knowledge surrounding tea. “The depth of tea is here if you scratch the surface. If you come in a peaceful time we can talk to you about brewing techniques and so on.”
Frankovich and Luce say travel is what inspired them to open Twisted Branch. Frankovich recalls “billowing, tapestry-filled restaurants” on Egypt’s Sinai peninsula with “palm tree dividers and low cushion seating. You can spend the whole day there swimming off the back porch drinking tea.
“I wanted to share that with our people here,” he says, “because it just created such a pleasant state of being in me to while away the day in these types of atmospheres.”
Barodofsky, too, built a business out of his experiences abroad. “I set up the business based on a certain number of criteria of what I wanted from a business. Travel was right on that list,” he says. Since the 1960s he’s made nearly 100 trips to the Middle East—Turkey, Pakistan and Chinese Turkistan, among many other countries—to buy carpets, kilims and other textiles.
He sees his shop on the corner of E. Main and Fourth streets as an educational venue as much as a business. “Sun Bow is an art project to introduce tribal rugs and women’s textile art,” he declares.
Indeed, Barodofsky lectures at Washington D.C.’s Textile Museum and at rug conferences around the country. Perhaps more importantly, in the shop itself, Barodofsky and his employees offer cups of tea and the knowledge gathered during years of travel—making Sun Bow truly a place to learn (buying is, of course, welcome).
“I was having my car serviced and I heard the mechanic having this discussion with someone about the value of tribal rugs versus non-tribal rugs,” Barodofsky recalls. “I realized he had come through our world and was giving it out with a lot of enthusiasm.”
Sun Bow and Mead’s Oriental Rugs have been exposing Charlottesvillians to Middle Eastern and Asian artifacts for decades—Mead’s since 1974 and Sun Bow since 1977. As Americans generally have become more knowledgeable about world cultures and immigration has increased, Charlottesville has seen its international offerings multiply. “Our level of diversification is beginning to accelerate a little bit,” says Joe Mead, who owns Mead’s Oriental Rugs. One need only try to get a seat in the teahouse on a Friday night to recognize the widespread appeal of Eastern cultures for Western consumers.
And the growth continues. The mall’s east end is about to gain another pair of cultural missionaries when Scottie B. and Abba Watts open the Garden of Sheba later this summer. The two say their place at 609 E. Market St. will serve up entertainment and food—vegetarian and fish dishes from Africa and the African diaspora—but, just as importantly, awareness. “What we find really special about the space is that you can throw a stone to the old slave block,” says Scottie, referring to a site on the southeast corner of Court Square, which bears a small slate marker. “We’ve been chosen to help people wake up and realize there was a slave market right there.”
Scottie—who has been studying African music since 1990—and Watts want to present African and African-roots cultures in a family setting. The space will be smoke-free and the entertainment will include kid-friendly events like storytellings. “We’re just trying to promote as many positive things in the culture as possible,” says Scottie. “Africa is a very rich, wealthy, healthy continent.”
The idea for the restaurant grew from the pair’s experience in producing local music and cultural events (recently putting together a month of concerts and dances in the storefront on Water Street now occupied by make-up boutique Blush), as well as from travel in Africa, the Caribbean and Latin America. The first time he visited Africa, Scottie says, was a revelation: “I began to realize that Africa is bigger than what I was shown as a kid—Tarzan, people starving in the street, people living like savages. I cried for a whole day because I had been misled.”
Watts, too, says travel has changed his perspective. “It’s one thing to be poor in a rich country,” he says. “It’s something totally different to be poor in a poor country.” During his studies of Caribbean cooking in Jamaica and other Caribbean countries, he remembers, “We would have to go and harvest food before we ate it—climbing trees for breadfruit, digging up casava. We don’t take any of this for granted.”
The question of authenticity can’t be avoided when non-Western cultures—particularly those with poor economies—are being sold to American consumers. “I think it’s important to hear about a culture from someone from that culture,” says Watts. “Not only just living there” is vital, he adds, “but having the experience of the world looking at you as if you’re from that culture.” When cultural transactions meld with commerce, the attitudes of clients and business owners alike can cheapen or enrich the exchange.
For example, since 1997, Bashir and Katherine Khelafa, whose backgrounds are Algerian and Hungarian, respectively, have served a wide variety of cuisines—Greek, Italian, Moroccan, Tunisian, Algerian, Spanish—under the general heading “Mediterranean.” In their new location next to the post office (previously they operated from the ground floor space below what is now the tea house), they’d like to expand even further, especially into Hungarian dishes. But they say it’s important to stick with cultures into which they have genuine insight. Says Bashir, “We’ll never go beyond the ones we know.”
Across the street, Frankovich and Luce say they struggle with the responsibility of presenting cultures—Japanese, Indian, Chinese, Middle Eastern—they weren’t born into. Asked if there’s any danger of exploitation in their venture, Luce says “There definitely is. It’s a fine line that we walk in here, probably.”
Frankovich agrees. “This place does turn into a cool nightclub scene at times,” he says. “I have struggles with the missionary work as opposed to just ‘Here’s your tea.’”
Like many business owners on the Mall’s east end, Simon Harvey has traveled extensively, if in markedly posher conditions. He says the idea for Read & Co., the shop just a few doors down from the Tea Bazaar that he and his wife Lisa run, was born of his experience captaining yachts for wealthy employers. “I would help not just on the yacht, but with their land-based houses,” he says. “I would go out and buy artifacts, arts, décor, to help them furnish their houses and their yachts. I was buying into the tens of thousands of dollars.” Having kept up his worldwide contacts in the art and antiquities markets after coming ashore, he says it was a logical move to open an import business.
The resulting shop, opened in 2001, has a definite air of colonial times gone by. Inlaid wooden furniture from India sits next to Australian aboriginal didgeridoos and British rugby balls. Harvey takes a rosy view of the multicultural pastiche he’s created. “We’ve had a lot of customers say ‘When we come in here it’s like stepping into another world,’” he says. “There are so many cultures put together in here. Everyone likes to be romantic.”
Holding a small wooden carving made by residents of the Panamanian rainforest, he says, “They’re very primitive and it’s un-commercial. A kid could probably do it. But they’ve got the soul in it.”
Harvey estimates his customer base is 70 percent tourists, but also “professional people: doctors, lawyers. They’re the people that travel, and read and watch TV about the stuff they have.”
Mead finds a similar demographic among the clientele at his Fourth Street shop: “very refined, artistic individuals who’ve already been through the first and second stages of fine object appreciation.” Business owners may be loathe to use the word “wealthy,” but the fact is that much of the merchandise offered on the Mall’s east end is not aimed at a budget-minded crowd. For example, a relatively elaborate Panamanian carving at Read & Co. is priced at $800, and textiles at Sun Bow can cost hundreds if not thousands of dollars.
By contrast, the restaurants are affordable outposts in a Downtown market that is steadily moving to higher tiers. Dinner at Bashir’s Taverna could come in at under $10 per person, for instance, and the teahouse experience has rapidly become a community center for young artsy types as well as families with children. “In other cultures, the teahouse is historically a meeting place,” says Frankovich. “It’s not niche-based, it’s not clique-based. It’s where everyone from grandmas to babies come to hang out.”
Garden of Sheba promises to be another democratic venue. Watts says, based on the response to cultural events he and Scottie have produced in the past, he believes there’s a need in Charlottesville for the kind of meeting space the restaurant will provide. “It’s kind of like an underground movement,” he says. “There are people out there that want to see it go on.”
If the Mall’s east end hosts a higher concentration of non-European, internationally themed businesses, many people see it as pure coincidence. Katherine Khelafa says the neighborhood resists umbrella categorizations like “Eastern” or “Third World,” pointing out nearby restaurants like C&O, a French-Southern standard-bearer, and The Nook, Downtown’s answer to the lunch counter. Her husband worries that “Third World” has inaccurate, negative connotations. Simon Harvey points out that Willow 88, which sells Chinese furniture and Asian and aboriginal art, is situated on the Mall’s west end. All of the business owners interviewed for this article cited practical considerations—rent, storage, wall space—as the key factors in choosing their locations, rather than larger Downtown trends.
Yet some also say that, by luck or design, the area has a more sophisticated, quieter feel then the other end of the Mall. “It seems to have a little bit more of a soul,” says Mead. “I’m next door to Sandy McAdams, the sage of Charlottesville [and owner of Daedalus Books]. I share the same building with a Chinese restaurant [Peking].”
Gregg Davis, a Charlottesville police officer who patrols Downtown on a bicycle, says the majority of situations needing his attention occur on the west end. “It’s just slow on the [the east] end,” he says. “It seems like if you want to be seen you’ll be on the west end.”
However, newer, more youthful factors are beginning to change the face of the east end. Nearby Belmont is fast becoming a hotspot of gentrification and is a quick walk away from the teahouse and other east end attractions.
Last fall, the Khelafas moved Bashir’s to a new location in a City-owned building at the mall’s extreme eastern end. Most business owners agree that when the building emerged from renovation and new shops moved in, the east end was given new vitality.
Carol Troxell, owner of New Dominion Book Shop, prefers to think of the mall as a whole, rather than comparing one half to another. Still, she agrees that the new shops have “added new interest in that block, definitely, which is good.”
And most also happily anticipate further City-fostered expansion of the area. The Khelafas are staking something on that idea. With the completion of the transfer station, Bashir says, the Mall’s center of gravity—and its heaviest traffic—may shift eastward.
“It will be much more dynamic, much more interesting,” he says. “This is the future of the Mall.”