Month: May 2009

The first time Michael McElrath met his fiancée Crystal Stevens, he forgot her name. “He never was good with names,” says Crystal. But in September he’ll make up for the memory lapse by giving her his own. Michael was a year ahead of Crystal at UVA and involved in the IMPACT Movement, a national organization that promotes African-American leadership and spirituality on college campuses. Crystal introduced herself because she was interested in joining the organization. Through mutual friends, visits to Main Street’s First Baptist Church where Crystal’s uncle Dr. Bruce Beard was pastor, and a shared faith, Crystal and Michael’s purely platonic bond grew stronger. For two years they were best friends, like brother and sister, until Michael began developing romantic feelings. When he confessed his feelings to Crystal in February 2005, her first reaction was confused: “You treat me like a little sister.” But it turned out the big brother qualities she loved in him translated well into a new relationship. “He had an old-fashioned Southern upbringing,” Crystal says. He was the kind of guy who would walk her home after dark. He was chivalrous, sincere, and sweetly attentive. “You could tell he was hanging onto my every word,” says his fiancée.

Michael and Crystal discussed getting married and even looked at rings together, but Michael still wanted to preserve some spontaneity for their engagement. “I said, ‘You pick five rings and I’ll make the final pick so it will be a surprise.’ But by the look on her face, one ring really had her heart.” He aligned the big moment with his birthday dinner last October, in the midst of Crystal’s hectic law school schedule at Emory in Atlanta (she’s an MTS/JD ’10 candidate). Characteristically for Michael, he might have gone overboard with the planning, arranging an advance manicure for his girlfriend (“Because everyone would be looking at her hands,” reasoned Michael. “What’s wrong with my nails?” Crystal thought at the time), and selecting her favorite dress for their dinner at an upscale restaurant. But he’d forgotten to plan one key element of the engagement: How would he propose?

Michael relives the crucial moment at dinner. “It’s racing through my mind how I’m going to get her this ring. I excused myself to the bathroom, pulled one of the waiters aside, and told him to present the ring on a plate, kind of dress it up.” Michael returned to the table and was surprised by a different waiter approaching him with a complimentary birthday dessert. Crystal had also pulled some strings with the waitstaff. When Michael’s accomplice arrived with a second dessert, Crystal thought she was getting crème brulée. When Michael took the ring and got down on one knee, she began laughing, as Michael had bet friends she would, and “assaulting [him] with her dinner napkin,” which was not expected. “We received some odd stares from surrounding dinner patrons,” Michael remembers. Crystal said yes, of course, and fulfilled Michael’s birthday wish: “The only thing I wanted for my birthday was for her to be with me forever.”

If you’re an early bird to the Saturday City Market (a 7am-er), you’ve probably been indulging in a little treat that few of your late riser friends probably even know about—free samples of seasonal, locally-sourced dishes courtesy of chef and L’étoile restaurant owner Mark Gresge. That’s right. Free. This is the third year Gresge has set up his own stand at the market to give shoppers a taste of what’s possible with the local bounty plus a recipe for trying the dish at home. A couple of weeks ago, it was Dixie cups of chilled English pea soup that earned rave reviews; Gresge ran out of all five gallons he’d made by 10:30am. This past week he distributed greens from Roundabout Farm braised with bacon he’d cured and smoked himself served over Bird Mill Grits from Ashland.

Gresge admits there’s a bit of self-promotion in his freebies, but when he tells us he also just wants to share his knowledge “with people who wouldn’t know what to do with fresh spinach,” we believe he’s sincere. After all, Gresge has been showcasing local products at L’étoile for more than 10 years—that’s well before “Buy Local” became a popular bumper sticker. And even now, he doesn’t reference this or that farm on his menu as a way of touting his commitment to local and seasonal ingredients from the likes of Polyface and Planet Earth Diversified, because it’s just a given that he would use the freshest and best ingredients available. “Any good restaurant does that,” he says.

This year, Gresge is also co-hosting a radio program from his City Market stand with radio personality Joe Thomas of WCHV 1260 AM. If you see Gresge walking around with white chef coat and mic, let him and all the listeners out there know how much you love local strawberries and those Bagelini things.

Tavola to open; Ventana to expand

The latest word from Michael Keaveny is that Tavola, the restaurant he will open in the old Crush space in Belmont, will have a mid-June debut. The latest word from Michael Fitzgerald is that Ventana, his tiny “Modern Mexican” small plate and fancy drink pad in the alley on Fifth Street SE, will take over the space next door vacated by Migration: A Gallery earlier this year. With the assistance of architect Michael Stoneking, who owns the building, Fitzgerald plans to knock out the wall between the two spaces, expand the kitchen and create a full dining room and lounge. In addition to tripling the number of seats and gaining the capacity for full-scale dinners and private parties, Ventana is also getting street frontage on Water Street where Fitzgerald plans to create open air seating. Local chef Sebastian Jack will take over as executive chef when the newly expanded Ventana opens “by August 25,” says Fitzgerald.

The larger space will accommodate an expanded menu of small plates, salads, appetizers and entrées as well as a Thursday-Saturday fixed “degustation” menu. Fitzgerald says prices likely will be in the range of $8-12 for small plates and $15-25 for larger dishes, with a few feature items listed at $30-plus.

Fitzgerald tells us Ventana likely will close around mid-July while the contractors make two spaces into one. Though he admits this is an interesting time to be making such a major expansion, the availability of an adjacent space was something he just couldn’t pass up. “Would this opportunity come up in a good economy?” he asks.

If last Sunday’s auction at the former Gravity Lounge venue was the final spring cleaning of the year, then this week rang in the glut of summertime, a belt-buckling binge after so much purging. Don’t fill up on rolls, people, until you get the rock from these two new albums.

Heavens! Hurry for Devon!

First, a new batch of ditties from one of our favorite local pretties. If Keep Your Silver Shined was Devon Sproule’s “getting married” album, then Don’t Hurry for Heaven, recently released on iTunes, surveys the emotional landscape of Sproule’s old Virginia block from as nearby as Belmont Park and as far away as Far East, the studio where she and husband Paul Curreri recorded some initial tracks for the 10-song album.

And thanks to a distribution deal with Now Forward Music, Don’t Hurry for Heaven may cover just as much ground. In November, Now Forward signed a two-year distro and marketing deal with City Salvage Records, the label founded by Brooklyn art-country musician Andy Friedman, who was also Curreri’s college roommate. During a January interview with Feedback, Friedman said that Now Forward’s Kindred Rhythm imprint, distributed by Koch Entertainment, would place albums by some City Salvage artists in music retailers like Best Buy for the first time.

“I almost felt like Steve Martin in Three Amigos, when he gets shot with a real bullet and he comes back to Chevy [Chase] and Martin [Short], saying, ‘It’s real!’” joked Friedman at the time.

Don’t Hurry for Heaven bears little resemblance to Silver: Sproule still spreads her lyrics around like a tasteful interior decorator with a pocket full of tchotchkes, but she arranges ’em with a softer vocal touch on tracks like “Bowling Green” and the recent live staple “Ain’t That the Way.” Gone are the rough edges of Sproule’s guitar, rounded by reverb. And Heaven was produced by Curreri, who seems to’ve hit an emotional and aural stride of sorts on his missus’ material.

Is it shinier than Silver? Feedback is going to sit on that question for a week or so; keep listening for more.

Brock me, Amadeus!

No, it’s not a typo; things aren’t always what they seem, readers. Take singing drummers, for example—they’re not all as harmless as Don Henley, you know. And Adam Brock sure as sheeeit ain’t no Eagle.

A longtime member of The Nice Jenkins and part of the current, superlative incarnation of The Invisible Hand, Brock is one of Feedback’s favorite local kit killers. So Feedback was thrilled to grab a copy of a six-song EP from Brock’s solo project, a band and album dubbed “Borrowed Beams of Light.” Stay tuned to the Feedback blog for more on the album.