Hanu Truck serves hungry customers at the Tom Tom Founders Festival. Photo: Darren Sweeney.
Seems like more food trucks are rolling into Charlottesville every month—and the city is playing catch-up with its regulations as a result. C-VILLE writer Darren Sweeney has a rundown of some of the newest purveyors of meals on wheels, along with details on where to find them on the street and online.
Got a favorite truck in town? Tell us in the comments.
Hanu Truck
Owner: Patrick Kim
Menu: Korean-style tacos, taco sandwiches, quesadillas and sliders served on a steamed bun. Options include tofu, short rib, spicy pork, chicken, and pork belly.
Locations: Hanu Truck can usually be found around noon on Wednesdays at the Charlottesville/Albemarle Health Department at 1138 Rose Hill Drive. Kim also parks outside Champion Brewing about 6pm Wednesday through Saturday.
Menu: Beef, chicken and crab cake sliders, as well as weekly Southern-style specials. Sides include soups and fries served with a special celery salt and chipotle lime sauce.
Locations: Mouth Wide Open can be found for lunch at the corner of Water and 1st streets or at Rivanna Station on U.S. 29 North. The food truck also sets up outside Champion Brewing on most Friday and Saturday evenings.
Menu: Burgers, wraps and cheesesteaks, as well as french fries and onion rings.
The Lunchbox duo now has a brick-and-mortar home at 1221 E. Market St., but they still roll out the truck for special events or festivals throughout town.
For a quiche, the crust needs to be dense to hold the savory custard-based filling. Meynig only uses flour, salt, butter, and ice water, a trick she has learned that makes the crust crispier and overall tastier. Photo: Elli Williams
To the untrained eye, the quiche is a seemingly simple dish that requires very little skill and few ingredients. It consists, after all, of only two elements: crust and filling. But think again.
This French-inspired staple of American cuisine is subtle and sophisticated, varied and complex. If you ask Lynette Meynig, she’ll tell you that the secret to a great quiche is the crust.
“It’s like working with clay,” she said, and just like clay, knowing how to handle it is a major advantage.
Meynig knows a thing or two about crusts, pies, and quiches. The owner of Family Ties & Pies, she bakes dozens of sweet and savory pies to sell at the City Market every Saturday. During times of high demand, the number increases to hundreds. She can make a perfectly buttery crust in her sleep.
When I met her in the kitchen of her family home for a quiche-making lesson, I could tell she was in her element. Without taking her eyes off the bowl of unbleached flour that sat on the counter, she grabbed and added an incredible amount of cold butter to the mix. The butter is cut into small pieces for easier amalgamation.
In the Meynig household, Wednesday has been renamed “crust day” during market season, when Lynette needs to make a few dozen to sell on Saturday mornings at the City Market. Photo: Elli Williams
“The crust is the most fattening part, but I use only quality butter,” she said. I suspect she’s caught sight of my deer-in-the-headlights look. As someone who never cooks with butter, seeing two whole sticks disappear in a cloud of flour was a new experience for me. But I should have known. Quiche is a classic French dish and, contrary to my olive oil-loving native cuisine, butter is amply used —and certainly preferred. (Legendary Mastering the Art of French Cooking author and chef Julia Child reportedly used 753 pounds of it while filming her TV series, “Baking With Julia.”)
“I have five or six pie crust recipes. It depends on the pie,” Meynig said. For a quiche, the crust needs to be dense to hold the savory custard-based filling. Meynig only uses flour, salt, butter, and ice water, a trick she learned that makes the crust crispier and overall tastier.
“You add water until it feels right,” she said, looking into the bowl of the food processor where the ingredients have been tossed and turned for a couple of minutes. “My hands are my best friend and measuring tool.”
After the dough is formed, Meynig works it with her hands until it is more uniform (but not too uniform, for fear of ending up with a heavy and chewy crust) and ready for the shaping machine—a contraption that takes a ball of dough and squeezes it into a perfectly formed terrine in one movement. It’s quite a sight.
Once the dough is in place in the tin-foiled cake dish, it goes directly into the refrigerator to rest for at least one hour. Meynig admits that making the crust is the most tedious and involved process. In fact, during market season—April to November —Wednesday has been officially renamed “crust day” in the her household.
Next up is the filling. The beauty of a quiche is that you can actually fill it with anything you want. The original Quiche Lorraine, made famous by Child, was a meat lovers’ favorite: bacon or lardons intertwined in a thick custard.
Today, however, veggie quiches are just as popular. The trick is to sauté the vegetables until they are melted together, or in the case of bell peppers, until the crunch is gone. For our class, Meynig cut up and cooked bell peppers and onions. She later added fresh spinach and sun dried tomatoes.
And now, the fun part—the construction. Take the crust dough out of the fridge, prickle it with a fork so it doesn’t bubble, and add a layer of cheese. Meynig uses Gruyere because of its subdued and unique flavor, but Swiss, American, and provolone are also commonly used. The cheese helps unify the ingredients and acts as a sort of fortifier for the custard.
There are a few methods and philosophies when it comes to custard, but Meynig has a simple and delicious option: eggs and half and half. Well blended, the mixture is added to the pan, covering the veggies until it almost spills out.
A popular alternative is sour cream, and the result, in flavor and texture, is much different.
In a commercial convection oven like Meynig’s, the quiche is ready in 25 minutes. Somehow, that still seems like a long wait.
Each week, C-VILLE’s Green Scene page takes a look at local environmental news. The section’s bulletin board has information on local green events and keeps you up to date on statewide happenings. Got an event or a tip you’d like to see here and in the paper? Write us at news@c-ville.com.
Good eats guide: The Piedmont Environmental Council’s 2013 Buy Fresh, Buy Local guides are hitting mailboxes now, with information on more than 170 farms, orchards, farmers’ markets, wineries, breweries, restaurants and more in Charlottesville, Albemarle, Fluvanna, Greene, Louisa, and Nelson—all offering locally produced agricultural products.
Get out: Outdoor Charlottesville—the recently re-named, re-focused Outdoor Adventure Social Club—is hosting a launch party from 6-8pm Thursday, May 2 at Mono Loco to recruit members and celebrate what’s new: more trips, and a much lower monthly membership fee (just $9). Snack on free appetizers and enter for a chance to win a Blue Ridge Mountain Sports shopping spree.
Take a hike: The Piedmont Group Sierra Club invites you to join a four-mile hike this weekend in Albemarle County’s newest park near Crozet. Meet at Panera Bread in the Barracks Road Shopping Center at 10am on Saturday, May 4 to carpool, or join the group at the trailhead at 11am at 6610 Blackwells Hollow Road, Crozet.
The Virginia Quarterly Review completed a total overhaul today with the announcement of W. Ralph Eubanks as editor. The hire leaves the prestigious literary magazine with a full leadership team for the first time since the highly publicized suicide of its managing editor, Kevin Morrissey, in July 2010.
“It is an honor because of the publication’s storied 88-year history, having published many of my personal literary heroes, like Eudora Welty, John Berryman, and D.H. Lawrence,” Eubanks said of the job. “It is a challenge because I will be editing a general interest magazine in the digital age.”
Eubanks, who will be the magazine’s first African-American editor, is currently the director of publishing at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., where he has served since 1995. He will begin at VQR June 3, in time to oversee the magazine’s fall 2013 issue.
“Ralph has a deep understanding of how writers practice their craft,” said William R. Ferris, former chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities. “He also knows how to shape the work of a writer. In his capacity as both an editor and an author, Ralph has witnessed the evolving landscape of book and magazine publishing.”
During a phone interview Wednesday, Eubanks said he intended to expand VQR’s content in the areas of book reviews and literary criticism, to publish photo essays in both print and digital formats, and to build on the magazine’s legacy in longform journalism and narrative nonfiction, particularly with respect to environmental issues. He also outlined his plans for organizing the magazine into departments to create predictable expectations for readers and to offer more short-form entry points in the magazine.
“Magazines like the VQR are really carefully curated content,” Eubanks said. “That’s what the readers expect. They expect something that’s editorially sound, that’s stimulating, and that someone has put a great deal of thought into how it’s presented to the reader. That’s really what I bring to the magazine both in print and online.”
Jon Parrish Peede was named VQR’s first publisher in October 2011, arriving from his position as Director of Literature Grants for the National Endowment for the Arts to take over business and administrative duties. He joined editor Ted Genoways, who edited the winter and spring issues of 2012. Since that time, longtime contributor and interim editor Donovan Webster and Deputy Editor Paul Reyes have shared editorial duties with Peede and guest editors.
Genoways was placed on administrative leave briefly in 2010 due to allegations of workplace misbehavior in the months preceding Morrissey’s suicide. He was cleared of wrongdoing by UVA after an internal investigation and subsequently resigned in May 2012 after nine years in charge of the magazine. In July 2012, Kevin Morrissey’s brother, Douglas Morrissey, filed a wrongful death suit in Richmond circuit court naming Genoways and former UVA President John Casteen and alleging, among other things, that “as a direct and proximate result of the intentional infliction of emotional distress caused by Genoways, Morrissey died.”
Locally, the fallout from Morrissey’s suicide and the inquiry that followed cast a pall over VQR, but the magazine has continued to publish Pulitzer Prize-winning authors and photographers and collect prestigious national and international awards.
Over the past decade, VQR has won more National Magazine Awards than any other literary quarterly in the country, and in 2010 it was named to Utne Reader’s 10 best magazines of the new century. In 2012, Maisie Crow’s video “Half-Lives,” a documentary produced for the VQR website that tells the stories of survivors of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, received the Overseas Press Club Award for Best Use of Online Video. The magazine’s spring issue, which focused on changes in the publishing landscape in the digital age, got props from New York Times media guru David Carr via Twitter: “Just got this spring issue of Virginia quarterly review. The issue, on the business of literature, is spectacular.”
At the time of Morrissey’s suicide, VQR was dealing with a significant administrative transition as it moved from the President’s office, where it had been nurtured by former President John Casteen, to the office of the Vice President for Research and Innovation, headed by Tom Skalak. The transition coincided with the arrival of President Teresa Sullivan and, after Morrissey’s death, Sullivan instigated a review of the magazine’s financial administration and personnel policies.
Under Genoways, VQR had turned heavily towards long-form journalism focused on international issue cuts on politics, the environment, and war, and its total expenses grew from $347,243 in FY2003-04 to $795,670 in FY2009-10. During that period, its total income also increased significantly from magazine sales, endowed funds, and University support. After the review, Peede was hired to manage the magazine’s business matters, to expand its reach, to increase donations and secure grants, and to oversee personnel matters.
Under Peede’s leadership, VQR has continued its focus on international affairs reporting but presented a wider range of thematic subjects and landed big name fiction writers more regularly, like 2009 Pulitzer Prize winner Elizabeth Strout, whose story “Snow Blind” ran in the latest issue.
In hiring Eubanks, Peede, who got his M.A. at the University of Mississippi in Oxford, completes the remake of an editorial team that’s distinctly flavored by influences from his connections to Mississippi and Washington, D.C. Reyes, former senior editor of The Oxford American and a staff member at Harper’s, joined the magazine in 2012. Eubanks, who grew up in Mount Olive, Mississippi, during the Civil Rights struggle, is the author of the well-received memoir, Ever Is a Long Time: A Journey Into Mississippi’s Dark Past.
“I’m very much shaped by being an African-American from a small town in Mississippi who grew up there during the Civil Rights movement,” Eubanks said. “That’s shaped who I am, it’s shaped what I’ve written, and it’s had an impact on a lot of the books I’ve done for the Library…making sure that those voices from history that at one time were not part of the historical conversation were present there. And that’s something that I plan to bring to the VQR. I don’t think it’s necessarily an African-American vision, I think it’s an American vision.”
Web Editor Jane Friedman, a former publisher of Writer’s Digest, was hired last year to lead the redevelopment of VQR’s website, which will roll out later this year. Both Friedman and Assistant Editor Allison Wright, who joined the team this year, teach in the media studies department in the UVA’s College of Arts & Sciences.
At The Library of Congress, Eubanks managed the publication of more than 80 nonfiction books on American history, photography, maps, and film in collaboration with leading trade publishers. Eubanks said photography would be “a very important part of the magazine,” and said he would draw from his experience managing the recent publication of nine Farm Security Administration photography books in the Library of Congress’ “Fields of Vision” series, which were published with introductions from contemporary authors such as Nicholas Lemann, George Packer, Francine Prose and Annie Proulx.
“Ralph Eubanks is a gifted editor, acclaimed author, and respected publishing industry leader,” Peede said. “We are fortunate to hire a seasoned editor with such enthusiasm for new technologies as well as a steadfast commitment to literature and exceptional journalism. Having come from the highest level of book culture, Ralph is devoted to creating works of permanence.”
VQR has print subscribers in 50 states, 24 countries, and six continents and is funded by close to $4 million in UVA-managed endowment and investment funds.
Brooklyn’s Roosevelt Dime tour the nightclub and farm store circuit with a quirky collection of instruments and a clapping, stomping, soul-filled music show. Photo by Kate Reeder.
Roosevelt Dime is a sonic steamboat ride from the neo-folk filled streets of Brooklyn to the rollicking Big Easy, with banjo, electric, and washtub basses, trumpet, and woodwind beats. The jovial assemblage comes to make merry—and will take no sitting down. Not as sticky sweet as the name The Honey Dewdrops suggests, Virginia-based musical couple Laura Wortman and Kagey Parrish temper lovely harmonies (and the bill) with the painful longing and loss that comprises the human experience, using the language of traditional Americana and rootsy folk.
Friday 5/3 $10-12, 8pm. The Southern Café & Music Hall,103 S. First St. 977-5590.
Bicycle and Pedestrian Coordinator Amanda Poncy was shocked when she received double the amount she requested for her budget this year. The money will allow her to collaborate with Park and Trail Planner Chris Gensic to connect trails and urban passageways to create a city-wide corridor that’s easy and safe to access.
“We really just want to provide multiple ways for people to get into the city,” Poncy said. “It’s about understanding where people ride, and building facilities to accommodate them.”
Bicycle and Pedestrian Coordinator Amanda Poncy and Park and Trail Planner Chris Gensic are joining forces to make the city’s trail system more cohesive for cyclists and walkers. Photo: Christian Hommel.
Poncy’s agenda includes adding buffers and bike lanes to Rose Hill Drive, connecting Monticello Avenue to the county trail system under 64, improving intersections to make left-hand turns safer for bicyclists, and putting corrals and fix-it stations in key destinations like the Downtown Mall, City Market, and shopping centers.
That’s music to the ears of local commuters Caroline Laco and Anne Dunckel.
Laco, 30, has been biking about 10 miles round trip almost every day for the past three years. Her daily commute goes through McIntire Park, past Charlottesville High School, and down Rose HIll Drive. The lack of bike lanes on Rose Hill and poorly maintained clutter along the Meadowcreek Parkway make cycling to work a challenge, she said, but Poncy’s upcoming improvements—including the new intersection at 250—should give her a straight shot to work and shave several miles off her daily ride.
“The biking community feels like the city has put us as a greater priority now,” said Laco. “It’s like they’re saying ‘We know you exist, and we’ll take your safety more seriously.’”
With Charlottesville occupying less than 11 square miles, many bikers say that getting from point A to point B is often easier on two wheels, especially in terms of traffic and parking. But crossing the city on a bicycle can be impractical, Gensic said, because the setting constantly changes from urban to residential to parkland.
“We’re going to have to have a mix of off-street and on-street [trails] to get you any distance over about a mile through the city because you change environments every three or four blocks,” Gensic said.
A graduate student at UVA, Dunckel doesn’t own a car. She said biking is her first choice for transportation, otherwise she’ll walk.
“It seems like anywhere you need to go is within three miles,” Dunckel said. “I feel like I get to most places just as quickly or quicker than I would in a car.”
Getting from her home on Barracks Road to Grounds is normally pretty easy, she said. But riding her bike down Main Street to get to the Downtown Mall makes her nervous.
“From Starr Hill to [Blue Moon] Diner, the bike lane is pretty much a door lane,” she said. “I’ll usually take the lane of the road and not risk getting doored by people who aren’t paying attention. People don’t really look for cyclists all that much in Charlottesville.”
West Main Street is an area of concern for Poncy, and she said she hopes cyclists and pedestrians will speak up while the city conducts a streetscape plan for the corridor.
“That is something that’s going to be considered as part of that effort, and I encourage anyone with an interest in biking or walking along West Main to participate in that process,” Poncy said. “They can really influence the design of how bike facilities are on that corridor.”
Options to make the corridor safer could involve widening the roads, removing street parking, or realigning the bike lanes to the other side of the parked cars. Making these changes is a community process, she said, which can be both a blessing and a curse.
“Ultimately when a project comes to be and is ready, the public has to weigh in and get a chance to share their concerns,” she said. “Some neighbors might feel very attached to parking, so having competing interests and a very limited right-of-way can be challenging.”
Poncy approached City Council with a list of immediate and future projects, and requested $100,000 in funding. Council allotted $200,000 for the projects, and unanimously agreed that Charlottesville’s bikeability and walkability are a top priority.
City Councilor Kathy Galvin, a landscape architect who bikes to work and often goes weeks without getting in her car, said it just makes sense for the city to prioritize the biking and walking demographics. Cycling fits the bill from an economic and health standpoint, she said, but it also addresses one of the area’s major economic issues. If residents have easier access to biking and walking, living without a car—and saving the thousands of annual dollars spent on maintenance, fuel, and insurance—is a more practical option.
“We’re known for our expensive housing costs, but if a car will cost about $10,000 a year to maintain, it starts becoming competitive to live in a city with high housing costs but minimal transportation costs,” Galvin said.
According to AAA’s annual report on driving costs, driving a medium-sized sedan costs roughly 61 cents per mile—about $9,000 for every 15,000 miles. Vehicle miles traveled have fallen about 9 percent since 2005, and biking is up 24 percent in the young adult demographic (ages 16-30).
“This suggests to me, as someone who’s in urban design and is a policy maker, that there’s a growing mode shift in terms of what people are using to get around,” Galvin said. “It’s a university town, and it makes a lot of sense to me that we would begin to understand what the demographic wants and needs.”
Gensic’s budget for maintaining and improving the city’s walking trails is $100,000 this year, and he said he’s excited to work alongside Poncy to make Charlottesville’s urban and trail systems more cohesive, bridging the gap between recreational and transportation biking with safe intersections that connect park trails, greenways, sidewalks, and bike lanes. That’s good news for cyclists with knobby tires.
“I can only put a trail in the woods for so long before I’m going to hit a street,” Gensic said. “A trail in the woods is fun to ride circles on, but if you can’t get to work, school, or Downtown, it’s not really a transportation link.”
Sussex County’s annual Shad Planking, once a must-attend event for Virginia pols on either side of the aisle, has drifted far to the right. Photo: Roll Call
When it comes to political partisanship, Virginia is a case study in voter schizophrenia. While trending increasingly Democratic during presidential years (and having failed to elect a Republican to the U.S. Senate since 2002), it nevertheless has a solidly conservative governor, a stridently right-wing attorney general, and a Republican-dominated House of Delegates that is among the most extreme in the nation.
And yet, despite the widening partisan divide between NoVa and RoVa (that’s pointy-headed politico speak for “Rest of Virginia,” in case you were wondering), our glorious Commonwealth has still managed to maintain a modicum of inter-party comity, even as other divided states (cough-Wisconsin-cough) have collapsed into bitterness and non-stop partisan bickering.
Without a doubt, one of the most visible displays of cross-party commingling in recent decades has been the Shad Planking, an annual gathering held in the woods of Sussex County and sponsored by the Wakefield Ruritan Club. A politics-and-smoked-fish festival that traces its roots all the way back to the 1930’s, Shad Planking came into its own alongside Virginia’s legendary U.S. senator (and onetime governor) Harry Byrd, who used it as an operational base for his fearsome Democratic machine.
While the planking has always been dominated by conservative white males (legend has it that then-State Senator Doug Wilder became the first black man to attend when he showed up in 1977, the same year that Washington Post reporter Megan Rosenfeld broke the festival’s gender barrier), it slowly evolved into a must-attend event for political candidates of every stripe.
In fact, at this point in the previous gubernatorial cycle, the long dirt road leading to the event was awash in thousands of signs for competing Democratic and Republican candidates (to be fair, they were mostly for Terry McAuliffe and Bob McDonnell, who took the traditional “sign wars” to a truly ludicrous extreme).
This year’s event, however, marked the second year in a row where not a single Democrat running for statewide office showed up. What’s more, the tenor of the event was noticeably more right wing than in years past, featuring a confederate flag-bedecked Sons of Confederate Veterans booth, hundreds of equally offensive confederate flag stickers worn by the nearly all-white, all-male attendees, and a festival-capping speech by Tea Party hero Cuccinelli.
Unfortunately for the Wakefield Ruritans, the festival’s gradual rightward drift has translated into much smaller crowds, which has a direct and obvious effect on the fundraising haul that is earmarked for Wakefield’s volunteer fire department and rescue squad, among other things. As Shad Planking chairman Robert Bain lamented to Hampton Roads’ Daily Press, “it’s always been a lighthearted atmosphere. It’s a place where people of all party affiliations come and exchange ideas without having to be in your face about it.”
It’s a nice sentiment, Mr. Bain. But sadly, given the current political atmosphere, it seems more likely that we’ll witness the electoral resurgence of the Whig party before such bipartisan bonhomie is seen in Virginia again.
Try New Belgium’s Dig at Brixx. The Nelson Sauvin hops have a gooseberry flavor with hints of white wine grapes. Photo: Elli Williams
Humulus lupus, the species best known to us as hops, produces effects in beer that we traditionally associate with bitterness. Hops also produce aromas and flavors that are usually associated with earthiness, grassiness, floral characteristics, and a bit of weedy dankness. In the past couple of years, a progressive sect of hop growers has been cross-breeding hops and creating new varieties that produce a whole host of flavors that are not traditionally associated with hops.
Hops are used in beer brewing to add flavor, aroma, and bitterness, and are also known for their stabilizing and preservative effects. The bitterness that hops provide to beer is sourced from the alpha acids that hops contain. These alpha acids are turned into bittering compounds known as iso-acids as a result of adding hops to boiling wort. Wort is how we refer to the unfermented sweet liquid that will become beer. The earlier in the boil hops are added, the more bitterness they will contribute. The later in the boil the hops are added, the more they will contribute to the aroma and flavor of the beer.
Pale ales and their IPA big brothers have been popular offerings from American craft brewers since the early 1990s and are still the most popular today. The hophead craze from a few years ago has dwindled, and customers and brewers alike are more interested in complexity of flavors in lieu of tongue-splitting bitterness for novelty’s sake. This search for new flavors has set the stage for new hop varieties. The primary sources for these hops include Australia, New Zealand, and proprietary growers in the U.S. Pacific Northwest.
The leading trend with “feature hops,” so named for the distinctive features they provide to beer, is to grow hops that lend distinct fruit flavors that aren’t normally associated with pale ales. Classic hops such as Cascade and Centennial are known for their grapefruit characteristics, but these new varieties have such descriptors as blueberry, peach, gooseberry, boysenberry, and Sauvignon Blanc. Much like anything that strikes hot within craft beer, these hops are highly sought after and very hard to come by. This is also due to the fact that they are generally proprietary, restricted to the growers that own the brand.
At Champion Brewing, we’ve enjoyed working with a few of these varieties, such as Australian Galaxy, and a blend of hops made by HopUnion called Falconer’s Flight. Falconer’s Flight is a blend of three such popular hops: Simcoe, Citra, and Sorachi Ace. Check out the following new hops and some locally available beers in which they’re featured.
Galaxy: This is an Australian hop known to lend aromas of peach and passion fruit. Can be found in Champion Brewing Company’s Ghidorah Belgian Tripel and Devils Backbone’s Tasmanian IPA on tap at our respective breweries.
Mosaic: An American variety known for heavy citrus, stone fruit, and also slight onion/garlic characteristics. Featured in Terrapin Beer Company’s Mosaic Single Hopped Red Rye Ale, available at Beer Run.
Sorachi Ace: This proprietary variety has lemon and dill flavors, and can be found in Brooklyn Brewery’s Sorachi Ace and the DuClaw X-5 Sorachi Ace IPA, both available at Beer Run and not to be missed.
Nelson Sauvin: A male hop grown in New Zealand, it lends gooseberry flavors and a distinct white wine grape characteristic. It can be found in a number of beers, including New Belgium’s Dig, currently on tap at Brixx: Wood Fired Pizza.
Motueka: This hop is one I’m very excited to work with in the summer months, as it produces lemon, lime, and tropical fruit flavors. It was included in Blue Mountain Brewery’s Red Zeppelin, which went quickly and is sure to return.
Hunter Smith is the president and head brewer at Champion Brewing Company and the manager at Afton Mountain Vineyards.
