Coca-Cola building on Preston welcomes first tenant
Timbercreek Market wants to help you put supper on the table.
Sara and Zach Miller had a clear goal when they established Timbercreek Organic Farm in 2007: Grow good food for the people of Charlottesville and Albemarle County.
Walk through the door of the Millers’ new venture, Timbercreek Market, in the Coca-Cola building on Preston Avenue, and you’ll find everything you need to create an entire meal from scratch: charcuterie, cheeses, seasonal produce, raw meats, milk, eggs, fresh breads and tarts, beer, wine, even condiments and seasonings.
Most of the goods for sale are sourced from local farms and artisans, such as Local Food Hub, Albemarle Baking Company, Flora Artisanal Cheese and the Millers’ own Timber-creek Organic Farm. If it’s not local, it is at least made with sustainable practices.
If cooking isn’t your thing, Timbercreek Market will prepare supper for you. Each meal-to-go contains a cooked main dish and sides, plus instructions for proper re-heating, plating and serving.
The market also offers café sandwiches, like ham and cheese, veggie muffaletta and a steak and cheese, all priced around $10, and a children’s menu with items priced around $5. Its signature item, though, is steak on a plate—any cut of meat from the case, grilled to order, any time of day.
All items are take-away, but there is plenty of bistro-style seating indoors, plus small tables and umbrella-covered picnic tables on the patio.
Through partnerships with local restaurants like Citizen Burger Bar and Brookville, the Millers built a large wholesale business around their meats. Seeing the Timbercreek name on menus around town is very rewarding, “but we wanted to work with the household customer in a more direct way,” says Sara. “For the beef, we spend two years raising that animal, and for us to not see it all the way through to the plate ourselves has been a struggle.”
Now, with the market, she enjoys watching home cooks stock their kitchens with ingredients grown or made just a few miles away. She likes seeing, from farm to fork, what people will be having for supper, and Zach agrees that the face-to-face contact helps build relationships with customers.
“You’ve seen us in the market and talked to us,” says Zach. “It’s the best kind of account-ability, because you know that the food we put in front of you here is the same food we put in front of our own families.”
Food fest in Orange
Charlottesville foodies, mark your calendars and gas up your cars: On Saturday, August 8, the fourth annual edibleFEST takes place in downtown Orange from 10am to 5pm. Dubbing itself “the most delicious day of summer,” the event features demos by some of Central Virginia’s most accomplished chefs and has drawn thousands from around the region. This year, the big names include Craig Hartman of Barbeque Exchange; Curtis Shaver of Hamiltons’, Tucker Yoder of the pop-up restaurant Eljogaha, Dwayne Edwards of Fossett’s, the Ivy Inn’s Angelo Vangelopoulos and many more.
New this year is the DIY tent, where guests can listen to experts on sustainable living topics including beer brewing, kombucha, foraging for mushrooms and cheese- and vinegar-making. And then there’s the actual eating, of course. More than 30 food vendors will ply their wares, and live music and kids activities round out the event. Entry is $7, free for kids 12 and under. For full details, check ediblefest.com.
—Erin O’Hare and Courteney Stuart