Month: June 2016

Categories
Living

The Fitzroy makes its debut with dinner menu and late-night drinks

Owners Richard Ridge and Kelley Tripp (above) overhauled the former Blue Light Grill space into The Fitzroy, complete with an exposed brick wall, black-and-white subway tile behind the bar and dark-stained wood shelving. Photo: Ézé Amos

Richard Ridge and Kelley Tripp wanted to create a gathering place on the Downtown Mall, a restaurant and bar where folks can become regulars. Given that the doors have only officially been open since last week, it’s hard to say if everybody knows your name yet at the new space, but it’s certainly already drawing a crowd.

Introducing The Fitzroy, the newest place to grab dinner and a drink on the Downtown Mall. Located at 120 E. Main St. in the old Blue Light Grill spot, The Fitzroy has big shoes to fill. Blue Light was a downtown staple for 15 years, serving up classic seafood dishes and swanky cocktails in a sleek, preppy atmosphere. Ownership quietly changed hands in April of last year, and in November, Blue Light served its final meal before Ridge, Tripp and their other business partners, Ryan Rooney and Kevin Badke, began overhauling the space and menu.

Six months later, it is rebranded and almost entirely unrecognizable, with an exposed brick wall, black-and-white subway-style tile with a capital letter F behind the newly built bar, dark-stained wood shelving and a lot more seating. (Jeannette Andamasaris at JAID Style conceptualized the overall vision of the space.) During its grand opening last Tuesday evening, guests packed into the seats around the bar, the high-top tables, the cozy tufted booths and the banquette seats lining the brick wall (all of which were designed and built by Hector Zamora of Zamora General Contracting). Outdoor seating is limited for now, but Ridge says the full patio will open within the next few weeks.

“A lot of the changes we made were aesthetic, but we also made some more operational changes,” Ridge says. “We wanted to create more room for people, and it was great to see folks fill those spaces. You get a different feel depending on which part of the restaurant you’re sitting in.”

The menu is more reminiscent of down-home comfort food, but, as promised to the loyal seafood-loving Blue Light crowd, guests can still indulge in a giant platter of raw oysters on the half shell with horseradish, and cocktail and mignonette sauces. For those who prefer their shellfish cooked, consider the oysters Rockefeller (roasted with spinach, sausage, bacon, absinthe and Parmesan cheese) or oysters larroquette (roasted with andouille sausage and lemon-rosemary butter).

As for the inspiration behind the menu, Ridge says it’s all about options.

“With the format we have, you can really make it customizable, and people have appreciated that,” he says. “We’ve seen people build different meals based on certain dietary needs, whether they like to share or not, or how hungry they are.”

Sandwiches include The Fitzroy burger made with dry-aged Seven Hills beef that’s ground in-house every day, a fried shrimp po’ boy with remoulade, buttermilk-battered fried chicken with lemon cayenne aioli and an all-things-local club with chicken, ham, bacon and avocado. Items like a thick-cut pork chop, short rib stroganoff and house meatloaf make up the entrée section, plus there’s a daily fish (halibut, for the time being) with caramelized lemon and herbs. The cauliflower “steak” is the only vegetarian-friendly main dish, but the giant slice of a cauliflower head served with a beurre blanc made from Bold Rock cider, tarragon and Parmesan is surprisingly hefty and flavorful, so non-meat-eaters may be perfectly content ordering that every time.

The entrées come without sides, which is where the mixing and matching comes in. Pair anything with a bowl of clam chowder, order a full-sized kale Caesar salad with shrimp or chicken for the table to share or choose from the list of eight available sides. The mac-and-cheese features cavatappi pasta with a silky-smooth sharp cheddar cheese sauce, broiled to create a light crust on top. Hand-cut French fries are available as a side, as are duck-fat potatoes, fried to crispy perfection and served lightly seasoned in a small cast iron skillet. There’s also a list of appetizers that includes barbecue shrimp, French onion dip and dry-rubbed wings, a twist on the classic buffalo served with Crystal hot sauce and house ranch.

“It’s been great to see people interact with the menu and make their own dining experience,” Ridge says.

The Fitzroy is serving dinner seven days a week, with late-night hours every day (closing at midnight Sunday through Tuesday and 2am Friday and Saturday).

“We really want to have this balance where we feel like a nice restaurant but also transition into a great place to get a drink late-night,” Ridge says, adding that they plan to start serving lunch and weekend brunch once they’ve got their bearings on dinner and late-night.

This article was updated at 5:12pm June 9 to name the designers on the project.

Categories
Arts

Film review: X-Men: Apocalypse has too many heroes, loses cred

X-Men: Apocalypse, starring Jennifer Lawrence, finds Fox studios losing territory in the superhero franchise market. Photo: 20th Century Fox

When Marvel first sold the film rights to its biggest properties —Spider-Man, X-Men, Fantastic Four—it was not yet aware of the gold mine that awaited it with The Avengers series. And at first, Sony and Fox were doing interesting things with their acquisitions; the first two Spider-Man movies by Sam Raimi are industry-defining milestones for both comic films and action films in general, and Bryan Singer’s X-Men and X2 proved that team-driven, caped-hero flicks could work visually, emotionally and financially. And with Fantastic Four…well, they tried.

Now 18 years after the release of Blade—arguably the risky move that started us down this path—we’re seeing weekly caped hero vs. caped hero megabudget extravaganzas featuring battles of cataclysmic scale. Where a film like X-Men: Apocalypse would once have been a dream come true for fans of the first entries in this series, what we end up with is less of a galloping epic and more like returning-director Singer limply checking off a series of demands from Fox studios heads as they attempt to play catch-up with Marvel, even though the former company had an enormous head start.

Here’s the plot: Apocalypse—played by the normally engaging Oscar Isaac in makeup indistinguishable from an evil wizard at a Renaissance faire—was the first mutant who aspires for godhood in ancient Egypt. He goes to sleep for a while. He wakes up. He still wants godhood, so everyone fights about it. Many thousands die, except for good guys with names you remember. Wolverine shows up in the middle, kills a bunch of anonymous soldiers, says nothing, leaves. One paragraph just saved you 140 minutes of your life.

Paradoxically, as the titles of these comic book behemoths get more and more dire—Dawn of Justice, Civil War, now just straight-up Apocalypse—fewer characters of consequence seem to be dying permanent deaths: Phoenix and Stryker in X2, darn near everyone in X-Men: The Last Stand. Evidently, Fox’s strategy for emulating Marvel’s success is to focus on building a shared universe full of characters with name recognition. The thing they neglected, however, is that Marvel takes the time to make good individual movies in between the world-destroying epics because, ultimately, the name recognition matters less than the quality of the product.

The worst part about X-Men: Apocalypse isn’t its failure as a film. It’s that it corners its own fanbase into questioning whether the first two entries were even good enough to merit this sort of grandeur to begin with. Sure, they introduced the balance of camp and gravitas that can be found in much of Marvel’s output, but bending the tone of the original franchise past its breaking point for little reason beyond reminding the world that this franchise still belongs to them is doing nobody any favors.

Bottom line, X-Men: Apocalypse doesn’t look good. It’s not fun. It barely makes sense. Yet inevitably, there will be further entries with even larger battles with even lower stakes. It took three successive failures for Sony to give up on its once-great Spider-Man franchise, allowing Marvel to use the character to terrific effect in Civil War. We can only pray that Fox does the same, pulling the plug on this once-interesting now-lifeless franchise.

X-Men: Apocalypse PG-13, 140 minutes
Violet Crown Cinema, Regal Stonefield 14 and IMAX

Playing this week

Regal Stonefield 14 and IMAX

The Shops at Stonefield, 244-3213

Alice Through the Looking Glass

The Angry Birds Movie

Captain America: Civil War

The Jungle Book

Love & Friendship

Money Monster

Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising

The Nice Guys

Violet Crown Cinema

200 W. Main St., Downtown Mall, 529-3000

Alice Through the Looking Glass

The Angry Birds Movie

A Bigger Splash

Captain America: Civil War

The Jungle Book

Love & Friendship

Money Monster

Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising

The Nice Guys

Tokyo Story

Categories
News

Rural Internet-ification: Jane Dittmar wants to connect the 5th District

Jane Dittmar has specific goals in mind, spurring her run for Congress, and broadband access is at the top of the list because it’s hard to generate jobs without it. Photo by Eze Amos

In the 1930s, electricity was common in the cities, but pretty much nonexistent elsewhere. If not for the Rural Electrification Act, some of us might still be sitting in the dark. It’s the same situation today for many in rural areas without Internet access.

Jane Dittmar became aware of how dire the situation is in Albemarle County when running for the Scottsville seat on the Board of Supervisors in 2013. “People in the rural area don’t have Internet or have spotty Internet or only DSL, which is slow,” she says. “Their children can’t do their homework.”

She has seen families driving to Panera so their kids can do their school work. Or they park around area libraries to use them as hot spots. “If you’re scraping by and want to apply for a job at Walmart, you can’t do it on paper,” she says.

Rural citizens without the net can’t use telemedicine. Veterans can’t check their benefits. And for a jobs-strapped district like the 5th, “No consultant will ever say, ‘Locate here,’ without Internet access,” she says—a couple of days before the Washington Post reported new U.S. Census data that shows new businesses are dramatically less likely to start up in small towns or rural communities than in the past.

“This is critical infrastructure,” she says. “We’re leaving families behind.”

And that is why Dittmar is running for Congress. During the two years she was chair of the Board of Supervisors, she says she tried to score the grants needed to help wire the countryside—and learned it’s an issue that requires federal and state efforts. “I wasn’t able to do that,” she says. “I need to have access to our Congress to do that.”

She points to low-populated, vast land-massed South Dakota, which has done an “amazing” job using grants from all those fees that are paid in phone bills to provide Internet for its citizens.

“The private sector can’t just do it out of the goodness of its heart,” she says. That’s why, as with rural electrification, if the public sector puts in the Internet infrastructure, the private sector can take over, she says.

Dittmar, 60, says running for Congress wasn’t on her bucket list. “I really want to see us connected and I wasn’t able to get that done on a local level.”

She’s already gotten some heat from checking the wrong boxes on federal financial forms that put her net worth at more than $250 million. “I was a $50 million homeowner for a day,” she laughs. She refiled the forms with the House of Representatives clerk’s office and says she was told it was a frequently made error.

“This is my first rodeo,” she says. Despite critics calling the error a lack of attention to detail that doesn’t bode well for reading the bills that come before Congress, she says it wasn’t as if she were trying to hide a $50 million condo as a $50,000 property. “That would have been a little more uncomfortable explaining.”

She also thinks her background as a mediator, business owner and former president of the Charlottesville Area Chamber of Commerce will serve her well as she faces Republican state Senator Tom Garrett. “Most of my career has been bringing people together,” she says. “I have an economic development background. He does not. I’ve made payroll and launched regional economic partnerships. These things are emblematic of a candidate who knows what she’s doing.”

Still, it’s an uphill battle in the 5th District, which stretches from the North Carolina border to almost Maryland and which has elected Republican Robert Hurt for the past three terms since Dem Tom Perriello lasted one term in 2008.

Dittmar describes the district as five separate regions: the counties that consider themselves Northern Virginia, Charlottesville, Lynchburg, “which doesn’t identify with Charlottesville,” five counties around Farmville and Southside. “That’s one of the terrible grievances I have with gerrymandering,” she says. While Charlottesville may say the environment is the biggest issue, in Southside jobs are “No. 1, 2 and 3,” she adds.

There is one thing that unifies the district, she says: “We all have a digital deficit.”

Related Links:

Sept. 22, 2015: See Jane run

May 5, 2015: Dittmar won’t seek reelection to BOS, endorses Randolph

Categories
Arts

Kyle Dunnigan brings cast of characters to the Southern

Kyle Dunnigan’s comedy pedigree includes an Emmy-nominated song and a long list of zany stand-up characters. Photo: Publicity photo

Craig Pullin, Deputy Trudy Wiegel’s bespectacled, slack-jawed boyfriend in the cult comedy “Reno 911!,” isn’t who fans thought he was.

Pullin, played by comedian Kyle Dunnigan, is a serial-killing mastermind hiding behind a clueless veneer in both the Comedy Central half-hour sitcom and the feature film Reno 911!: Miami. But Dunnigan, who’ll perform at The Southern Café and Music Hall on June 7, set out to create a character who’s just straight up clueless.

And indeed, Pullin lives on to this day on the actor’s YouTube page, not as the Truckee River Killer, but as a dimwit who lives with his mother, plays the violin (poorly), cuts his own hair (poorly) and generally acts a fool (very well).

“I saw him in a different way,” Dunnigan says. “In my mind it is more of an innocent character. I tend to do stupid characters that don’t know they’re stupid.”

The crowd at the Southern will likely get a chance to see for themselves. Dunnigan, who’s also known for his work as a writer and actor on “Inside Amy Schumer,” “Cedric the Entertainer Presents” and Howie Mandel’s “Howie Do It,” says he likes to intersperse his stand-up with character sketches, music, crowd work and impersonations (e.g. Donald Trump, Perez Hilton, Caitlyn Jenner).

In addition to seeing Pullin, Charlottesville’s comedy fans might glimpse Dunnigan as Carl, a bucktoothed, mullet-sporting redneck who gets into all kinds of trouble, typically while trying to do something nice for his overweight girlfriend. Or maybe they’ll see Del, a charming octogenarian enjoying every minute of his tranquil senility.

Dunnigan says he’s been developing characters such as Craig, Carl and Del since he was a kid. His work with sketch groups over the years has only helped him flesh out those characters, each of whom is taken from “pieces of people” he’s come across in his daily life.

But, whatever the source material, most of them share a thread.

“I guess it’s a running theme, I just never really thought of it,” Dunnigan says. “[The characters] feel no shame or embarrassment. I often feel shame and embarrassment.”

Take, for example, Dunnigan’s dating history. He went out with Sarah Silverman from 2011 to 2013 and is more recently coming off a fling with colleague and collaborator Amy Schumer. You might say it’s not a bad track record for a guy who’s known for playing dweeby dumbasses, but Dunnigan would probably prefer you not.

“I mean, that makes it sound like I’m some kind of hunk, but I just like funny women,” he says. “I have definitely dated above my station in life.”

Dunnigan also seems to have a knack for congenial breakups. He says he and Silverman are working on a project now—“I love her,” he says—and he’s still gainfully employed at “Inside Amy Schumer,” which recently completed its fourth season on the comedy network that seems to pay most of Dunnigan’s bills.

The latter employment will be contingent on Schumer’s schedule next year, Dunnigan admits: “It’s supposed to go for another season, but you never know. Amy is just so busy.”

Dunnigan says Schumer’s own meteoric rise in the comedy universe is due to her hard work and being the right kind of comedienne at the right time.

“She’s really funny, obviously, and she has tapped into a group of people that didn’t really have a voice,” he says. “She’s also good on social media—she doesn’t really have a weak spot.”

Dunnigan, himself a Jack-of-all-comedic-trades, could only hope other comedians would say the same about him. In addition to his television successes, he’s dabbled in promotional videos, script writing and podcasts, hosting “Professor Blastoff” on the Earwolf podcasting network with Tig Notaro and David Huntsberger from 2011 to 2015. He won an Emmy for “Girl, You Don’t Need Make Up,” a song he penned for “Inside Amy Schumer.” And he’s currently developing a new show for Comedy Central set in a superhero academy where he plays a professor whose superhuman abilities Google has rendered obsolete.

Then there’s the stand-up. Dunnigan’s been featured in Comedy Central half-hour specials, appeared on “Late Night with Conan O’Brien,” “Jimmy Kimmel Live!,” “Late Night with Seth Meyers,” “The Tonight Show with Jay Leno” and “The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson.” He’s also performed at dozens of comedy festivals, and although live performances are only a small part of his job description these days, Dunnigan says they’re still critical.

“It’s a great job,” he says. “The only thing about it I don’t like is traveling. You do everything by yourself. If I was in a band it would be a lot more fun. But I’ve had other jobs, and this a great one.”

Related Links: “Inside Amy Schumer: Skip Therapy”

Categories
Arts

ARTS Pick: Pops at The Paramount

The “Suite for Downton Abbey” is just one of the epic theme songs that will soar to the rafters during Pops at The Paramount on Saturday. Photo: Wikimedia commons

Experience the splendor of well-loved hits from film, theater and television with Pops at The Paramount, performed by the Charlottesville Symphony at the University of Virginia. The program, directed by Kate Tamarkin, includes John Lunn’s “Suite for Downton Abbey,” selections from John Williams’ score for Star Wars: The Force Awakens and Arnold Schoenberg’s “I Dreamed a Dream” from Les Miserables. Piano soloist and audience favorite Jeremy Thompson will perform George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue.”

Saturday 6/4. $25-95, 7:30pm. The Paramount Theater, 215 Main St., Downtown Mall. 979-1333.