By Matt Dhillon
Fans of the Basan food truck may be experiencing an empty feeling in Charlottesville’s parking lots and on its blacktops. One of the city’s most beloved dining experiences, marked by a fire-breathing rooster logo, is no more.
But every night resolves into morning, and for Basan proprietors and chefs Kelsey Naylor and Anna Gardner, tomorrow has come. Now, they wake up to a new and challenging project—running Umma’s, their brick-and-mortar Japanese and Korean restaurant.
The two chefs prepare everything from scratch. “We’re too stubborn to cut any corners,” Naylor says. So there are things to pickle, things to chop, things to order. Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday are for prep, the rest of the week is service. There’s a menu to build, workflows to develop, ingredients to source—primarily from Kelsey’s mom Jen’s Sussex Farm and a few other local growers. In between, they might have time for sleep.
For the food truck, “from scratch” meant making noodles, fermenting miso, and preparing the sauces as needed; now it means several days of cooking, fermenting, and gathering ingredients in order to bring that same homemade quality to every dish at Umma’s. “If we can’t make something the right way, we’re just not going to make it,” says Naylor.
That work ethic reflects the influence of Jen, “Mamabird,” Naylor, and is just one of the ways she is honored at the restaurant. The name Umma’s, which means “mom’s” in Korean, is in recognition of her, the mothers before her, and their collective influence on the food being made there.
“She’s the most stubborn woman I’ve ever met in my life,” says Naylor of Jen. “Everything from how she treats her chickens and all of her livestock, to her plants and her farming—everything is an unwillingness to be lazy, and that taking a corner is seen as laziness and that’s absolutely not acceptable.”
And then there’s Sussex Farm. All of the kimchi is made there, and the 22-acre farm has hundreds of birds (chickens, quail, ducks, turkeys, and guineas), a multitude of fruit trees, and an abundance of produce. In that way, the food is essentially Virginian at the same time that it is Korean or Japanese.
Such high-quality source ingredients allow dazzling combinations on Umma’s menu. Traditional cuisine like banchan, bulgogi, and yaki udon are tantalizing, and some of the less familiar plates—like barbecue eel next to a hot dog, beef tongue wrapped in sesame leaves, fried wood ear, or fried bone marrow—excite curiosity. The Big Mac Bokkeum-bap combines an icon of American pop culture with the traditional rice stir-fry in a hot stone bowl.
Naylor and Gardner have been cooking professionally for about a decade each, including a period in Japan at a local izakaya (an informal, Japanese bar), where they learned to develop their own approach to traditional ways of cooking.
“Perfect authenticity is not possible,” Naylor says. “You can be authentic in the way that you’re trying to share and show a culture, but if you’re trying to say that the food tastes exactly the way that it would taste in Japan or Korea, it’s not going to and it never will.”
Naylor and Gardner instead set out to make food that is authentic to themselves, their own experience, and their taste. The important thing, they say, is to work with what is local and make something connected to where you are.
And this works in reverse too. The Umma’s founders say they became fascinated with how Japanese and Korean cooks repurpose American ingredients, and reimagine dishes toward their own palate. “It was a new way to look at these things that, at times, we’ve been forced to cook to the point of boredom and see as new again,” says Gardner.
Naylor and Gardner’s experience and understanding of the elements of traditional cooking—why ingredients work the way they do in those dishes—gives them the insight and confidence to play in the kitchen.
The creativity behind Umma’s frequent menu changes is largely dependent on the agricultural season. It’s a motivator for the two chefs who say they are excited to work in some ramps from West Virginia, pickled squash flowers from Sussex Farm, and a new, whole sardine banchan.
“I think that there are two types of cooks in the world, if I’m generalizing,” Gardner says. “One type wants to make something that has been made for thousands of years and draws almost a meditative enjoyment out of fine tuning and finding the most perfect version of that thing, and then the second type is more interested in making something new.”
Amid all of this preparation, production, and culinary innovation, when Umma’s founders need to eat their own dinner, the two chefs, who spend their day crafting new ideas on the plate, find sustenance in a quick bowl of rice with butter and soy sauce.
Nightcaps & highballs
They say every great bulgogi sandwich needs a Matcha Mule—well, Jessica Catalano does. As Umma’s bar and front-of-house manager, Catalano has created a rotating cocktail program that pairs with the restaurant’s inventive dishes to elevate the dining experience. Here are three of her recommendations.
Yuzu Chuhai
Chuhai is the slang name for a “shoCHU HIGHball,” considered Japan’s national drink. They are made from shochu—a clear, Japanese distilled spirit (ours is distilled from barley, but shochu can be distilled from rice, sweet potatoes, buckwheat, and more)—club soda, and a splash of whatever you want to flavor it. We always have an ume (salty pickled plum), lime, and yuzu (tart citrus that tastes like a grapefruit and orange cross) chuhai on the menu, as well as sometimes a rotating special that uses fresh fruit from Mamabird’s farm. The yuzu chuhai is my favorite, paired with an order of karaage or KFC wings.
Lychee Spritz
Made with Giffard Lichi-Li liqueur and sparkling umeshu (Japanese plum liqueur), as well as a drop or two of house yuzu bitters. I had sitting on the patio and drinking with friends in mind when I designed this drink, and that’s exactly how I would recommend consuming it—in the sun, with good conversation, and a handful of our shared dishes. Try a set of banchan or one of our chilled salad options.
Matcha Mule
Soju, a slightly sweet Korean distilled liquor made from grains and rice, is infused with ceremonial-grade matcha, and mixed with fresh-squeezed lime, simple syrup, and topped with Gosling’s ginger beer. This delicious, easy-drinker is a popular late-night hit, so I would say roll in after 10pm and have one or two as your nightcap, paired with an order of our nori fries and bulgogi sandwich. And if you’re drinking one and your friend beats you at Mario Kart while you’re here, it’s the perfect excuse for losing. You would’ve won if you weren’t drinking.