Author: erinohare

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Living

Grit opens fourth location; Snowing in Space coming to West Main

Grit Coffee opened its fourth location last week at The Shops at Stonefield. Photo by Eze Amos

Snowing in Space Coffee Co., a local nitro coffee business that’s been serving up thick, creamy, Guinness-like (but not alcoholic) nitro coffee on tap at several locations around town, will soon take over the old C’Ville-ian Brewing Co. space at 705 W. Main St.

Snowing in Space co-owner Paul Dierkes says he signed the lease only recently, and plans to open a coffee concept on West Main—where there isn’t really another shop dedicated to just coffee—in early 2017.

Currently, Snowing in Space coffee—in flavors such as the nutty Gimme-Dat, the blueberry Lil Blue and the peppermint, green tea and coffee blend Ninjabrain—can be found at Paradox Pastry, Keevil & Keevil and The Local, and in some hip local offices like WillowTree Apps.

Dierkes is particularly excited about the collaboration opportunities the new location affords. Snowing in Space has worked on special brews with Trager Brothers Coffee and Lamplighter Coffee Roasters in Richmond, and they’ve also collaborated with Virginia Distillery Co.

Another jolt

Grit Coffee Bar and Café opened its fourth location last week at The Shops at Stonefield. Baristas at the newest Grit will sling the same locally roasted coffee and espresso drinks as the other three locations, but they’ll have a few special-to-Stonefield options, such as nitro cold-brew coffee and, by early 2017, beer, wine and cocktails. Grit co-founder Brandon Wooten says the Stonefield Grit has a “10-tap draft system that will include a rotating selection of harder-to-find craft beers, ciders and wines.” The cocktail menu isn’t finalized yet, but Wooten says it will be focused on “unique drinks perfect for enjoying before or after dinner.” Customers can expect a few classic cocktails, but most of the drinks will be “built around bitter notes meant to give a subtle nod to coffee” and pair well with a new rotating dessert menu. Some cocktails will have an espresso or cold-brew coffee base, and others will utilize liqueurs and potable bitters.

But it’s not all drinks and dessert: Grit will offer build-your-own breakfast sandwiches, Cuban sandwiches, empanadas, savory small plates and grab-and-go options as well.

The Alley Light welcomes new chef

Brian Jones, who’s perhaps best known around Charlottesville as Petit Pois’ opening chef, has left his most recent post at Fifth Street Station’s Timberwood Tap House for a new gig: He’ll be cooking at The Alley Light.

At The Alley Light, Jones will help co-owner and executive chef Robin McDaniel cook the extensive Alley Light menu and contribute dishes to the specials board.

McDaniel and her husband, Alley Light co-owner and general manager Chris Dunbar, previously worked with Jones at both Petit Pois and Fleurie, and the three are glad to be working together again. Jones is “a great presence [in the kitchen],” Dunbar says. “He’s very organized, very detail-oriented, creative.”

The decision to leave Timberwood wasn’t an easy one for Jones—he says he enjoyed getting to know the owners and the kitchen staff during his six months with the restaurant, and it was a joy to watch Timberwood open in October. But, ultimately, Jones says, kitchen management wasn’t his thing. He missed cooking. “I was ready for the challenge of managing, but my heart still wanted to be behind the range with a towel in one hand and a spoon in the other, cooking great food, using the highest quality ingredients thoughtfully prepared and executed with great technique,” he says.

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Living

Mary Michaud takes a holistic approach

Mary Michaud’s apothecary is full of Mason jars containing tinctures, flower essences and oils, all used to treat a variety of ailments. Photo by Martyn Kyle

During this year’s Belmont Bash, Mary Michaud spent hours weeding her front yard on Levy Avenue. She thought that passersby kept looking at her funny, and once she’d pulled the last weed from the ground and stood up to admire her work, she saw why: She had left all of the dandelions behind.

“My neighbors probably think I’m crazy,” she says, laughing. But Michaud is an herbalist, and dandelions are medicinal. Dandelion leaves, eaten plain or consumed in salads or tea, are an appetite stimulant that can help an upset stomach; dandelion roots can help improve liver and gallbladder function.

It’s the kind of thing Michaud keeps stocked in her apothecary, one of the many plant-based treatments she keeps on hand for clients who seek her help in soothing all kinds of ailments.

Michaud’s practice, Be Herbal, operates under the umbrella of Ayurveda, one of the world’s oldest medicine systems that originated in India more than 3,000 years ago. “Ayurveda is, literally, ‘the science of life,’” Michaud says; the system’s main principle is vata, which governs movement in the mind and body—blood flow, breathing, digestion, etc. It’s all about energy.

“The term ‘energy’ tends to turn people off because they think you’re talking New Age,” Michaud says. “But when I talk about energetics in the body, I’m talking about blood flow, lymphatic flow, metabolism…processing membranes and fluids coursing through the body. I’m talking about quantum mechanics, really.”

Michaud—a trained clinical herbalist and Reiki master—also holds a master’s of science in nursing from the University of California, San Francisco, among other degrees and certifications. She worked in an immunology clinic in Boston and was a family nurse practitioner in the San Francisco area (where she treated some 1960s rock stars but says she can’t share names) and in Charlottesville for years, practicing, diagnosing and prescribing. She still holds the FNP certification.

Michaud loved clinical work, but she says that with Western medicine, which relies on allopathy (the treatment with remedies, often pharmaceuticals that have the opposite effect of a symptom), “you get to a point where there’s nothing else you can do [for a patient], and that really bothered me.”

She’d always been interested in plants, and in college she dabbled in herbal remedies after visiting the home of an herbalist who had plants hanging from her ceiling. That interest grew during her time in San Francisco, so a few years after moving to Charlottesville, she completed a three-year clinical herbalist training at Sacred Plant Traditions, in 2006. There, Michaud began to truly understand how plants—and the many vitamins and minerals they contain—can help people in ways that pharmaceuticals cannot.

Michaud says that a major difference between pharmaceutical treatments and herbal ones is that pharmaceuticals affect specific receptors in the body whereas herbal protocols aim for larger systems that “give the body a nudge to say, ‘Oh, you remember how to do this.”

Plus, herbal treatments can be tailored to an individual in a way many pharmaceuticals cannot. “Everyone is completely unique. That’s another strength of Ayurveda [and herbalism]. It acknowledges the individual’s uniqueness; two people will have the same symptom and the remedy will be different. It’s very customized, and I feel that to be much more effective,” Michaud says.

All of her clients first fill out a lengthy health history questionnaire, and during their initial 90-minute session, Michaud asks questions that give her “an idea of the energetic of their system.” Is it too fast? Too slow? Hot? Cold? How is their digestion? How is their sleep? How’s their mood?

She’s checking to see how the body’s systems work together as a whole (a person’s “constitution”), looking for a disruption or a blockage that needs to be worked over.

For example, when a woman experiences severe PMS—cramps, headaches, irritability, etc.—it’s usually because at the start of a woman’s cycle, there are extra androgens (a type of hormone) in the body, and the liver can have trouble regulating those androgen levels. A bitter herb tea, made specifically with that woman’s constitution in mind, can gently remind her liver how to process that hormone.    

Michaud’s apothecary cabinet is a wonder to behold: It’s full of quilted Mason jars and glass dropper bottles in many sizes and colors. There are neatly labeled flower essences (imprints of flowers on water), such as mimosa flower—take a few drops orally to help with anxiety, Michaud says—and tinctures (alcohol extracts of herbs), many of which she’s made herself. The Be Herbal kitchen cabinets have enormous glass jars full of thing like gravel root (also known as Joe-Pye weed), peppermint leaf, St. John’s wort, holy basil rama, chamomile, oat straw and violet leaves.

Thanks to her clinical background, Michaud knows how pharmaceuticals work in the body and how different herbs interact with them. She knows the warning signs of serious ailments likely better treated by Western medicine, and will tell a client when he needs to see a doctor for medical imaging and lab work.

“It’s been such a funny road of going through the deep, deep science and then going into the hippie California experience, doing science there, and then coming to Charlottesville and finding the plants,” Michaud says of her journey. “In Ayurveda, there’s the idea of your true nature. When I’m getting the same message from different traditions,” she says, “that’s truth.”

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Arts

American Shakespeare Center discontinues The Santaland Diaries

Chris Johnston stars as Crumpet in The American Shakespeare Center’s final run (for now) of The Santaland Diaries through December 26. Photo by Michael Bailey

Backstage at the American Shakespeare Center’s Blackfriars Playhouse in Staunton, actor Chris Johnston pulls on a red turtleneck and green velvet knickers, a green velvet smock and red-and-white-striped stockings. He ties up a pair of Converse Chuck Taylors with jingle bells on the shoelaces and dons what he calls “a perky stocking cap decorated with spangles.”

He reads a few pages of text—lines he began rehearsing months ago, while he was walking his dog or holding his newborn daughter—to get the words in his mouth. And right before he goes on stage, Johnston reminds himself to just tell the story.

The story Johnston tells this holiday season isn’t one of Shakespeare’s, but one of a cynical, out-of-work slacker actor who takes a job working as an elf named Crumpet at a New York City Macy’s department store during the holidays.

As the star and sole character of The Santaland Diaries, the elf regales his captive audience with an insider’s view of Santaland: the interactions with other elves (some were extras on daytime soap operas), the various Santas and their lecherous and drunken habits, the angry, greedy and harried parents and all of the snot-nosed, sometimes stupid and sometimes smartass children.

The Santaland Diaries, an adaptation of essayist David Sedaris’ story about working as a Christmas elf, has been a pillar of the American Shakespeare Center’s holiday season every year since 2004, but Johnston will be the last actor to play Crumpet at the ASC, at least for a while.

“The time was right to make a change,” and the reasons were many, says ASC co-founder and artistic director Jim Warren. “I’ve been saying for years that I want us to stay ahead of the curve and figure out the right time to change our holiday season programming before ticket sales took a nose dive,” he says. “And, to be perfectly transparent, being denied the rights to perform Santaland with the all-star female actor who has played dozens of male Shakespeare characters—Allison Glenzer—helped me to decide that the time was now,” Warren says.

Warren has directed more than half a dozen actors in the role of Crumpet, and “each actor brought their own personality, their own take on the character and their own bag of tricks to the rehearsal process for us to create something special and different every year,” he says.

Johnston’s take on Crumpet has been in the works for nearly two decades. He saw a dress rehearsal of Santaland when he was in high school in Utah and thought it was “hilarious. I just thought it was really, really, really great.” Then, in 2006, during his first holiday season with the ASC, Johnston started playing the pre-show music for Santaland and has done so every year since.

After being around the character for so long, Johnston says finding something that he shares with the character on the page helped him bring Crumpet to life. He identifies with Crumpet’s ability to see—and subsequently reveal—the true nature of things. When a parent whispers to Crumpet, “We’d like a traditional Santa, if you know what I mean,” Crumpet leads the family to a Santa who is decidedly not white, exposing the quiet undercurrent of racism.

It’s not easy to be alone on stage for an hour and 10 minutes, Johnston says (Andrew Goldwasser and René Thornton Jr., who played Crumpet in 2013 and 2014, respectively, agree). Actors often rely on one another for cues, establishing a rhythm not just for lines, but for knowing when a scene is going well and when it needs to pick up a little. But in Santaland, the actor’s scene partner is the audience…and every night, the audience is different.

There’s no exiting the stage after a bad scene, regrouping and coming back on to nail the next scene. And Johnston knows quite well when a joke doesn’t land—he can see their faces. The ASC’s mission is to explore the English Renaissance stage and its practices, namely Shakespeare’s staging conditions of leaving the lights on the audience and thereby including them in the world of the play, Warren explains.

But really, Johnston says, he’s only alone on stage for the first 10 minutes, as he gets to know the crowd. After that, Johnston, his audience and Crumpet are all in it together.

“It’s a good challenge as an actor, and I like that,” he says. “I don’t want to get bored, and I don’t want to get complacent.”

By the end of the play, it’s Christmas Eve, and on that night, the Macy’s customers reveal the season’s worst evils, cranked up a notch. Crumpet has had it up to here with Santaland; he’s ready to snap.

“I loved every time the show would wind down to its final stanza…and that last Santa, a Santa who’s a bit different from the rest,” former Crumpet Goldwasser says. After more than an hour of sarcasm and cynicism, “suddenly there’s this heart, and this room full of people (myself included), who had spent the last hour laughing about how annoying this time of year can be, suddenly remember why it’s also the most wonderful time of the year.”

“I love doing that and being able to see what it does to a room,” Johnston says with wistfulness in his voice, glad for the house lights that afford him a full view of the audience as he’ll tell Crumpet’s story a few more times before the lights go down on ASC’s The Santaland Diaries.

Categories
Arts

Woods Running takes off with expansive, emotional tracks

Though still in high school, the four members of Woods Running (Aaron Richards, Jake Pierce, Jacob Sommerio and Benjamin Snell) are playing regular gigs in rock venues around town. Photo by Martyn Kyle

The four members of post-rock band Woods Running are about halfway through a pot of mint tea at Twisted Branch Tea Bazaar when they catch the eye of a bearded, ponytailed man sitting at the next table.

“Hey guys! I thought that was you,” the man says with enthusiasm. “When’s your next show?”

December 9, they tell him, at The Ante Room.

“Sweet,” he replies. His own band’s show for that night got canceled, so he’ll catch their set instead. “You guys rock. Let’s play a show together soon,” he says, before turning back to his own mug of tea.

“That guy’s in a band here in town,” Jacob Sommerio, who plays guitar in Woods Running, tells me in a lowered voice, before promptly freaking out with his bandmates. For Sommerio and his bandmates—guitarist Jake Pierce, bassist Aaron Richards and drummer Benjamin Snell—there’s a huge thrill in being recognized as musicians.

One, they’ve only been writing music for a year and a half, and playing shows for even less time.

Two, all of them are in high school. Sommerio and Pierce attend Albemarle High, and Richards and Snell are part of the same homeschooling collective. They began playing music together about four years ago, at first getting together for jam sessions via their youth group at Maple Grove Christian Church.

“Normal teenagers want to go to the mall to hang out; we just want to hang out in Ben’s basement and jam,” says Richards. “[But] we’re definitely not your typical teenage garage band.”

And he’s right. Woods Running’s ambient post-rock is devoid of the punky, chunky power chords and angst-ridden lyrics that you’d expect adolescents to write. The band’s sets are entirely instrumental; no words at all. “It’s a different feeling from other music,” Sommerio says. “My grandpa is always asking, ‘What are you doing, making up all those songs? That’s not what a guitar sounds like.’”

“It’s an emotional soundtrack,” Pierce says, one that explores the landscape of sonic time and space, allowing these four musicians to discover the overall feeling of a piece as it’s written.

The band wrote its first song, “Eleanor,” in about 30 minutes, just so Snell’s older brother (who is a member of indie-folk band Rain Tree) could make a live session parody video. It’s named after a friend’s 1991 baby blue Cadillac that had driven its final mile a few days before. That first take, the bandmates say, was “terrible, awful,” but they’ve refined it into a thoughtful song that starts off with straightforward, fingerpicked guitar and swells gently into an airy, reverb-y atmosphere not unlike the sideways shoreline sunset that graces the band’s Preface EP cover.

The EP’s other tracks, “Harmony of Inhibitions,” “Father of Lights” and “Swift and Certain,” with its reverb-drenched guitar parts, simmering drum beats under shimmering cymbals and full, deep bass, are fuller and more unexpected, demonstrating a level of confident, emotionally expansive and sensitive musicianship that sounds wise beyond the band’s adolescent years.

So far, all Woods Running songs have been written accidentally. “Seriously, nothing is intentional,” at least not at first, Sommerio says. “We’ll play, feel it out, then run through it again. It’s evolving every time,” Sommerio says of the process.

The band knows it has something good to work with when its members look at each other with “What the heck did we just do?!” expressions on their faces. Once, Pierce locked himself in the bathroom to freak out about a song. Other times, the band will run screaming from the room, or jump on a bed.

Preface was created with a “let’s make some dope songs and put it out there” attitude, they say; they recorded four tracks in Snell’s parents’ basement using Logic Pro.

The band’s new material, which the guys are currently recording at the Music Resource Center (Sommerio and Snell are budding audio engineers), is more intentional. Now, each time they run through a “freak-out song,” as they say, they stop to work out each section. They’re playing with structure, paying attention to loudness and quiet. They’re exploring the heavy, the light and the sonic and emotional sound and space that exists between the two.

“We’re pushing ourselves, trying to find our niche,” Pierce says.

They all admit to getting a bit nervous before shows; they’re still learning how to feel as comfortable on stage as they do in the Snell family basement.

“There are definitely moments [during shows] where you realize it’s all coming together and this is what we wanted it to sound like,” says Pierce, who has a penchant for playing with such urgency that he’ll break a string and have to finish out the set with guitars borrowed from other bands on the bill.

Local audiences are responding well. So well, in fact, that less than a year after Woods Running debuted at Maple Grove, the band has played the Tea Bazaar twice and will open for Girl Choir and Matt Curreri & The Exfriends at The Ante Room on Friday.

Snell says the band never intended to perform for audiences, but Will Mullany, who books DIY shows for Milli Coffee Roasters, reached out, and from there, other local bands and bookers started inviting Woods Running onto bills.

When asked why they play music in the first place, the guys joke about only being able to play so much Minecraft, disliking sports, having no interest in Model UN and wanting to do something that sets them apart from their peers. But then Snell deadpans, “What else would we be doing?,” and the group smirks and nods in agreement before taking another sip of mint tea.

Categories
Living

New concept pops up at Yearbook Taco

Owner Hamooda Shami says the Yearbook Taco concept ran its course in less than a year, which is the idea behind 11 Months, a space for extended restaurant/bar pop-ups. Photo by Eze Amos

When deciding on what to do next with the Yearbook Taco space, owner Hamooda Shami dug deep into a lengthy note on his iPhone, a note full of mostly wild hospitality ideas that ends with a Peanuts cartoon where Lucy, in her winter coat, hat and mittens, says to Charlie Brown, “I feel torn between the desire to create and the desire to destroy.”

Shami feels that he played it safe in creating the Yearbook Taco concept, which, he says, with its yearbook photos of staff and customers adorning the walls, has run its course. Yearbook reached its peak about 11 months in, Shami says, when the novelty wore off.

With that in mind, Shami will open 11 Months—a space for extended restaurant/bar pop-ups—in February. Every 11 months, he’ll close the restaurant for a month to rebrand, tweak the menu and bar offerings and redecorate the space for the new theme. The general restaurant layout and staff will remain the same.

“When you make a bold, innovative move, sometimes people respond, sometimes people don’t. Either people will respond well, or this will be my most public humiliation,” Shami says, laughing optimistically. He hopes that it goes over well, both here and in Richmond—he’s signed a lease to open an 11 Months there, too. It’s not likely that the two spots would host the same concept at the same time, but he’s open to anything.

And there’s potential for community involvement, he says. If the idea is successful, he’d consider presenting five different concepts for the public to vote on, and whichever concept won would be the next 11 Months Presents theme.

Shami wouldn’t go on the record as to what the first 11 Months concept is, other than to say it’ll be “weird, but not too niche.” But he did profess his love for Morrissey more than once during our conversation.

Juicy news

This spring, The Juice Laundry will open a new location in Washington, D.C., in the Arris apartment building, part of The Yards near Nationals Park. Owners Mike and Sarah Keenan say they were approached by the building’s developer, who had traveled to Charlottesville for a wedding several months ago and happened to visit The Juice Laundry on Preston Avenue.

“We see it as a really great and exciting opportunity to bring our products and passion for healthy living to a new community—and all the UVA grads now living in D.C.,” they say. As for The Juice Laundry here in Charlottesville, nothing will change, though the growth could allow them to expand the menu to include “even more healthy, delicious options.”

Homegrown gal

Allie Hull, founder of Homegrown Virginia and an Ivy resident, will be on hand from 2-5pm Saturday, December 10, at the Crozet Artisan Depot, during the Taste Virginia reception. A variety of foods created from local farm produce, such as jams, jellies and sauces, will be ripe for sampling. Homegrown Virginia makes small-batch recipes highlighting produce picked during the peak of ripeness.

Categories
Living

Spudnuts closes after close to 50 years

Mike and Lori Fitzgerald took over Spudnuts from Lori’s father in 2005. Now the family, with son G. Michael, is closing the beloved potato donut shop after 47 years. Photo by Eze Amos

For years, Mike Fitzgerald has arrived at the Spudnut Shop at 309 Avon St. between 1 and 1:30am to get started on the day ahead. He’ll have a cup of coffee, check on the equipment and begin to make the first batch of potato flour donuts—he’ll mix the dough and let it rise, then roll it out, cut the donuts and fry them before glazing. If everything goes smoothly, it takes about three hours to make a single batch.

By the time Spudnuts opens at 6am, the first batch of donuts is ready and warm, and Mike’s wife, Lori, is at the counter, ready to nestle donuts into boxes for large orders, or to serve regulars their usual glazed donut—“the king of ’em all,” Lori says—and a cup of coffee.

The Fitzgeralds have run Spudnuts since 2005, after Lori’s father—Richard Wingfield, who opened the shop in 1969—passed away. Lori’s worked at the shop her entire life, and Mike started helping out shortly after he and Lori met, around 20 years ago. “He didn’t know how lucky he was—getting a wife and a donut shop,” Lori says, laughing.

So it was only after many, many months of careful consideration that the Fitzgeralds have decided to close their beloved Spudnuts at the end of December.

“Sometimes you feel like it’s time to do something else,” Lori says. “If you’ve been in a business [for this long], to carry on something that you take great care of is a lot of work. It keeps you awake for many hours.”

The couple says closing was a difficult decision to make, particularly because the business is doing well and they don’t feel overrun by other donut shops that have opened in town over the past few years. A while ago, they cut back Spudnuts’ hours, just to see how it went, how it felt.

Eventually, closing seemed like the right thing to do. Mike had wanted to spend more time with his father after closing the shop, but his father passed away last August.

The Fitzgeralds have thought a lot about what they’ll do next, and while they don’t have any definite plans (except for adopting a more regular sleep schedule), one thing is certain: The business is not for sale at this time.   

“It’s as much a loss for us as it is for Charlottesville,” Lori says. The Fitzgeralds’ son, G. Michael, grew up at Spudnuts—Lori remembers him sitting in a high chair, eating his lunch with regulars and bouncing between the tables in his walker, a coconut donut in hand. G. Michael, now a senior in high school, began working the register and making change when he was a kid and says he loved sitting on a ladder in the back room to get a bird’s-eye view of donut-making every morning before school.

“We’ve had more fun than heartache,” Lori says. Every morning, a group of 70-to-80-year-old locals sit together with their donuts and coffee at the table furthest from the door, talking. Lori says she’ll miss serving up a bit of sweetness to them first thing in the morning.

“My father used to say, ‘Brighten the corner where you are,’” Lori says. “Hopefully that’s what set us apart for all these years.”

A new saison

Restaurateur Wilson Richey thinks there’s a lot of great beer being brewed in and around Charlottesville. And while there’s plenty of good beer, he says there’s not a lot of high-quality, beer-inspired food being made to pair with it. Pizza and wings just don’t cut it, he says.

“Everyone loves beer, so why not present a cuisine that’s just as interesting and has a very long history?” Richey says about the inspiration for his newest restaurant, Brasserie Saison, set to open this February on the Downtown Mall in the former Jean Theory spot.

Brasserie Saison, a collaboration between Richey and Champion Brewing Co. owner Hunter Smith, will offer Benelux cuisine (food of the Low Countries: Belgium, Luxembourg and The Netherlands, with some Polish, Austrian and German influence) and exclusive specialty beers brewed on-site by Smith and the Champion team.

Richey, the man behind Revolutionary Soup, The Whiskey Jar, The Pie Chest, The Alley Light and The Bebedero, says the Brasserie Saison kitchen and brewing operations will go hand in hand; the menus will be planned far in advance to give brewers the time to brew complementary beers.

Tyler Teass, most recently executive sous chef at D.C.’s Rose’s Luxury restaurant, will lead the kitchen. Before landing in D.C., Teass worked as sous chef at the Clifton Inn and at L’etoile.

The Brasserie Saison menu will change with some regularity, but Richey says it’ll be heavy on vegetable-based and vegetarian dishes, like marinated beets and grilled endive, with a focus on local produce and proteins. They’ll also have smoked meat, duck sausage, carbonnade (beef braised in strong ale and served with egg noodles) and a mussels dish that Richey says is “not a precious little bit, but a big bowl with French fries and sauces.”

The beers will be “really unlike other beers we’ve done at Champion,” Smith says, such as lambics, saisons and Belgian wheat beers, brewed and kegged in a space underneath the restaurant, then hooked up to a draft system in the upstairs bar. All the beer brewed at Brasserie Saison will be sold there—nowhere else. They’ll probably fill growlers, Smith says, but they’ll likely cost more than normal, because of the specialty beer. 

Leah Peeks, beverage and events director for The Whiskey Jar, will have the same role at the Brasserie, running the bar program that, in addition to beer, will include cocktails and a wine list; she’ll bring over Reid Dougherty from The Whiskey Jar to manage day-to-day bar operations.

Brasserie Saison will seat 45 diners inside and another 30 on the patio. It’ll be open daily from 11am to 2:30pm for lunch and from 5 to 10pm for dinner, with late-night hours on the weekends.

Richey says they’ll have specials on both the food and bar menus—such as a curated list of Richey and Smith’s favorite bottled Belgian and Dutch beers—to keep customers intrigued.

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Arts

Rugged Arts nurtures a thriving underground scene

Spititout Inc. founders MC Remy St. Clair and FellowMan work with DJ Double-U to close each Rugged Arts showcase with a freestyle group cypher. “It’s like walking on water, not having a limit,” St. Clair says. For every MC, says Fellowman, when you’re ready to be heard, “you know it, and you grab that mic.” Photo by Eze Amos

When R.U.N.T.215th was growing up in Philadelphia in the mid-1980s, he routinely stayed up late and recorded Lady B’s “ Street Beat” Power 99 FM radio show, taping it on his boom box. He’d listen to the tapes over and over—the sets were packed full of Public Enemy, MC Lyte, Audio Two and Melle Mel tracks, plus in-studio rap battles and the music of the Bridge Wars—a track-for-track rivalry between the South Bronx’s Boogie Down Productions and Queensbridge’s Juice Crew over the birthplace of hip-hop music.

One night, Lady B played KRS-One’s “Criminal Minded,” and R.U.N.T. was hooked. Captivated by the wordplay, the sense of individuality and social consciousness expressed in song, he recalls thinking, “I’ve gotta do this.” He started rapping at home and in school, in the upstairs room of a neighborhood Episcopal church. He filled rhyme books and stacked them in his closet; sometimes, he says, his mom’s abusive boyfriend would tear up his rhyme books, but R.U.N.T. kept writing and rapping. He emceed, performed at block parties and the local Boys & Girls Club. He got into graffiti art, which, in addition to emceeing, DJing and breaking, is one of the four original elements of hip-hop culture.

R.U.N.T. began planning his future around hip-hop, but then his mom finished nursing school and they moved from Philadelphia to Charlottesville, a small city with an even smaller scene.

He’s been working on growing that scene ever since. After participating in a few different projects in town, including Burnt Bush Productions, R.U.N.T. formed his own hip-hop collective, Spititout Inc., in 2005, with the intention of cultivating an underground hip-hop circuit.

R.U.N.T. and his current Spititout Inc. collaborators—Rose Hill native MC Remy St. Clair and NOVA-raised producer and poet FellowMan—have organized Rugged Arts hip-hop showcases since summer 2013, first at Eunoia and now at Twisted Branch Tea Bazaar. Rugged Arts is a unifying, artistic outlet for underground artists from Charlottesville and the surrounding areas, and Spititout Inc. emphasizes that it’s a safe and welcoming space for hip-hop culture. It’s the place to go to be exactly who you are.

St. Clair says Spititout—made up of a second-generation Philadelphia hip-hop head, a white man and an openly gay black man—is “a blueprint for unity within the hip-hop community.”

Every Rugged Arts event tells “the story of a struggling city that never really gave our art form a chance,” says St. Clair, who hosts the showcases. When certain venues would host hip-hop, the organizers would have to jump through hoops—hiring extra security guards, purchasing extra insurance on the building— and that makes holding a show fairly difficult, financially and otherwise, St. Clair says. (Other venues currently hosting local hip-hop shows include The Ante Room, Milli Coffee Roasters booked by Camp Ugly and Magnolia House.)

Spititout Inc. feels that the stigma against hip-hop, especially underground hip-hop, is unwarranted. It’s all about peace, love, unity and having fun—those are the core values, R.U.N.T. says; it’s not about violence and hatred.

That’s not to say that the showcases are soft. “Rugged Arts is a place where you can talk about social issues and plan events to confront certain social issues,” R.U.N.T. says. The music addresses poverty, oppression, racism, sexism, politics and so much more, but there’s a social activism component to it as well: There’s always a donation box on the merch table, raising money for causes such as the bail fund for those arrested during the protests in Charlotte, North Carolina in September.

“What we stand for [at Rugged Arts] is what hip-hop stands for and has always stood for,” FellowMan says, and that’s for equality and voice and against exploitation and oppression. “It’s important that we continue to make politicized art because…art is maybe the only tool we have [against suppression], so it’s vital that we encourage it.”

Spititout Inc. looks for genuine, individual and entertaining artists with a social conscience who are pounding the pavement in search of a platform. They book around five artists per showcase; each shares his music with Rugged Arts’ DJ Double-U, who fires the beats at the right time in each artist’s set.

The promoters have plenty of goals for the future of Charlottesville underground hip-hop. R.U.N.T. hopes the scene diversifies while continuing to offer socially-conscious entertainment; he wants local artists to tour and touring artists to stop in Charlottesville. St. Clair wants area hip-hop acts to play Fridays After Five, and FellowMan wants to see hip-hop at the Tom Tom Founders Festival. “I would like to see a ‘community event’ actually accept us fully and not just tolerate us,” St. Clair says.

Every Rugged Arts event ends with a cypher, a group freestyle where anyone in the house can grab the mic and spit it out. DJ Double-U plays the beats—often made by local producers—and the mic is passed around. Everyone knows when an MC is ready to talk—you can see it on his or her face, St. Clair says—and when the hand touches the mic and the words start to flow, it’s an audible emotional exhale. It’s relief, the remedy for whatever ails them that day.

Categories
Arts

First Fridays: December 2

Matt Celentano at VMDO Architects

First Fridays: December 2

Cameron Mankin derived his 14 Fallen in Daredevil #11 series from comic book images. The small etchings—jittery black lines on a chalky white ground—“have a certain doodle-like quality to them, but only if someone drew the same doodle a dozen times in the same spot,” Mankin says. He hopes that the prints and etchings in his “Tangible Intangibles” show at WVTF & Radio IQ Studio Gallery tantalize “the viewer’s puzzle-solving impulse. All of the work in the show is drawn from a previous narrative that exists kind of like a memory leftover in the remaining print. I’d love for viewers to interact with these prints by trying to piece the narrative back together,” Mankin says. It’s an attempt to get viewers to look, think, then think carefully about their thinking, an exercise that perhaps helps us understand the whole picture, an increasingly important skill to possess.

Cameron Mankin’s “Tangible Intangibles,” a series of prints, woodcuts and etchings, is at WVTF & Radio IQ Studio Gallery this December.

Art on the Trax 5784 Three Notch’d Rd., Crozet. “Seeking Rhythm,” featuring functional ceramics by Patrick Gibson. Opens Saturday, December 10.

FF Blue Moon Diner 512 W. Main St. An exhibit featuring collage by Andrew Marriott. 6-10pm.

FF The Bridge Progressive Arts Initiative 209 Monticello Rd. “2016 Gift Forest,” a pop-up market featuring more than 50 artists, makers and collectors from across the region. 5:30-9pm.

FF C’ville Arts Cooperative Gallery 118 E. Main St. “Escaping to Childhood,” an exhibit of Milenko Katic’s dream-like paintings. 6-8pm.

FF Chroma Projects Gallery 201 E. Main St. “Manger Scene,” featuring installations and paintings by Pam Black, Virginia Van Horne, Lester Van Winkle, Russ Warren and Aggie Zed. 5-7pm.

FF Fellini’s #9 200 Market St. “Spirits of the Season,” featuring oil paintings by Marla McNamara. 5:30-7pm.

The Fralin Museum at UVA 155 Rugby Rd. “The Gift of Knowing: The Art of Dorothea Rockburne”; “Ann Gale: Portraits”; “The Great War: Printmakers of World War I”; “New Acquisitions: Photography,” featuring work from Danny Lyon, Shirin Neshat and Eadweard Muybridge; and “Oriforme” by Jean Arp.

The Green House 1260 Crozet Ave., Crozet. An exhibit featuring landscape and still-life paintings by BozART: Fine Arts Collective. Through December 17.

FF IX Art Park 963 Second St. SE. “Building Hope,” featuring work created by art therapists throughout Virginia. 6-8pm.

Kluge-Ruhe Collection 400 Worrell Dr. “On the Fabric of the Ngarrindjeri Body,” an exhibit of drawings, prints and photography by Australian aboriginal artist Damien Shen. Through December 18.

FF Les Yeux du Monde 841 Wolf Trap Rd. “Red Cow,” featuring new work by landscape painter John Borden Evans. 1-5pm.

FF New Dominion Book Shop 404 E. Main St. “Provence in August,” featuring watercolors by Blake Hurt. 5:30-7pm.

FF Second Street Gallery 115 Second St. SE. “Fly Away,” featuring works on paper by Rashaun Rucker; and “contested bodies,” a collaborative installation by Nikolai M. Noel and Matthew P. Shelton. 5:30-7:30pm.

Shenandoah Valley Art Center 26 S. Wayne Ave., Waynesboro. A juried exhibit of work from regional printmakers. Through January 28.

FF Studio IX, IX Art Park, 963 Second St. SE. “Into A Single Open Darkness,” featuring drawings by Miriam Mörsel Nathan and poetry by Annie Kim. 5-7pm.

FF Telegraph Art & Comics 211 W. Main St. “Picture Show,” featuring original drawings in ink and crayon and prints by illustrator and cartoonist Todd Webb. 5-8pm.

FF The Southern Café and Music Hall 103 First St. S. “In Unison,” featuring acrylic paintings of local musicians by Aimee McDavitt. 7-9pm.

FF Top Knot Studio 103 Fifth St. “Abstracts plus One,” featuring midsize abstract paintings by James Brewer. 5pm.

FF VMDO Architects 200 E. Market St. “Matt Celentano Abstract,” featuring tempera and spray-paint works on canvas by Matt Celentano. 5:30-8pm.

FF Welcome Gallery at New City Arts 114 Third St. NE. “Unbound Oasis,” featuring acrylic, ink and cut paper and encaustic works by Alexandra Chiou and Amanda Smith. 5-7:30pm.

FF WriterHouse 508 Dale Ave. An exhibit of oil landscape paintings by Randy Baskerville. 5-7pm.

FF WVTF & Radio IQ Studio Gallery 218 W. Water St. “Tangible Intangibles,” featuring woodcut, inkjet and etching prints by Cameron Mankin. 5-7pm.

FF Yellow Cardinal Gallery 301 E. Market St., second floor. “Found & Lost: Objects and Abstractions,” featuring work by Mineko Yoshida, Andy Foster and Jane Goodman. 5-7pm.

FF First Fridays is a monthly art event featuring exhibit openings at many downtown art galleries and additional exhibition venues. Several spaces offer receptions.

Categories
Arts

Vinyl never went out of style for avid collectors

WTJU DJ and programming director at the Paramount, Matthew Simon got hooked on collecting vinyl at a young age.  Courtesy subject

Ask a vinyl record collector about his collection and it becomes clear that listening to records is about more than the music. It’s about the ritual of placing the needle in the groove and being present for the sound; listening to The Beatles with your dad; anniversary dinners with your wife. In honor of Record Store Day on Friday, November 25, we asked local collectors about the vinyl experience.

What is the first record you owned?

Aaron Goff: The Smiths’ The Queen Is Dead; I found it at a thrift store. I originally had no intent in playing it, I just thought it would be cool to have a large, tangible form of an album I’d always loved.

Liza Pittard: My dad and I would talk about music while he would rummage through his old record collection and recount his memories of each. Once I bought a record player, he would give five records to me at a time to listen to. Two of the first ones he gave me were Hendrix’s Axis: Bold as Love and Talking Heads’ Little Creatures. Almost every time I go home, he continues to share his collection with me. He still won’t part with his Beatles records, but we’ll get there one day.

Matthew Simon: All the children’s “play and read” records, which I had a ton of—and Christmas with the Chipmunks. I remember so clearly wanting one album when I was 8 years old, and I stubbornly wouldn’t take any treats, books, clothes, anything, until I got that record. My grandparents came to visit and they had a gift in a brown paper bag for me and I wasn’t going to accept it; when they slid out a copy of Thriller, I was the happiest kid alive.

What’s in your collection?

AG: I have around 500 records, give or take. I’m constantly buying new stuff and giving away stuff that I don’t listen to anymore. I want to keep a collection that I will regularly listen to rather than one filed with rarities. A few highlights are an original mono pressing of Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde (thanks to SPCA Rummage), an ’80s German copy of Bowie’s Hunky Dory and an original pressing of Fugazi’s End Hits. I am usually particular about having entire discographies; I have complete collections from The Smiths, Joy Division, Slowdive, Sunny Day Real Estate, Tortoise, The Appleseed Cast and Sigur Rós, among others. I’m slowly eating away at Brian Eno’s discography.

LP: I own about 90 records, ranging from classic rock to electronic music of the 2000s to funk and soul. As I’ve been collecting, I’ve expanded the types of music that I listen to and I think that’s reflected in what I own. I also like to have a balance of older and newer records, so I can be exposed to the music of the past and also support musicians making music now.

MS: I have about 600 records, and they tell my story. I’ve got copies from when I was young, like Weird Al Yankovic and John Denver and The Muppets’ A Christmas Together; my dad’s copy of the first pressing of The Velvet Underground & Nico; a bunch of Stereolab, Talking Heads, John Zorn, Devo; every Phish album ever pressed; jazz, hip-hop, international compilations. It’s all over the place.

What’s your favorite record?

AG: Emergency & I by The Dismemberment Plan is one of my favorite records released within my lifetime [in 1999]. It’s technical and groovy with big hooks and relatable lyrics. They traverse so many different styles on this album while remaining accessible. It still holds up.

LP: It’s hard to pick a favorite because it changes based on how I’m feeling and what I’m into during a given time period. I listen often to Lali Puna’s Scary World Theory, a melodic and haunting electronic record. It was one of the first records that I bought when I started collecting. I am constantly listening to Johnny “Guitar” Watson’s A Real Mother for Ya, which I found at Melody Supreme a month or two ago; I heard him on WTJU’s jazz and blues marathon and have been hooked since. I found the record right after the marathon ended, so it felt like fate.

MS: The collection as a whole is my favorite. I love adding to it to make sure I have a record or song for every possible occasion or mood. That said, I love owning the original copy of Stereolab’s Transient Random-Noise Bursts with Announcements. The sound of that album on vinyl is the epitome of all the reasons to own a record player: the music and phasing is so good, the album art is cool. Records can certainly be art. I have a copy of Animal Collective’s Hollinndagain, of which only 300 copies were initially made; each and every copy features a cover spray-painted and decorated by hand by the band themselves. They even drew on the center label with a marker. I love just looking at that one.

Categories
Living

The Salad Maker opens on Market Street

Jacie Dunkel opened The Salad Maker last week to provide fresh and quick salad options for customers seeking a sit-down spot for lunch or dinner. Photo by Tom McGovern

In The Big Salad episode of “Seinfeld,” Elaine asks George to get her a big salad from the coffee shop. “What’s in the big salad?” George asks. “Big lettuce, big carrots, tomatoes like volleyballs,” Jerry deadpans.

You won’t get enormous salads with gargantuan vegetables at The Salad Maker at 300 E. Market St., but you will find dozens of fresh salad options. Owner Jacie Dunkel, who also owns Tin Whistle Irish Pub and Fellini’s #9, says that while the Blue Ridge Country Store on the Downtown Mall has a great lunchtime make-your-own salad bar, there aren’t many places downtown to get a quick salad for lunch or dinner, and she wanted to give customers another option, especially one with seating.

Tin Whistle chef Karen Fiedler started developing the salad recipes before handing things over to Allison Campbell, previously of Zazu’s and Revolutionary Soup.

Salads are ordered via paper menus available at the door—once you’ve snagged one, write your name on the line and circle your special or classic salad of choice, or select your own components from a hefty list of greens, proteins, cheeses, housemade dressings and more. Then, take your paper to the Create counter, and pick it up and pay—$8.95 for a special or classic, $6.95 and up for a custom—at the Produce counter when your name is called.

There’s the North Garden, with spring mix, spiced almonds, goat cheese, dried apricots, roasted red peppers and balsamic vinaigrette, as well as The Crozet steak salad with romaine and iceberg lettuces, blue cheese, marinated mushrooms, tomatoes and blue cheese dressing. There’s also a cobb, Greek, Caesar and spinach salad, and, if you’re feeling adventurous, opt for a Palmyra salad: in-season ingredients sourced from many local farmers and City Market vendors—it’ll never be the same twice. All salads come with a housemade rye cracker. And The Salad Maker also offers a daily soup, made at the Tin Whistle, and homemade brownies and cookies.

Strike while the waffle iron is hot

How do you like your waffles? With a pat of butter and a drizzle of syrup? Smothered in fruit compote and whipped cream? Scalding hot and crispy brown after a moment too long in mom’s toaster (I’m looking at you, Eggos!)?

Come winter, your preferred waffle consumption method may change with the opening of Iron Paffles and Coffee at 214 W. Water St. At Iron, a paffle—housemade puff pastry baked to flaky perfection on a waffle iron—is a bit richer and more flexible than a waffle, making it the perfect vehicle not just for syrup, caramelized cinnamon apples and whipped cream, but for sandwiches, too.

In February, owner Kathryn Matthews plans to start serving eat-in and take-out paffles such as the Made of Iron, with sausage, bacon, egg and cheese; the Rise ’N’ Iron with blueberry compote, local hickory syrup and whipped cream; the Iron Master, with Southern fried chicken and mac ’n’ cheese; and various vegetarian options. Paffles will cost around $6 each.

Tasty tidbit

Monolith Studio’s chef knives were recently named a runner-up in the Home category in Garden & Gun magazine’s seventh annual Made in the South Awards, which celebrate and encourage Southern craftspeople.