Fox’s Cafe in Belmont is one of the last best places to get an affordable, fresh, and made-to-order red-blooded American breakfast. Photo: John Robinson
Dear C’ville,
We always knew this is where it would end up. I know a big part of you will be very happy about me leaving. And maybe an even bigger part of you never really loved me in the first place.
But let’s not kid ourselves, there were some pretty great moments, some memorable nights. Like shivering in the rain in the neon glow of the El Tako Nako trailer on Hydraulic Road. The eye-watering, hot pepper seed-infused grease soaking through the double corn tortilla-wrapped carne asada tacos brings a tear to my eye just thinking about it. Yeah, it was really goood.
And the long Sunday afternoon walks to Lemon Grass to slurp near perfect beef noodle soup and chat with Hiep Pham and his wife Mai about pho. All things pho, new locations of great pho houses, and, most encouragingly, Hiep’s dream of one day opening a pho and bun-only joint Downtown, whereupon all the trendy pretenders would recede, leaving us alone. Together.
And then there were the mornings when we woke up at the crack of dawn. If an early breakfast was in order, the over easy eggs, sausage, and potatoes at Fox’s Cafe seemed like America’s greatest invention outside of exceptionalism. Heck, I guess there were even a couple times when we went for a long walk after a Fox’s breakfast and just waltzed, shameless as a cow-pie bingo winner, right back in there and ordered up some double cheeseburgers and fries for lunch. And, even after two meals and all that talk, we each had a little bit left of a 10 dollar bill and more to say.
Remember when we met Chris Gibson at Gibson’s Grocery? He cares so much about how a hot dog should taste that he purchased a vintage frankfurter steamer for his Nathan’s dogs, and he treats his potato rolls as tenderly as…well, you know. I guess losing mutual friends is always the hardest part of a breakup. Song Song, and her lovingly prepared pork and leek bings, will always tug achingly at the softest part of my hungry heart.
Oh, and I won’t ever forget the evenings we spent together with Bashir and Kathy Khelafa at Bashir’s Taverna, in the warm embrace of their worldly salon, with an endless parade of delectable surprises from every corner of the globe emerging from the kitchen, and conversations with good people making us feel like a part of something bigger. Maybe they’re even a little bit to blame for all this. They love what they do so much, they made me rethink how I spend my days.
But C’ville, if there is to be another chapter for us for some time down the road a piece, certain things have to change. It’s not a laundry list or anything, but I need some gestures of good faith, some indication that you’re making an effort to acknowledge what I need.
For instance, there are several Japanese restaurants up and running already, so why no ramen? Hot and hearty soup like fine ramen has fueled and inspired many an army to rise up and face impossible odds, and even win hopeless battles in certain circumstances. With ramen on our side, think what we could accomplish.
And you really need to get gyro, shawarma, or doner on the spit. Enough of these frozen slices, imported from out-of-town distributors, reheated on the griddle. Find a way around Virginia’s Victorian era health regulations and get us some shaved meat sandwiches, dripping their grease into that sweet dark place at the bottom of a cylinder of foil where the tzatziki dwells.
You have a new, more diverse clique now, I know. But please invite the Sudanese and Lebanese to make your life richer by availing unto you the wondrous cuisines of their ancient lands. An Ethiopian restaurant shouldn’t be out of the question either. They occupy corners of the most unassuming burgs from coast to coast and thrive. I could wrap you in injera and eat you alive.
But most of all C’ville, you need to show a little love to the working schleps like me. It hurts me to think that we were star-crossed from the start—you, prep school, and me, well, you know school was never my thing. Towns everywhere are bragging up their cuisine spectrums and feting their top chefs, but the truth is you can get good food for $20 a person anywhere. What separates podunk from cosmopolitan is that in places like New York, Paris, London, and Chicago there is ubiquitously available great tasting (if not macrobiotic and/or preciously conceived) universally affordable food. The true measure of any grubscape is the food it serves its common people.
Maybe you’ll think of me sometime when you’re down to your last five bucks and you pick up a local rag looking against hope for a tip on something grubby to mow on. Frankly my dear, I don’t give a damn.
For starters, Song Song’s Zhou and Bing’s pork and leek bing—a pancake, ever-so-delicately crisped and stuffed with an exquisitely-seasoned pork patty—is heavenly and, quite possibly, the best cheap lunch in Charlottesville. But that’s not really the point here. The point is that a woman with a business degree started a restaurant because she wants people to be healthy.
“When I first started,” said Song, “I just wanted the customers to have healthy, nutritional food, especially for people who could not afford expensive food, that they could come here and have low-cost healthy food.”
When she talks about how much effort, thought, and experimentation she has put into the select few items that are on the menu at her Downtown Mall restaurant, and how all of them are there to contribute to the long-term well-being of her customers (or at least not make things any more difficult for their bodies), you get the sense that she processes it all at very personal level. But her earnest zeal for keeping people alive, healthy, and happy, while not taking too big a toll on their wallets, may also be her weak point.
“There are a lot of things I do here I know are not the way to make money,” said Song, who holds an MBA and was once an assistant CEO. “But I want to do things this way.”
She serves three basic things, all of it made by her, from scratch: a very healthy porridge called zhou (pronounced “Joe”), bings, and salads. A native of northeast China, Song serves real-deal food like they eat in her home country. “Everything here takes at least half a day to prepare,” she said. “So I cook a big batch, like at home, and share it with the customers.”
How healthy is Song’s food? “Sometimes I have the hospital calling me for patients who want the zhou,” said Song. “Zhou is very good recovery food. …In China, it is called the man’s fuel station and the woman’s beauty salon.”
Song had a couple other lives before getting into the food business. She was a cancer researcher and graduate student in microbiology at Case Western Reserve University. But it was while working as an executive that she developed a debilitating case of carpal tunnel syndrome that sidelined her for two years. Once she got healthy, she wanted a new line of work that would inspire her to the same degree her previous careers had, and she went at the food business with the same motivating factor that pushed her toward cancer research: people.
“In research, it takes years to get anywhere,” she said. “When I first started I didn’t really think about longevity, I just wanted to make healthy food. Years from now, if some people have the memory of zhou and bing, that is enough for me to make it worth it. That makes me feel good. I wish for all my customers to live a long time.”
“I was working as a substitute teacher in an eighth grade science class while I was also taking my medical school prerequisites at UVA. There was no lesson plan for class one day, so I looked out the window to see if I could find a science project for us to do. And I said ‘O.K., right there. Why are the flowers under that drain spout bigger than the other flowers?’ When I saw the kids picking things up and sniffing things, I thought, this could be my job. I could teach.”
That’s local educator Carlos Pezua on his first “Eureka!” moment. His life, at least in retrospect, has always been that way—a series of “Eureka!” moments leading him to one outcome: teaching.
His first one came at age 13 when, as a forward-looking junior high school student, Pezua toured the Bay Area with his parents. “We went to the [University of California] Berkeley campus, and the vibe of the place was so great I told my folks that that’s where I wanted to go to college,” he said.
The son of a physician in the U.S. Army, Pezua grew up on military installations around the world, from Germany to Panama to Korea and finally Northern Virginia for high school, before earning a scholarship to attend UC-Berkeley.
Once at Berkeley, however, the call of San Francisco’s smorgasbord of social and cultural indulgences, more often than not, was too much for Pezua to resist. He lasted only a semester at Berkeley, and spent the next semester in the city, hip-deep in the music and party scene and loving every minute of it.
When he returned east, he eventually got on a clear path to commencement and earned a degree in politics from UVA. He went to work in Washington, D.C., as staff assistant for Senator Chuck Robb. It was during this episode when he met with another “Eureka!” moment: “It was the autopen,” said Pezua.
One of Pezua’s duties as a senate staffer was to write responses to Senator Robb’s mail and then set an autopen, a device that mechanically replicated the senator’s signature, to sign the letter. He’d then mail it off as though the senator himself had taken the time to address his constituent’s concerns.
“I was standing on my rooftop with my friend one night looking out over the city and I said, ‘There’s got to be more than this. This isn’t enough.’”
So Pezua set off with a friend for Arizona, where he worked as a backcountry ranger for the Park Service at Coconino National Forest. He cruised the Arizona wilderness for a little less than a year then he was back at UVA, where he realized that teaching had been his calling all along.
Pezua was fluent in Spanish, so it was only natural that he would teach the language, which he did for Albemarle County schools for nine years, earning him the Golden Apple Award for best teacher at Murray High School in 2008.
Pezua is no longer in the public school system, but teaches privately, both one-on-one and group sessions. This summer he offered a class upstairs from Mudhouse on the Downtown Mall.
“I’m not so much teaching as learning. I am like a prism,” said Pezua. “I’m breaking down Spanish knowledge and the students are the ones who see the colors. I’m channelling more than anything. When I am teaching someone the Spanish verbs and they finally get it and have that break through and they feel it and I feel it, it’s invigorating. When they get it, it’s an epistemological unlocking. I’m moved by—I’m compelled by the experience.”
Try the tarantula roll: soft shell crab, avocado, cucumber, and roe covered in seaweed and topped with toasted almonds. Photo: Elli Williams
For most of my sushi eating life, I’ve thought of the the sushi roll as not much more than a wasabi delivery vehicle. Sushi was such an obvious scam when it first showed up on these shores, somehow convincing spendthrift, culinary adventure-seekers that not cooking something made it fancy. And most of the places selling it didn’t have to go to much effort to tantalize the artless palates of the fatuous masses. For those who demanded a little flavor or punch, they offered wasabi. Wasabi, soy sauce, and a piece of raw fish?
That’ll be $30.
Toshi Sato, owner-chef at Now & Zen, has me thinking differently. He puts out huge and beautiful sushi rolls stuffed with dynamic flavor combinations and sided with hot, and sweet, and salty sauces.
Sato is from Kesennuma, Japan. If that rings a bell, that’s because in 2011, his hometown was washed through by a massive tsunami. In the mid-’80s, Sato studied culinary arts at a school in Tokyo and then went to work in Tokyo restaurants. In 1987, after only a couple years on the job, he met Ken Mori, a Japanese man who had been living in the States and was looking to open a sushi restaurant in Charlottesville, Virginia. Sato decided he liked the sound of the adventure, so he and his friend Atsushi Miura lit out for The Old Dominion. At the time, Sato somehow thought Charlottesville was much closer to New York.
Upon his arrival, Sato went to work right away at the newly opened Tokyo Rose. He moved into an apartment above the space that Belmont’s tavola now occupies and has lived in Belmont since.
“Customers were very different 26 years ago in Charlottesville,” Sato said. “Not too many people were looking for sushi. And we didn’t have rolls. It was just sushi.”
As time went by, though, the taste for classic ngiri gave way as a new breed of American sushi eater grew up.
“Now the young people have been eating sushi since they were children,” Sato said. “They all know sushi.”
Now & Zen’s tarantula roll, a fat log of hefty tempura soft shell crab, avocado, cucumber, and flying fish roe wrapped in seaweed, enveloped in rice (the thing is about 2″ thick laid out) and topped with toasted almond slices, is a prime harbinger of the dawn of a new age in sushi. Alongside the tarantula, Sato adorns the plate with ample squiggles of spicy mayo, Sriracha, and eel sauce (soy sauce, sugar, and dissolved eel bone). I can’t believe I’m about to say this, but you can eat the whole thing and never once think about smearing wasabi on it.
He also does rice bowls with the fishy goods all laid in loose, donburi style, like deconstructed sushi rolls. The tuna tataki is a fabulous high-protein, low-impact fuel cell: a bowl of sushi-grade rice perfectly tacky, a small pickled seaweed salad on top, some avocado slices, tiny scallion slices, and thick slices of lightly seared tuna—and a lot of it. Then you pour on ponzu sauce (soy sauce, vinegar, and lemon juice) at your discretion. Be careful with this one though. Sato puts a ping pong ball-sized wad of wasabi in the bowl too. Once you’re mostly through the entire serving, if you’re even slightly color-perception challenged, you wanna be careful not to mistake a teaspoon of wasabi for the avocado.
There are loads of options on Sato’s menu: an array of distinctive sushi rolls and rice bowls and a page long offering of what amounts to sushi and side dish tapas servings, with edamame and eggplant-spinach dishes and small fish portions as well. What sets the restaurant apart is the freshness, care in assembly, and, to be frank, its portions. You will not leave hungry.
Sato opened Now & Zen across from McGuffey Art Center on Second Street NW in March 2011, doing mostly carry out due to space restrictions, and added a dining room a few months later. He’s finishing construction now on yet another small addition.
As for his personal bent and inspiration, Sato said he reads up on modern culinary theory voraciously. “I want to keep it contemporary,” he said. “I don’t want to do anything traditional at all.” He adamantly reiterated this several times.
“I want to be able to be adventurous,” he said. And isn’t that how we all got started eating sushi in this first place?
Bashir's Taverna, started in 2001 by Bashir and Kathy Khelafa, is a favorite power lunch spot for the City Hall crowd. At night, the restaurant transforms into a cross-cultural salon, where the eclectic Mediterranean flavors of Bashir and Kathy's food mingle with the sounds of Europe, South America, and Africa. Photo: Christian Hommel
I started hanging around Bashir’s Taverna a week before the Friday evening that Paris native and singer Jean Jacques, aka J.J., was booked to perform during the dinner service. J.J. had stopped in to drop off some flyers that featured a manipulated photo of him standing next to the Eiffel Tower, the two figures in the photo appearing to be about the same height.
“Jean Jacques will sing A French Songs Evening,” the flyer proclaimed. I was kind of excited to find out exactly what that meant, but Bashir was skeptical, having never put J.J. on his bill before. That fish can get fried later. Like a lot of Charlottesvillians this time of year, Bashir Khelafa and his wife Kathy were going to the beach for a few days before the show to stay with their daughter and grandkids, which is sort of how they wound up in town in the first place.
The Khelafas were living a pretty good life in New York City but their daughter, Andrea, had come to school at UVA, married a young man, and decided to start a family down here. Even though Kathy was hip deep in her art curator career and Bashir was starting to publish in his academic field, they made the move south in 1996, like so many other families, because this was a place they could see their roots spreading out.
“We talked about it for a year before we did it,” Bashir said. Kathy made me an offer I couldn’t refuse.”
“I promised him I would make him famous if we moved to Charlottesville,” said Kathy.
I spent about a week hanging out at the restaurant, asking questions, trying to figure out how an Algerian academic and a Hungarian-Brazilian aristocrat ended up bringing their particular brand of global culture to the Downtown Mall. It seemed like there were two answers to every question I asked. Or maybe just one answer in two voices.
The beauty of Bashir and Kathy and what they bring to the people around them could have easily been lost in the mad and infinite shuffle of New York. They wouldn’t have had the money to open the kind of restaurant they wanted. The globe-hopping international eclectic cultural soup pot they stir together, equal parts food, music and art, wouldn’t be a thing you could notice in the world’s polyglot food metropolis. The warmth of heart that comes from foreigners of polite society who have been wrenched from home by war and heartache would make them a dime a dozen in the country’s biggest port of entry. But in Charlottesville, the couple still fascinates, and it’s not because of who they are so much as how they are.
Bashir and Kathy are impossibly cute together. They step on each other’s stories, then apologize and defer, then jump back in with bombast to correct a detail or give it a more appropriate tone or pace. One night Bashir was describing two “weddings impossible,” war stories from the frontlines of the catering world: two hopeless situations where they, by dint of their will and wits, won the day. Kathy listened as Bashir wrapped up the story of the twin catering triumphs and then they high-fived each other.
Bashir, who grew up in Algiers in a family of musicians, took Kathy, who is Hungarian but grew up in Brazil, to a dinner at the United Nations for their first date. Photo: Courtesy Bashir Khelafa
When the couple first arrived in Charlottesville, Kathy kept one foot in the New York art scene at first, commuting back occasionally. Bashir found some partners and opened the Blackstone Coffee Company at Albemarle Square. It lasted six months.
That was the moment the Khelafas decided it was time to go whole hog into the restaurant game and opened Bashir’s Gourmet Take Out on the Mall in 1997. There wasn’t much happening Downtown on the world cuisine front then but Kathy was familiar with the charisma of her husband’s playful charm, so his name became the name and personality of the place. By Bashir’s recollection, the list of Downtown eateries up and running read like this: Baggby’s, Escafe, The Nook, Eastern Standard, Chaps, Miller’s, Christian’s Pizza and The Downtown Inn. That list may be a couple names short but it is a far cry from the 60 odd establishments operating now.
“We never had any doubt that our restaurant would work. Never gave it a thought from the very beginning,” Kathy said.
In 2001 the couple took up the lease on the space they’re in now, in the building next to City Hall. There was a gap of a few months between when the old place closed and when they got Bashir’s Taverna ready to open in the fall. In many ways, the business is still built on a loyal customer base, people like Liz Schley, who first flocked there out of the culinary desert. “I was very very bereft at that time. I had to eat other places. I was traumatized. I really was,” said Schley, who has been a three-time-a-week regular right from the beginning. “I would go place to place eating food I didn’t like very much.”
And, of course, there are always new characters passing through, like J.J., and, I guess, like me, who catch a whiff that the place is about more than well-seasoned white beans and fall off the bone lamb, who get sucked in by Bashir’s voice, as he grills you about what you liked and didn’t like on your plate, and want to know more about him and the little den he’s built in the shadow of City Hall.
Shebeen owner Walter Slawski takes what he learned growing up in Zimbabwe and incorporates it into the menu at his restaurant on Ridge-McIntire. Photo: Elli Williams
Ah, the plight of the vegetarian. Even in this day and age, scrumptious grub options for those who don’t dig the flesh can still be scant. Everyone else at the table will be tucking into savory, juicy, chunky, flame-licked, and skillet-seared succulence, while the pitiful vegetarian sits there with his microwaved veggie burger getting cold while he’s trying to get the server’s attention to bring every condiment in the kitchen in the hope that the combination of them all will make his beans on a bun taste like something special.
When a restaurant goes to the trouble of concocting a dish that a vegetarian can order without sounding like a finicky invertebrate, you can imagine the late nights spent in the kitchen by the masterminds of the menu poring over sketches of recipe ideas, trying to remember the names and compatibilities of elusive, exotic spices. The gesture amounts to something much more than simple accommodation or consideration for the selective herbivore; the act is magnanimous if not philanthropic.
“Trying to cater to vegetarians is difficult as a forethought as opposed to an afterthought,” said The Shebeen Pub and Braai owner and chef Walter Slawski. “We tried to come up with dishes that make it interesting and exciting to be vegetarian or vegan. People are constantly requesting more vegetarian options, more vegan options.”
The Shebeen, which opened in 2003, just celebrated its 10th anniversary. The restaurant grew out of Slawski’s catering outfit, The Catering Outfit, which has been servicing Charlottesville clientele since Slawski was a UVA economics undergrad.
I popped into The Shebeen for dinner last week with no agenda in mind. Under the menu heading “Vegetarian,” two enticing offerings begged to be given their chances. I went for the sadza cakes and talked my companion into ordering the West African ground nut stew.
The sadza cakes are parmesan polenta cakes topped with a flavor blast of stir-fried vegetables, ladled over with a lemongrass beurre blanc.
“It’s kind of like making grits,” Slawski, who grew up in Zimbabwe and visited South Africa often, said of the sadza, the Zimbabwean white maize version of the universal starchy staple, polenta. The finely ground meal is boiled in water, seasoned with salt, and laced with butter and parmesan cheese. This creamy mash is spread on sheets to cool and set up. When it’s serving time, it is cut into squares that go into a 500-degree oven and, “if everything is done right,” said Slawski, “come out with an almost crispy top.” While the cakes crisp in the oven, eggplant, sun-dried tomatoes, spinach, sugar snaps, and shiitake and portobello mushrooms are getting sautéed in oil with salt and pepper. Wine and butter with a lemongrass kicker are also getting cooked down for the beurre blanc. When it’s all plated, it’s an extravagant combination of flavors that is rich and deep but with a light touch. The polenta is a terrific texture to balance the stir-fry and gives it a hearty bottom. The beurre sauce soaks into the fluffy cakes, infusing them with condensed flavor and nicely glazes the crispy fresh snap peas and intense sun-dried tomatoes. It’s good chow.
“It’s one of our most popular dishes,” said Slawski. “You get people coming in who are not vegetarian ordering it.”
The West African ground nut stew is a huge portion of tempura-fried vegetables with okra and kale, spiced with coriander and ginger, topped with crushed ground peanuts, and served over yellow rice. It is inspired in part by a dish Slawski remembers from his childhood. “The ground nut stew is something we ate growing up,” he said. “A ground nut is just a peanut. So, there’s a lot of protein there.”
There is a much more understated flavor in this dish and for those addicted to over-spiced cuisine and high octane hot sauces, a touch of a hot pepper-based condiment could be in order.
“African food, typically, is mostly vegetarian bland—the indigenous food anyway,” said Slawski.
The rest of the menu is a madcap tour of Zimbabwe and South African-inspired dishes, covering it all from steak and lamb to peri-peri (an African bird’s eye chili rub) chicken and several seafood choices. “There’s a tremendous amount of Indian influence on the food of South Africa,” said Slawski. “There’s Dutch and Malay influence. I’m very passionate about my childhood and growing up there and the experiences I had and the foods that I ate.”
Gibson’s serves up a Nathan’s Famous hot dog with all the fixins’ on a steamed potato bun, which owner Chris Gibson says is essential to a good dog. Photo: Elli Williams
Gibson’s Grocery owner Chris Gibson reckons the hot dog is still the number two snack food in America. That may not always be apparent around these parts, but the frankfurter’s presence throughout the rest of America is undeniable. From the take-out windows and lunch counters of Chicago, to the ubiquitous hot dog carts of New York City, from every ballpark to the corner hot dog shacks of Los Angeles and the corner-lot Coney Island diners across the Motor City, the hot dog appears to be just as popular as the hamburger in most places.
Around here, however, the wiener has been a tad more elusive. The big yellow Last Call Dogs truck, once a regular around UVA and the Pavilion, hasn’t Tweeted since last July and its website is gone. The truck was spotted along West Main with a “For Sale” sign a while back. The Downtown Hot Dog Company, once unfortuitously situated in York Place, was unable to overcome the stealthy profile of its location.
There are reliable dogs available from carts on the Mall, but they are only slightly more likely to consistently show up at a prescribed location than an ambitious street musician. But enough of what was, what ain’t, and what will never be. Here’s what is.
Mel’s Diner on West Main Street does so very many things solidly that it’s no surprise its hot dog is right up there. Grilled over open flame, served in a lightly toasted roll, with jalapeño slices available, Mel’s is a righteous dog.
Everyday Shop and Cafe on Rolkin Road, up Pantops way, is a woefully underappreciated sweet spot. There’s an ABC on/off, decent coffee, draft beer to go, bottle beer to stay, a broad range of pastries, a solid grill menu, plus salads. The breakfast sandwiches are as good as any in town. The kitchen folks are great and will do your dog any way you want. On the grill, the griddle, split, or intact. There’s the all-too-rare jalapeño slices too. Don’t let them over toast your bun though. Great picture windows give it a travel plaza feel, but a good one.
Beer Run serves a very fine frank as well. It’s the second best one I could find. It’s an uncured, all-natural Applegate link in a pretzel bun. It has that crispy, crunchy flat-top griddle-cooked feel. With sauerkraut and a good mustard, the roll is so hearty it’s like a gourmet pretzel with a great hot dog bonus. The hefty bun, however, is a bit of a hot dog flavor crusher. But, at $4, it is a very solid wiener just the same.
The top dog on the scene is, hands down, at Gibson’s (Avon and Hinton in Belmont). The owner’s dad, Franklin Delano Gibson, operated the store from 1977 to 1999. The late, elder Gibson, a Charlottesville native, was the definition of “pillar of the community,” with a reputation for bridging racial divides in the neighborhood. The road from the bottom of Belmont Bridge to Monticello Avenue is named in honor of the senior Gibson. Chris grew up working in his dad’s store but then moved to Northern Virginia for a spell. He discovered the wonders of Nathan’s Famous hot dogs while traveling in the Northeast for his work in human resources. He returned home to Charlottesville, renovated the family store, and reopened Gibson’s Grocery in 2011. He serves great, inexpensive, cold cut sandwiches, has a good range of wines, an even better selection of beers and, most appetizingly, he sells Nathan’s Famous hot dogs. Nathan’s wieners are so doggone irresistible that some screwball ate 69 of them (buns too) in 10 minutes before a crowd of 40,000 at Coney Island on the Fourth of July.
The dogs at Gibson’s steam all day in a hot dog cooker that Chris bought from a vendor in New York. It’s a two-compartment contraption, where the dogs steam in a water and delectable “hot dog oil” vapor, he said, on one side, while potato rolls wait in a separate steam chamber. When he puts these two things together and tops them with mustard and a very high-end, locally made sauerkraut (no extra charge), this is an absolutely world class hot dog, as good as they make them anywhere. It’s $2 a dog and two for $3.50.
By Gibson’s estimation, the potato roll is as crucial to the combination as any other component. And he’s right. It’s substantial, but completely unobtrusive and complements the impossibly tasty frankfurter. Unlike any other way of serving a hot dog in a bun, the perfectly steamed potato roll melds with the sausage in the way only two things so made for each other can.
Pigeon Hole owner Naomi Annable asks only one question when trying out a new recipe: “How are we gonna f@#$ that up?” Which is to say, she’s always looking to enhance the flavor. Photo: Elli Williams
If you’re throwing in with the (unofficial) Townies Taking Back The Corner movement for the next few weeks, remember that a hearty breakfast is an important part of any revolution. And the best place to get this one started, without question, is The Pigeon Hole, right in the heart of the contested zone.
The Pigeon Hole inconspicuously showed up on Elliewood Avenue in January 2011, and it’s been a twinkling star in the neighborhood ever since. I say inconspicuous because, “we have never advertised,” said owner Naomi Annable. “Ever.”
Not even one tiny little ad somewhere?
“Nothing,” she insisted.
“I was raised by hippies,” she told me as we lounged on the homey front porch of her restaurant. “I’ve been cooking on a gas stove since I was 5 years old.”
By age 10 and a part of a collective, Annable, along with her brother, was cooking for anywhere from 10 to 25 people one night per week. “I started by learning to cook for 20,” she said. “I still don’t know how to cook for two people.”
On her own since age 16, she has worked, at one time or another over the last 24 years, at every position in a restaurant, from front of house to every station in the kitchen. She worked in the kitchens at Southern Culture, Jarman’s Gap in Crozet, where she also did pastries, and at Dr. Ho’s in North Garden, among many other places.
But the Pigeon Hole has little in common with those Albemarle favorites. “I’m an anarchist,” said Annable. “We’re a very punk rock restaurant. Everything we have was already here or came from the thrift store.” Her restaurant is a direct reflection of her upbringing—an atmosphere free of pretension or formality, no defined hierarchy. Employees all have equal say; they pool tips and sometimes even divide a small contribution pulled from the till.
Annable often alludes to her punk rock ethos, but the prevailing patois at The Pigeon Hole is decidedly hip-hop. The weekend menu has several versions of Eggs Benedict. One special, consisting of baby spinach and artichoke hearts on biscuits with two poached eggs slathered in hollandaise sauce, under the menu heading “Saturday and Sunday only, Yo,” is referred to by staff as “the Beastie,” an homage to late Beastie Boy Adam Yauch. Likewise, an Annable recipe might include the instruction, “then mix that s$&# up.” Or, a taste test of potential menu special might prompt the question, “How are we gonna f#$% that up? We gotta f#$% it up good.”
“Don’t leave it tasting like something anyone could make,” is what she’s trying to say.
Annable is always looking for the next notch up the flavor scale, trying to find that one ingredient for every simple dish that puts the taste over the top. “I like to say, ‘What’s the crack? What’s the thing you put in there that the person is like, ‘Hmm, what is that?’ and can’t stop eating it?” she said.
The Hole’s huevos rancheros was inspired by Annable’s first ever rancheros encounter on a road trip in New Mexico. “It’s the one thing on our menu that I eat most myself,” she said. “I still look forward to the huevos every time.”
She started by ladling huge portions of black beans and rancheros sauce into separate frying pans over medium flames. Her beans are a stripped-down affair. She adds lightly sautéed onions, black beans, and chili powder, with a light salting going on throughout the process. “When I travelled in Mexico,” she said, “the women would bring me into the kitchen. All they had was a huge thing of salt. That’s all they used. I couldn’t understand how they could get those flavors with just salt, but they would add just a little bit at a time, over time.”
The rancheros sauce is sautéed onions, garlic, adobo peppers, sriracha, crushed tomatoes, oregano, all done in olive oil, salted, then cooked down.
The two eggs she had broken onto the griddle weren’t there long before getting flipped over. The beans got plated, then the eggs went on the beans, the rancheros over that, then some cheddar was spread. It all got pushed under the broiler to melt down. When it came out, she sprinkled on fresh, chopped green onions and it was ready to go.
While the huevos rancheros is a heaping helping and very satisfying, it has a refreshing lightness to its step. Maybe it’s that the sauce is not overly spicy. Maybe it’s the fluffy stone-ground white grits on the side, rather than corn tortillas, that all leaves you feeling like you can get up and get going rather than needing to find a place to lay down and recover.
“It’s Americana comfort food,” said Annable. “Everything here is made from scratch, except for the biscuits.”
The Pigeon Hole serves about 1,000 biscuits in a busy week in several biscuit dishes, from red-eye gravy (made with heavy cream, sautéed onions, diced ham, and a blend of Shenandoah Joe coffee grounds, special to the PH) to biscuit baskets with butter and jams to egg and meat sandwiches on biscuits and biscuit-bottomed Benedict platters. “It would be cruel and unusual to make anyone make that many biscuits.”
Another weekend-only Benedict classic you’ll want to try is the Crabby Florentine— wilted spinach on biscuits, with poached eggs topped with crabmeat and hollandaise. The first time Annable tried the dish, she said, “I took one bite and was like, ‘Oh my God, this might be the best thing I have ever eaten.’”
The brand new Crozet branch library. Photo: Jack Looney
The universe (which others call the Library) is composed of an indefinite, perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries.–Jorge Luis Borges, “The Library of Babel”
In September, Albemarle County will open a library in a brand new building in Crozet. Between now and then, it will also begin a public planning process for the newly approved $12 million Northside branch library, which is set to be relocated from its current strip mall home to a building that for years served as a warehouse for a building supply company on Rio Road West.
The process will mostly involve detailed citizen input on specific topics, like how many computer terminals will be online and whether there will be separate areas for children and teenagers. It’s not likely to address the question of whether or not libraries are relevant in the digital age, because the statistics show they are, which is amazing, in a world where Google is the information architecture for our most basic decisions and the publishing industry is moving digital.
The Crozet library is going to be grand. The exterior has already taken a stately shape, two stories formed in stone and brick with towering panes of glass, and an interior that promises to hold all the appeal of a cozy, high-end ski lodge. A fireplace with cushy lounge chairs facing its hearth sits adjacent to floor-to-ceiling, end-to-end windows with spectacular panoramas of the Blue Ridge Mountains. The view anchors what will be one end of an open expanse of book stacks, computer stations, reading and meeting tables, and separate, designated areas for children, teens, and adults. At the opposite corner of the span from the windows is the door to a large multi-purpose room, to be used for public events and as a home to various learning programs.
It’s a monumental project on many levels. The new Crozet library will be double the size of the current one, which resides in the old railroad depot, affording space for not only more meeting area but more room for books as well. Shelf space is so tight now that if they acquire a new title they have to get rid of another one to make room for it.
John Halliday, director of the Jefferson-Madison Regional Library (JMRL) System, has overseen the development of the brand new Crozet branch library, a $9.6 million project, and sits on the committee that will award the contract for the $11.8 million renovation of the Northside branch library. Photo: Elli Williams
“It’s the first library that Albemarle County has ever built,” said John Halliday, director of the Jefferson-Madison Regional Library (JMRL) System. “This Crozet library will be the first [JMRL] library to meet state standards of what a public library should be.”
The Crozet library cost $8 million to build, with an additional $1.6 million to be raised by the community to furnish books and computers. Library supporters are about halfway to that goal thanks in part to $100,000 contributions from Hollywood film director and UVA alumnus Tom Shadyac (Patch Adams and Ace Ventura: Pet Detective) and the Dave Matthews Band.
The JMRL system, which operates nine libraries in four counties, has almost 500,000 books, and circulates around 1.5 million books a year. Just 2.7 percent of that circulation—roughly 40,500 units—are books downloaded from its website.
The busiest branch in the entire JMRL system is the Northside library, located in the sparsely-inhabited Albemarle Square mall on 29 North just above Rio Road. According to Halliday, the county is paying $300,000 a year to rent the 15,000 square feet of space the library now occupies at Albemarle Square. It also pays an additional $200,000 a year for the storage space that holds county administrative records. The new Northside branch will accommodate both the library and the county’s storage needs, so the new library is a solution to an existing, pressing problem, and the proposed $11.8 million investment is calculated to pay for itself within 10 years.
The main challenge facing the county and JMRL right now is time. The lease on the Albemarle Square property expires Halloween 2014. That means over the next couple weeks a hand-picked committee of county, community, and library people, including Halliday, need to select an architect from a batch of 12 submissions received during the bid process. As is the standard these days, community input is considered a prerequisite to a successful project.
“One of the qualifications of course will be to see how they have worked with community input in the past,” said Halliday.
Once a design firm is selected, the county will hold a public meeting sometime in August, during which the community will voice its preferences and concerns to the architect, who will then go and turn the input into a vision to be reexamined and modified until it is eventually hammered into a plan that everyone can agree on. At that point, the architects will have to figure out how to convert a warehouse into a full-fledged, digital-age library in a matter of months.
Books and mortar
When it was announced that the Library contained all books, the first reaction was unbounded joy. All men felt themselves the possessors of an intact and secret treasure. There was no personal problem, no world problem whose eloquent solution did not exist—somewhere in some hexagon.—Jorge Luis Borges, “The Library of Babel”
“We’re closing down branches and shutting down hours across the country,” said UVA professor and digital media guru Siva Vaidhyanathan. “The great thing about Charlottesville is that we haven’t had to do that. We’re opening libraries here.”
Vaidhyanathan, Robertson professor and chair of the UVA media studies department, is a leading expert in the field of information science. Once named by Library Journal as one of the “Movers & Shakers” of the library field, he is the author of the widely acclaimed books, The Googlization of Everything and The Anarchist in the Library, works that mainly address the perpetually changing behaviors that dictate the custody and dissemination of information in the digital age. His tweets and articles appear in such vaunted places as Salon, Slate, and The New York Times.
The Googlization of Everything is an energizing read–a fast-paced and thorough analysis that contrasts the pitfalls with the conveniences of living under a monopolistic yet seemingly innocuous (their motto from the jump was “Don’t Be Evil”) search engine company that has evolved into the largest, most pervasive information holding, manipulating, and distributing company in history. Vaidhyanathan profiles all the ways in which Google has insinuated itself into our society and our lives, and sketches out the extent to which the company holds sway over key aspects of the business realm. He also poses alluring questions, like considering whether or not Google can be considered…you guessed it …a library.
While Albemarle residents are indeed fortunate to be able to upgrade and build new libraries, Vaidhyanathan wonders if all the right questions were considered, but he doesn’t question the need for libraries.
“One of the things that I’ve noticed about the Albemarle, I guess the Jefferson region, the city and county libraries, is that they’re not evenly spaced,” he said. “There’s no library branch in some of the low income neighborhoods in Charlottesville. It seems to me that that should have been their priority from the beginning.”
It’s perhaps indicative of county library planners’ particular problem that they have a digital media expert whose writing on libraries and information reaches to the far corners of the globe following their progress. It’s also, maybe, a testament to our confusing information landscape that his main critiques deal with the location and condition of its buildings and the quality of the books they hold, not to the digital horizon he perpetually contemplates.
Siva Vaidhyanathan, chair of the UVA media studies department, is a leading expert in the field of information science. Once named by Library Journal as one of the “Movers & Shakers” of the library field, he is the author of the widely acclaimed books, The Googlization of Everything and The Anarchist in the Library. Photo: Jane Haley
“The existing libraries are in need of upgrades anyway. Every one of the library branches needs upgraded collections. The children’s books are a couple of decades out of date at this point,” Vaidhyanathan said. “It’s clear that both Charlottesville branches need pretty serious upgrades as well. The Downtown Charlottesville library is sort of musty, has old furniture, old carpeting, inadequate parking.”
As a nearly daily visitor to the JRML Central Branch library, I read out-of-town newspapers, borrow Vaidhyanathan’s books, and cruise the stacks at random to see what might jump out at me. My motivations are, essentially, nostalgic.
My world of information, though, is distinctly digital. I have a smartphone, I submit stories via Google Docs, and run a small documentary media company with contracts in Michigan and California from my desk in Belmont.
Downtown reference librarian Russ Lyttleton worked in the Cincinnati public libraries for nine years before coming to work in the JMRL system two and half years ago. He also sat on the planning committee for the 2007 renovation of the downtown Cincinnati library, a project that reflected the new direction of libraries as community centers where the public can access computers at no cost.
“We centralized all the computers into a computer lab,” said Lyttleton. “We added the nice new flat-panel computers with faster processing speed and added a lot more software. We also added video editing and sound editing software. The computers here, for security reasons, won’t allow outside materials to be uploaded onto the computers.”
While I don’t really have to use them, I’ve noticed that the in-house computers at the Central Branch could use some updating. The library website offers a plethora of e-encyclopedias, e-books, and e-magazines and journals, but it has some catching up to do in the software department. For instance, if you bring in a disc or other drive and upload it to work on it on JMRL’s computers, you’ll get an error message.
Since we will soon be a community of library planners and since $12 million of our tax dollars are going to build a new library, these are the sorts of specifics we might want to consider. And since software evolves on a nearly continual cycle these days, and hardware generations turn over only a little bit slower than that, considering those specifics very quickly gets you into thinking about bigger stuff, like what the library should look like 10 years from when it’s built. Or whether libraries should be virtual information networks or place-based community centers.
If you put on your Google Glasses and look around, it’s not hard to see how quickly the fundamental idea of a library as a repository for books is changing. San Antonio will open what Bexar County, Texas touts as the country’s first completely bookless library later this year, the BiblioTech. All its holdings will be accessible only from computer stations or on mobile devices. Public libraries have experimented with nearly book-free environments already, usually resulting in vitriolic public backlash, at least in the cases of Newport Beach, California and Phoenix, Arizona, but it’s irrefutable that libraries are hardly about just books anymore.
“Libraries are really becoming community centers with a focus on education,” said Halliday. “We had 170,000 people come last year and use the computers.”
Sixty-three percent of adults in America are able to access the Internet via a personal mobile device such as a smartphone, tablet, or laptop computer. The Internet makes its way into 76 percent of American households overall. Income is the biggest exclusionary factor for people who don’t have their own personal Google machines. And with the Internet being where almost all information lives now, access to it is not even optional anymore, it’s crucial.
“One of the things we have to keep in mind about libraries is that they are the central nervous systems of the community,” said Vaidhyanathan. “They’re the places where people seek out jobs, seek out mystery novels, seek out music and movies but also seek out neighbors and collaborators and space to think and plan. A lot of really important civic engagement goes on in libraries.”
If libraries didn’t offer a free Internet service, there’s not a lot of other places people could go to log on. The Downtown library, between its mezzanine level computer lab and the several computer stations on the lower level of the building, has 25 general-use terminals where people with library cards can access the Internet. Those computers have a 30-minute time limit which is usually extended automatically so long as no one is waiting for a terminal. Once you sign off of a computer however, you have to wait another 30 minutes to get back on. There are three additional computers whose use is restricted to job searches and educational endeavors. The time limit on those is two hours and you need to have a librarian sign you on.
“Job applications are a huge part of our business, so to speak, or job searching,” said Lyttleton. “Or people have to interact with a government agency or make a tax payment or renew a license, that sort of thing.”
From the general-use computers, you can access only a very limited selection of e-books and you cannot access any of the titles downloadable for circulation unless you have a mobile device to put them on. And if you had that, you probably wouldn’t be at the library using their computers in the first place.
On any given day at the Downtown library, there are usually less people reading hard copy newspapers, magazines, and books than using computers. The people who come and stay a while are the Internet users and the parents who use the children’s section as a satellite daycare facility. Becoming an Internet access portal and a community center that happens to have some books on the shelves, which is sort of what the new Crozet library is shaping up to be, looks to be the way of the future.
As book repositories, our public libraries are used much in the way they have always been. People looking for books come in, find what they want, hit the checkout desk, and leave. Circulation still goes up every year.
“Here people still want to read books, hardback, physical books. When people go into a library, they still want to see physical books,” said Halliday.
Public libraries don’t receive near enough funding (Halliday says JMRL gets $600,000 annually for books, all from the state) to amass collections that rival the size and relevance of university libraries, though, so anybody serious about research locally would end up at UVA.
If that’s the case, shouldn’t our libraries should start to look more like the BiblioTech in Texas? If, in the future, books will be composed as digital files or scanned, digitized, and hosted online for prosperity why not position ourselves for access to all of that now? A recent Pew Research center study shows that the percentage of readers who prefer print, an aging group, are in decline, while our teens, who are demonstrating more of an affinity with e-readers of all types, are on the rise. If that trend continues, as most experts believe it will, books could well go the way of vinyl records, manufactured for and exchanged within a small community of fetishists and collectors. It seems impossible after so many centuries, but it’s probably going to happen.
Having grown up in smaller cities during the pre-culinary America era, the last few decades, for me at least, have been a psychedelic deliverance from the doldrums of Big Boy, Sizzler, egg foo young, and cardboard pizza. The accompanying historical landscape of the period —colored by preemptive and proxy military actions and psychopathic financial tactics used by the West to ensure global economic hegemony—has contributed to the droves of immigrants and refugees who have so graciously enriched the cultural and culinary fabric of our great land. Sure, we’re a land of possibilities, but it’s hard not to feel a little conflicted about our appreciation of an incredible array of cuisine options.
Eddie Keomahathai landed in Charlottesville from northeast Thailand with his family in 1976, at age 11. He was the eldest of three kids and, since both parents worked, his mom started teaching him how to cook as soon as they arrived here so he could help feed the family. Eddie and his family were not officially refugees, but his father was working for the U.S. military on an American air base in Thailand when the Yanks decided to pull out. Eddie’s father was given the opportunity to relocate his family to Virginia, as opposed to staying behind to see how things played out for a former employee of the U.S. military after the U.S. abandoned its efforts in Southeast Asia.
Eddie took to life in Virginia, learning a new language, a new way of living. He graduated from Charlottesville High School and licked off to Averett University in Danville to study art.
He opened Thai ’99 on Fontaine Avenue in 1999, using recipes he had been cooking for his family since he was 11 years old. “I found out though,” Eddie said, as we stood in the middle of a bee hive of pre-lunch prep work going on in the kitchen, “that it’s different in a restaurant.”
Eddie’s aunt, who operated a successful Thai restaurant in Loudoun County, came down to help with the menu and train the kitchen staff—Eddie, his wife Pat, and his mom—how to do things at restaurant speed.
Eddie and his family responded to the steep learning curve and got up to speed quickly. “It took about a week,” Eddie said. “Otherwise, you’re not going to be in business.”
On my first visit to Thai ’99, I ordered the pad ped with chicken. It burst with layers of flavor, so I haven’t ever tried anything else. Eddie agreed to show me how his pad ped is made.
He started with soy oil in a sauté pan on medium heat. When it got just warm enough, he dolloped in a heaping tablespoon of red curry paste—dried chilies, garlic, lemon grass, kaffir lime, cumin, coriander seed, cardamom, and galangal root. “The secret to this thing,” he said, holding the curry, “is you’ve got to get it at about medium heat and stir it when it bubbles up. The oil educes the flavor from all types of ingredients,” he explained. Once the curry dissolved, giving the oil a lovely red speckling, he brought in shredded bamboo shoots and chunks of pre-blanched white chicken meat. He let the oil and curry cook into that for a couple minutes.
I expected much more pop and sizzle, even flashes of flame leaping from under a huge wok, but it was all quite mellow, so as to allow this complex concoction of tastes to infuse the meat.
Then Eddie ladled on 1.5 ounces of a combination of oyster sauce, white soy sauce, and soy-based Golden Mountain seasoning sauce, which had all been reducing over a low flame. He added a half teaspoon of white sugar, to balance any bitterness in the curry, and set it back over medium flame. Then came fresh slices of red and green bell peppers. He asked me if I liked it hot.
Well, yeah.
He threw in a pinch or two of freshly sliced-open red and green Thai chilies, grown in the garden behind the restaurant, then added an ounce of chicken stock, let some liquid cook off the whole thing, and laid it out on a plate next to perfectly steamed white rice.
Pad ped is such a dynamic combination of tastes that it takes your buds a couple bites to detect them all and let them fuse. It’s a stimulating food of savory sauces, tangy curry, crisp veggies, chili spice, and firmly cooked chicken.
Eddie (who is no longer associated with Thai ’99 II on Gardens Boulevard) will open Bangkok ’99 in the Village Green Shopping Center on Commonwealth Drive in a few weeks. His younger cousin recently arrived from southern Thailand, an area where the cuisine is influenced by Malaysian and Indian cooking. “They have about eight different kinds of curry over there,” Eddie said of his cousin’s home region. “This kid can cook. He’s a younger version of me.”
While we may see some southern Thai specials at Eddie’s restaurants, he said he will be sticking with the tried and true menu that has served him and his customers (who he wanted to be sure to thank) over the years.
