Author: Preston Long

This started out as a nachos survey, with me sampling some platters from a few establishments around the village perimeter, plus one on the Downtown Mall, just to establish a baseline. But I knew all along where it was going, where I would end up directing my sunshiny prose. I wanted to be in a spot with an ambrosial margarita, where the nachos, although a proper stand-in for supper fare, are abused as an excuse to order one more to wash it all down.

But this isn’t a drinking story. Not yet anyway.

Continental Divide is usually mad busy, which is why I have never made it past the point of giving my name to the hostess and then “waiting” at the bar with only appetizers and cocktails to keep me company until I’m full. I always end up figuring I’ll try back later. Finally, that later date came.

The menu and the daily specials at this UVA haunt on West Main are flush with southwestern delectables: Santa Fe enchiladas, catfish tacos, and salmon quesadillas with asparagus, tomato, and goat cheese. I zeroed in on the tuna tostada, a menu regular, and pestered chef Amber Cohen, who agreed to tell me how it’s made.

Cohen is a Lexington, Virginia native, and the daughter of a professional caterer. One of her first real gigs was at The Blue Heron, a vegetarian restaurant in Lexington, where the spice jars in the kitchen were left unlabeled. “You had to learn them just by the smell of them,” she said. She then apprenticed at several Charlottesville standards, including Bizou, Escafe, and Hamiltons’.

I followed her into the Continental’s impossibly tight kitchen and she took a sushi-grade yellowfin tuna steak, an inch and a half thick, and tossed it on the grill. She got some flour tostada crisps, which had been deep fried, and plated them. The tuna popped and sizzled over the flame. Cohen turned it once. She ladled black bean puree onto the lightly browned, puffy-crisp tortillas and spread a thin layer of roasted red pepper coulis over top.

“We do our beans from dry here,” she said. “Flavored lightly, with pretty much just cumin and onion.” She sprinkled crumbled goat cheese over the beans. After it had been grilling for only a few minutes, she took the seared tuna, sliced it in two, exposing the lovely pink, thick middle and laid it on the beans. Then came the kicker.

“It’s all about the glaze,” Cohen said. “You’re heating up rice wine vinegar, one of my favorite vinegars. Very versatile. It doesn’t have a heavy flavor and it’s a little bit sweet. It’s good to use in a similar fashion that you would use citrus, because it’s got that tart, sweet thing. So you heat the vinegar, you add sugar to it, dissolve the sugar, then you let it cool down and you add in your peppers, diced raw peppers, and you let it sit for a couple hours. And that’s what makes it special, gives it the awesome flavor.”

Cohen delicately spread the glaze over the stack of fish, beans, cheese, and flour crisps. And she was right: awesome. The tuna tostada is a crazy assemblage of textures and flavors. The bean puree and crisps have a little melding party. Within the tuna itself, the contrast of the seared outer skin against the pink pure middle is just right, and deserves to be enjoyed without distraction. But anyone can grill sushi grade tuna at home. The glaze is what makes people crave this thing, dream of it during the week. It gives the whole thing an Asian tinge, a complex sweet and sour essence.

When she one day has her own place, Cohen reckons, she may lay off the meat.

“I’m not vegetarian but I love cooking vegetarian food. I think being a meat eater in the long run makes me a better vegetarian chef because when you get used to the way things taste, you just dull your palate a little bit,” she told me. “I feel like I’m tasting what’s missing and a lot of times vegetarian food is too often flat and depends too much on cheese. Not that cheese isn’t delicious, it is. But often, things aren’t spiced properly or are missing certain elements for making a whole flavor. So, that’s really what I would want to do is vegetarian comfort food.”

I’ll be there when it opens.

By the way, I happened to stop back by the bar on my way out to inquire about the mysteries behind the Divide’s signature margaritas. They have a page-long list of tequila options, plus you can customize your drink by choosing Cointreau or Grand Marnier over the rail triple sec. Actually, bartender Matt McCaskill says you can just ask for yours “smoky or crisp, or citrusy or smooth.” And he will try to comply. I asked for mine to taste like tequila, more sour than sweet. He started with a dash of Cointreau over a full glass of ice. Then came a heaping helping of Jose Cuervo Platino. He added a splash of the housemade sour mix, which, McCaskill said, he couldn’t tell me anything about. Fresh lime juice came next. He cupped the glass with a stainless steel shaker, gave it a couple hearty jolts, popped the rim of my glass into a pile of chunky salt, poured the concoction back into the glass and garnished it with a lime wedge. If there’s a better margarita in town than this one, I definitely don’t need to know about it.

The fast food franchise gods have extended a gesture of mercy toward us and hath bestowed upon our town a considerable bounty of good tidings with the opening of Popeyes Louisiana Kitchen (1). It might behoove us all to send up thanks with abandon and with earnest zeal as then these gods may see fit to soon grant us a Krystal or a Del Taco, moving us closer to the day when we look over a fully realized national franchise tapestry, as proud as any in the Northern South.

I have lived in a Popeyes-free zone in the past, in Buffalo, New York. The one escape hatch was the Popeyes located at the first service plaza east of town on the New York State Thruway. I merely needed to get a toll ticket, drive 15 or so miles toward Rochester, hit the plaza, gobble down the goodness, get back on the Turnpike, take the first exit, pay a nominal toll, exact a U-turn, get another toll ticket, drive back to my home exit, pay another small fee, and be happy to have done it.

But the logistical issues of the Thruway stunt was nothing compared with trying to get in and out of the Popeyes parking lot on Emmet Street between Hydraulic and Angus. Nevertheless, we are blessed to have it there. What it brings is something there just ain’t enough of around here—red beans and rice.

I have no interest in getting into a chicken argument here. The bird served at Popeyes is just fine. Pulitzer Prize winner, best-selling author, and Alabaman Rick Bragg stated in his 1999 classic, All Over But the Shoutin’, that Popeyes makes as fine a piece of chicken as he has ever eaten. And I bet that dude has eaten some fried chicken. But more to the point, I have known New Orleans natives who consider Popeyes’ red beans and rice the best they have had.

Is it possible that a fast food chain is serving up something so good that it is not surpassed by all these fine dining kitchens, over-staffed with Culinary Institute of America-trained chefs, sous chefs, and sauciers? I think it might be.

I ate red beans and rice on Decatur Street in New Orleans last November. It was quite good. It was soupy and tangy and came with two pieces of fried chicken. I was charged about $9 for this. I mention that because when I went looking for alternatives to Popeyes’ beans and rice, I wound up at Miller’s Downtown. It has long offered NOLA–
inspired fare and I figured the red beans and rice platter deserved a go. I ordered the side portion of beans and rice and must have looked pitiful doing so, as the side portion does not normally come with sausage, but my gracious server persuaded the cook to toss some andouille into my little bowl. Hence, I was able to get an idea of what the dinner platter, which does come with sausage, would taste like. It was lusciously brothy, if not a tad light on flavor, and the andouille sausage gave it a perfectly seasoned balance. Here’s the problem: This entrée costs $14.

At the risk of offending any actual peasants, this is peasant food, after all. I thought the New Orleans price was pretty fair. I can’t imagine that the cost of doing business on one of the most visited streets in the French Quarter is that much less than our Downtown Mall. Heck, on Walworth Road in my old South London neighborhood, there’s a Jamaican bakery selling a huge plate of beans and rice, with a jerk chicken quarter on top, for 5 quid—a little less than the cost of two pints of Stella. Can we really not compete with the food prices of London and New Orleans?

La Michoacana (2)  serves a beans and rice platter. Soupy, refried black beans alongside sticky saffron rice with a small salad and fresh avocado slices. It’s great, it’s $8, but it’s not quite enough food at that price.

Mel’s Diner (3) has a red beans and rice side that’s more like a jambalaya. The beans and rice are mixed in together in a sauce-free blend, and it’s quite good once you get some hot sauce in there. It’s a smaller portion, but you can fill out the plate with other great sides. I went for the collard greens and mac-n-cheese. It’s pretty much a meal and the whole thing came to less than $6.

After I had gone around and tried these other fine dishes, I went back to Popeyes to make sure. I got the large side of red beans of rice. It was $4.35 with tax and still the best of the lot. New Orleans native Al Copeland, who came up poor in the housing projects of an impoverished city, started Popeyes in the ’70s, aiming to make cheap food for a broke-ass town. His passing five years ago was mourned by food critics and cultural commentators alike. He came as close as you can to making food that goes out to hundreds of restaurants taste like he’s back there cooking it himself. And don’t pass up the mashed potatoes with Cajun gravy or the corn on the cob.

I had never known an independent organic farmer before I went to meet Michael Clark, who owns and works Planet Earth Diversified (PED) farm outside of Stanardsville. Therefore, I had nothing on which to base any expectations. But what I did not expect was to meet an organic farmer who would go fishing more often if he didn’t have to stand still in order to do it; who kills enough deer to keep his freezer stocked with venison; who once applied for and was offered a job as an electrical engineer to help design Ronald Reagan’s pie-in-the-sky Star Wars missile defense system. I did not expect a farmer who stays up too late at night learning Linux so he can eventually write computer code to outfit his five greenhouses with an automated monitoring system; and who also dabbles in motion graphics for the YouTube videos that Planet Earth makes and posts to help raise public awareness of what independent farming is all about.

“Oh, I’m not opposed to national defense,” Clark said when he caught me doing a squinty-eyed double take at that Star Wars tidbit. And the deer slayer part is mostly because he has a permanent license to kill wild animals that graze his crops and could contaminate his produce.

Clark is an enigma. An engineer with a metaphysical mission. A naturalist farmer who was willing to work for Ronald Reagan. Raised Episcopalian in suburban Richmond, he grew his first tomatoes at age 5. The next year, he planted walnuts with his grandfather on land that he now owns in Floyd County. Clark brought his own hydroponically grown roses in five-gallon buckets with him from home when he came to UVA to study engineering in 1975. He tended to those flowers in the space where his roommate’s lower bunk would have been, had the roommate shown up for school. He sold his produce at Blue Mountain Trading Company (now Integral Yoga) while in college. He has been growing things for a while now. And the produce that comes out of his farm is as fine as any available.

“It’s amazing stuff,” said chef Harrison Keevil of Brookville Restaurant. “It tastes delicious, it’s grown correctly, and it’s just cared for. [Clark] actually loves absolutely everything that he does.”

Any longstanding regular customer of Clark’s—and there are many—will tell you the same thing about him.

“What he does,” said Vincent Derquenne, chef at Downtown favorites Bizou and Bang!, “is beyond organic. The guy works very hard to bring that product that is in that little box. I don’t think people understand when you buy the baby mizuna (greens), the micro mizuna, how much work that little box was.”

Love and the tomato

Clark’s produce is so good that it found him true love. I had a chance to hang out at the first day of the City Market season with Clark and his partner—in life and on the farm —Leslie Jenkins. In the late ’90s, Jenkins worked at Integral Yoga, where Clark brought his goods to be sold. “Everyone told me, you should try his tomatoes,” she said during a lull. “But I wouldn’t eat any tomatoes that I hadn’t grown. One day at the store, I was eating cheese on baguettes with sliced tomatoes and I was like, ‘Oh my God, where are these tomatoes from?’ Somebody said, ‘You’ve been selling them.’ So, the next time Michael came in I talked to him and then started working on his farm.”

When I first tried to get my head around the idea that Clark had carried his leafy greens, tomatoes, cucumbers, and radishes to the market pretty much every Saturday between Easter and Christmas for 30 years, I got snagged on what I assumed the toll of the social aspect of dealing with customers would take on a man who has chosen to live all of his adult life in the deep country. But he and Leslie work so hard on the farm, a farm they couldn’t possibly leave to itself for any significant length of time, that a day at the market is their version of a day off. Albeit a long day off.

The night before market, they both stayed up until midnight, weighing and packing micro-greens, arugula, spinach, and all manner of herbs into plastic cartons and Ziploc bags—each labeled and bar coded. They wake at 3am, pack up the truck, drive the 22 miles to town, set up the tent and the stainless-steel bins, fill them with ice, arrange the produce in neat rows, make coffee three different ways, hang signage, and then proceed to sell bag after bag and carton after carton of greens from 7am until noon.

Then, as the market merchants break down their stands to go home, chefs from Downtown restaurants start showing up at Clark’s stand to take produce he has not yet sold. Derquenne and his sous chef, Brett Venditti, walked up about 12:30pm, the day I visited, to look through a big cardboard box of leafy bunches that Clark had set aside for them.

“Doing what we do with him, coming at the end [of the market day] and picking up things is more about, for us, to push us to create new things,” said Derquenne. “It’s always good for us to have something coming out of what’s left and we say, ‘O.K., we’re going to do something with this.’ Pretty much the box that he gives us is kind of a surprise. For brunch, for example, we created a couple of new things just because of the things that we got from Michael. And that’s what’s fun. We like changing our menu and at the same time we like to be taken out of our comfort zone.”

Now that it’s warmer outside, they will come. They’ll come from the field and the hollow and the valley and even the next state over. I saw one last summer just after he had gotten off the bus. He looked as lost as Gomer Pyle at a love-in. He was warily wandering around the west end of the Mall, a little after sundown, in dark-colored dress jeans—creased, of course—with a short sleeve, snap-button, pattern-fabric cowboy shirt and a 10- gallon hat. He carried a small, overnight Samsonite in one hand and a guitar in the other.

“How you doing?” I asked him.

He looked at me like he was still shaking off the residuum of whatever malfunctioning time machine had landed him here.

“All right,” he said, completely unconvincing even to himself.

A couple hours later, I saw him walking west on Preston Avenue around Harris Street as though he was expecting to find an all-night diner he could hole up in until Mrs. Mulgrew would rent him a room at her boarding house come morning.

The cowboy hung around the Mall for a week or so, seeming to have made a couple of unlikely acquaintances of the more bohemian variety. He tried playing a little music with some of them, all sitting outside of Red Light’s offices (some of the slyer ones will set up a block away, so as not to appear too desperate) hoping someone would look down from the tower and say, “Holy s**t fellas, I think I see the next Alicia Keys right down there.”

After about a week, the cowboy disappeared, off to find the real Nashville, one would hope.

If that cowboy was still here though, I’m sure he’d be happy to spend what few bucks he scraped together busking the hard, brick streets of our town on a hearty, home-cooked meal, the kind of meal he might have found at that diner at the end of the world he was walking toward, or at Mrs. Mulgrew’s supper table.

Three places along the West Main Street corridor have popped up lately, serving just that meal—the kind of repast that would have sustained perseverant traders on treks over the Khyber Pass.

The Afghan Grand Market on West Main set up a steam table six or seven weeks back and started serving hot meals of kabobs and curries. The curry changes day to day: Monday and Tuesday it’s lamb, Wednesday/Thursday goat, and on Fridays, chicken. They all come ladled over basmati rice with naan and some creamy sauce. There’s even a little side salad. The curry is of the milder variety spice-wise but there’s a sauce to fix that. All the food is halal and the curry is done in vegetable oil, not butter. It’s all $6 to $8.

A little farther down on West Main, just east of 14th Street, is Nasir Sathi, who used to serve his Pakistani delights in Manhattan but brought his family to Charlottesville to raise his children in a more family-friendly environment. His Kabab & Curry has been there just a month now. I had the goat curry, which came on long rice, with warm tandoori bread and a side salad. Very good. There’s a fairly extensive menu that includes fish and shrimp curries as well as fish kebabs. There’s plenty of reasons for repeat visits. The curry here is done in vegetable oil as well.

Back after a four-year absence is Just Curry. It’s directly across the Mall from the Commonwealth Restaurant & Skybar, which is handy for proprietor Alex George, because Commonwealth is his other project, which he worked on while Just Curry was on the back burner. Just Curry does lamb, chicken, goat, and veggie curries with a Caribbean bent. All ingredients are listed on the wall and they all come with a perfectly fried plantain. The thing that really sets this place apart though is the hot sauce: a papaya-habanero base with cumin, mustard seed, and a hint of citrus. It sounds a little fruity, but it really works.

Barbecue can be so vexing—like one of those vague memories you can’t decide whether it ever really happened, or you maybe just dreamt it. You’ll be driving around the ragged streets of North Philadelphia trying to find that vacant lot where some guy had a half-barrel smoker and was selling brisket and ribs wrapped in wax paper, making change out of his pocket. Was it a Saturday, or maybe a weekday? I thought it was hot outside, or maybe it was winter. Could it have been Brooklyn?

Then there’s always the idle smoker along the side of the road in Carolina. Cold, black steel welded together as tight as a battleship. Where, oh where, could the wonderful man be who’s going to fire this thing up one day and bring us the joy of hot, tender pork?

And it’s utter folly to send a friend to a place that you just happened across. A harmonica player from Kansas City talked trash about me for months, calling into question the reliability of my witness in the barbecue realm, over a barbecue mix up in Georgia. He and his band took a pork-seeking diversion while on tour to try out a place that I had recommended.

I called up the harp player after their tour. “Hey Ernie, what gives?”

“The meat was all watery and the sauce was thin and tasteless?”

“You went to Sam’s off of Route 92?”

“Yeah, Sam and Son’s on Route 52?”

“Criminy. Not Sam and SON’s. I’ve never even heard of that place.”

Apparently I haven’t learned my lesson, because, while Belmont Bar-B-Que dutifully collects Best of C-VILLE awards year after year, and the vaunted Barbecue Exchange lies a bit beyond my range, I’m about to tell you about a self-described “cue-ologist” who will be about as easy to find as the UPS driver that just left the failed delivery slip on your door while you were in the shower. Barry, from Lake Anna, introduces himself as B, as in B Blues BBQ. That’s his smoker sitting at the Joy Imperial gas station on High Street. He smoked there for a few weekends but now sells his pork mostly at the Batesville Store on weekends and in Lake Anna during the week. B is a man of many hats. A snowboard instructor by trade, he learned how to smoke meat back when he had a frame shop in Manassas and spent his off hours at his cousin’s barbecue place.

“He told me, if you’re gonna sit around here all night, I’m gonna put you to work,” said B. That’s where B learned barbecue. He serves pulled pork sandwiches, smoked with mostly hickory but sometimes apple or cherry wood.

He pulls the meat off of a shoulder and mixes in either his Memphis-style sweet red sauce, or a vinegar-based Carolina sauce. I had the Memphis mix with some hot sauce thrown in. Tremendous stuff. As good a sandwich as you’ll get around here. Later that same evening, I tried B Blues BBQ’s pork ribs, dry-rubbed. I wolfed them down like a pre-lingual savage.

Jinx, who has smoked his wondrous pork for 13 years at Pit’s Top, a couple gravestones southeast of Meade on East Market Street, is a Mississippi native, but that’s not where he learned about meat. “The only thing I learned in Mississippi was to get the hell out of there,” he said. He grew up outside of Chicago but got spiritualized about swine when he spent time with family in western Kentucky.

He studied art history in college but, “it didn’t take. I was always meant for food,” he said.

Many pit masters have day jobs and indulge their passion for meat on the side. For Jinx, you get the sense that smoking pork is something he is compelled toward out of a higher calling. And he’s a purist. A handwritten menu in his shack lists coleslaw with the caveat “not recommended” in parentheses. I asked about the slaw and Jinx shot me a glance like I was trying to pass him a joint in church.

“No, I don’t recommend it,” he said. “Slaw is not in barbecue, that’s B-B-Q,” he said, pointing to placard on the counter that explains the difference. “I don’t have any anyway.”

Jinx’s pulled pork is stupendous. World class. And he’s not afraid to leave some gooey, juicy fat in the serving. He goes so light on the sauce you’re not certain there’s actually any there. All the better, because it’s like pork pudding, served on thin white bread.

Ace Biscuit & Barbecue, opened by a former sous chef last summer on Henry Avenue, serves ’cue with a broad range of side options to build yourself a multi-course lunchtime feast. There’s evidence of experimentation inspired by culinary curiosity here, but it’s solid, fat-free meat just the same.

For the biggest selection of sauces, Buttz BBQ on Elliewood Avenue is your place. You can mix and match Texas Red with Sweet Mustard, Alabama White or the heater Haba Haba. There’s also beer (it is the Corner after all) and rumblings of dinner hours in the works.

The New York pizza slice, for years the pizza gold standard, inspired a lot of wasted effort and money, what with people trying to reproduce NYC pizza parlors, replete with transported ovens, in places like Kansas or Albuquerque or (gack) San Francisco. Pizza everywhere was measured against some non-specific New York City pie. If you pressed New Yorkers as to where one could go to procure this mythical slice, no two people—not even two natives of the same ’hood—would name the same place. Foodies theorize about what makes this supposed world’s-greatest-pizza so special. One compelling posit is the water argument, which runs thus: New York City tap water is divinely endowed with unnamed pizza-perfect minerals not found elsewhere, which, hence, precludes the New York slice from being replicated anywhere else. The same has been said for whatever it is that deifies the NYC bagel.

Well, it’s all a bunch of hooey. I’m writing this from New York City and I can find nothing in any New York pizza that isn’t equaled or surpassed pretty much anywhere else in the States. The water seems to have much less to do with the reputation of the NY slice than does the amount of beer consumed prior to the impossibly late hour at which it was gobbled down in three bites. And most Charlottesvillians find laughable the notion that they need look any farther than Bodo’s for a world-class bagel.

Many cities eschewed the NY pizza style from the get-go and perfected their own thing, like Chicago’s deep dish, or Detroit’s Greek-influenced, square-cut sheet pie, with a buttery crisp crust and the sauce on top of the cheese. The style doesn’t matter a lick just so long your effort produces an earnest product of the combination of the unique factors that make your town a singular entity.

Dr. Ho’s Humble Pie, out North Garden way, with its vegan and whole wheat offerings, kooky topping combos, and all-around consistently solid pizza, well represents that New Age-agrarian bent that encapsulates Albemarle’s culinary ethos. Thomas Jefferson himself would most certainly approve of a Ho’s pie, so long as it was done up with foie gras and brie.

But everybody knows Ho’s. So let’s consider alternatives.

The pie at the Tip Top on Pantops is well beyond what you would expect from a big menu diner because the College Inn owners modified their Corner classic pan pizza for a more diner-appropriate pie. The 10″ Ala Greca, decked out with feta, fresh spinach, black olives, and sun-dried tomatoes, is top-notch. If you want to build your own, they have a great list of toppings, including hot peppers.

I mention peppers because as good as the personal pizza at Sal’s Caffe Italia is, the Downtown Mall spot has a short list of fixings. Mine came with pepperoni and anchovies. And that’s about as crazy as the options run here. But the crust is stout, buttery, and fluffy. The mozzarella cuts off clean and isn’t stringy. The sauce is tasty, if not a tad conservative on the tangy scale.

Pippin Hill Farm and Vineyards, another North Garden destination, serves specialty pies, with a haute touch, from a wood-fired brick oven. A couple Sundays ago, they served a limited run of small pizzas tricked out with barn sausage, sage, artichoke, some fancy cheese, and a balsamic drizzle. The juicy and delectably seasoned sausage put this thing over the top. All of these elements worked together very well without a hint of disharmony. Somebody here must know what she’s doing.

All these pies are great, but when you need a quick fix, and can’t commit to an entire pizza, the choices boil down to Christian’s and Vita Nova, both on the Mall, both New York-style. I have done repeated cold slice samplings (the only way to evaluate the true flavor) of both of these cheese pizzas. Vita Nova took over Christian’s old space, next to C-VILLE Weekly, in 1997, buying out Christian’s remaining lease with a non-compete clause, which prohibited Christian’s from re-opening until the lease expired. Vita Nova gradually morphed Christian’s recipe into its own concoction only to watch Christian’s re-emerge at its present location, in 2000, immediately after the expiration of the non-compete agreement.

Christian’s generally does a brisker business. Location, location, right? The Vita slice has a better crust. It’s dense and hearty. Christian’s sauce, especially accentuated at room temperature, has that pure tomato delicateness, very light on the condensed paste element. It’s a push, but go Vita Nova. We enjoy the company at the lonely end of the Mall.

Color me tacky and low-rent, but there’s just something homey and inviting about the naive optimism and dauntless ambition behind a strip mall storefront that has been transformed into an enchanting dining experience with a cozy darkened lounge. The practice must have been perfected in places like Texas, Florida, and Dubai, where the blistering heat forces people to scurry from their refrigerated cars to the comfort and safety of the nearest A/C bunker.

Sure, the Downtown Mall (so misguidedly named) is pleasant for a stroll on the way to dinner. You can window shop boutiques while giddily anticipating an after-dinner gelato. You can pass out some loose change along the way and feel good about helping some of the more consistently visible Downtown denizens get closer to their sleepy-time 40-ounce. Yeah, Downtown is special, but at a strip mall, you can park 10′ from the door, leave the rumble of four lanes of high speed traffic safely off to your side, and step into another world—a world of exotic music, aromatic herbs and incense, and luscious cuisine from distant lands.

Before the theoretical tenants of The Shops at Stonefield (who have started taunting us with signs in the windows of empty spaces that promise “gourmet burgers,” a “world class Mexican kitchen,” and an “Italian food and wine bar”) attempt to shift the center of culinary prominence toward the north side of town, there are still a few places that have been up there all along that are worth a try.

At the more affordable end of things is a place that opened last fall, El Tepeyac. It’s in a little strip of shops on Greenbrier Drive, tucked in alongside a paint store. It has big-screen fútbol rolling most of the time. If there’s no match to watch, then it’s Mexican soap operas and game shows. I ducked in with a friend the other day, sat down, and chuletas puerco ranchero jumped right off the menu and onto the table: two well-cooked boneless pork chops bathed in a spicy green rancheros sauce and flanked by refried beans and saffron rice. It was hearty and very well prepared. My buddy had the chiles rellenos: two poblano peppers stuffed with mozzarella and covered in sauce. I tried it and it’s a winner. This place has great salsas, not necessarily tempered for the gringo tongue. It also servers pupusas, a Salvadoran delight that is a kind of a thick, stuffed corn tortilla, as well as tacos. Plus there’s girl-drink booze and after-meal sweets.

At the recommendation of one of my neighborhood merchants—a native to the sub-continental region—I made it over to Maharaja, which sits along the east side of 29 North, just past Hydraulic Road, and looks out its front window at the business end of the Burger King drive-thru. The warm, inviting, madras-toned environs, detailed with tatted fabric lighting covers, is a nice respite from the asphalt sprawl outside. I got the chicken bhindi: white chicken meat that comes in an okra-heavy base with vegetables and garam masala, (spicy hot) seasoning. I was sent there to order something else (forgot my crib notes), but it was darn good and as spicy as promised. My date was well pleased with her two vegetable side dishes, mattar paneer—soft cheese chunks in a spiced creamy sauce—and vegetable masala, all with perfect rice. This place feels great.

The best spot for me on the strip mall trip this time, however, was Copacabana. It’s nestled into a little cubby, snug up against the building that Whole Foods used to occupy at Shoppers World. The menu is a tantalizing list of pastas with all manner of seafood and a large beef section. I was in for lunch and got the very simple but flawlessly prepared and presented sautéed shrimp in garlic and lemon butter with collard greens, rice, and fried bananas. It was ocean fresh, piping hot, and really, really good. The fried bananas were good enough to make me forget I ever had a plantain.

The cheap date is a tricky proposition. But there are ways to cut corners without necessarily revealing yourself for the broke-ass bounder that you really are. Despite the holdover notion that some here in central Virginia cleave to—the idea that we live in some bastion of Southern rectitude—you needn’t occupy your mind with chivalric conceits. It would be lost on, maybe even looked upon with consternation, by the vast majority of women around here. Let’s face it, these days Albemarle County is about as Southern as Harvey Keitel’s Arkansas drawl in Thelma and Louise.

For instance, there’s not one meat-and-three in the whole burg. And there’s often an acre of empty tables at establishments like Henry’s Restaurant—which serves econo-priced pork chops, meatloaf, mashed potatoes, and cocktails—while people wait in lines at sushi joints all up and down the Mall. There is nary a juke joint nor blues bar in the 434 area code. Heck, you can even get store-bought liquor on Sunday. This is essentially Fairfax County with a better view of the mountains and a much longer drive to Ethiopian food.

And there’s absolutely nothing to be ashamed of in any of that. Our town proffers a different small batch blend of eclectic charms from your typical old sleepy Southern hollow. Case in point, much-ballyhooed, The Local in Belmont has half-price bottles of wine until 9pm on Mondays. And nothing says “this relationship is important to me” like a Monday night date. There are excellent pasta plates in the $13-15 range and you can even get protein dishes for under $20. Yeah, twenty smackers is twenty smackers, but come on, you love her and you’re getting pricey wine at beer rates.

If you’re bold enough to employ the Sunday date gambit, you can start going on about how you’re really in the mood for a gourmet burger during the drive Downtown. “You know, I heard Positively 4th Street serves a pretty mean lamb burger,” you say, decisively. “It’s supposed to have feta and spiced pickles and all kinds of stuff on it.” There’s no need to mention that all burgers and sandwiches are half-price on Sundays.

Sal’s Caffe Italia on the Downtown Mall isn’t exactly giving away entrees, but while perusing the menu you can pull the old, “Geez, it all looks so good, maybe we should do it tapas-style.” Then order the arancini rice ball appetizer, lightly breaded, deep-fried rice balls stuffed with seasoned ground beef that you dip in marinara. They’re terrific and weighty. Add to that the fried ravioli starter, maybe throw in a salad or soup and you’re both stuffed with Italian goodness without breaking the bank. They also have a great $12 personal margherita pizza. Sal’s is one of the few joints around here that has that old school, Teamster-classy feel.

Basil Mediterranean Bistro on the Corner offers a bevy of thoughtfully conceived, meal-scale salads. I tried the salmoni: nicely grilled salmon, moist but sturdy, on mixed greens tossed in a light, creamy Caesar with red onion, mandarin orange slices, Roma tomato, cucumber, and sprinkled parmesan. It’s $14 and Basil has a kind of Costa Brava ambience that lends your date night a fiesta vibe.

For the advanced cheap date daredevil, take a drive north. Three miles beyond the airport turnoff, keep a lookout, and pull into the Bamboo House on the right. Affordable and like nothing else around these parts, the optical centerpiece of the dining area is a diorama of the nuclear deer family. A stuffed daddy buck, mama doe, and a fawn, all set against a lake scene. Scattered about the dining room’s perimeter are all manner of stuffed ducks, squirrels, and foxes. What this place lacks in conventional fine dining prerequisites, it more than makes up for in David Lynchian charm. There’s myriad offerings in both Chinese and Korean cuisine, but ordering from the Korean listings seems to put some pep in the step of the gracious staff.

I had the bibimbap: bulgogi beef (which is sirloin minced and marinated in a sweet soy sauce, seasoned, then laid into spinach), shredded vegetables, kimchi, hot chili oil and sesame oil, bean sprouts, and an egg, done over easy, all on rice. Your server will then carefully mix this wondrous medley just so in a huge bowl. An exquisite concoction at $8.95. There’s beer but no hard liquor. But then, you have drive back to town anyway. Good luck.

After covering kebabs and burgers in my last two columns, I should, in the interest of my own constitution, undertake my signature psyllium screwdriver cleanse, which involves copious amounts of vodka, orange juice, a hot water bottle, and, well, you get the idea.

Instead, I’m soldiering on, and have been eating eggs and meat for breakfast, lunch, and the occasional dinner for the past week in search of the perfect anytime meal. As one single soul (and gullet) charged with covering every available economical breakfast option in town, this is obviously not a comprehensive sampling. It is random and perfunctory. Shoot me. Better yet, e-mail me your own favorites and I’ll visit them and tell you why you’re wrong.

Though I am not native to the region, I feel qualified to comment on the common-man cuisine hereabouts as I too hail from a place (Los Angeles) given to similar self-aggrandizement, where the people labor under some mass delusion that their town and its citizens are somehow special. They are not and you are not. But we can all eat eggs together.

There really is nothing more satisfying nor anything more American than the all-American eggs, meat, and potatoes breakfast. Yeah, chocolate bread to start the day can get you in the right state of mind to shuffle around art museums and stroll along the Left Bank. The same as cappuccino and biscotti may be perfect preparation for a gondola ride through the canals or flirting with pigeons on the Spanish Steps. But nothing will bolster the spine to take on the drudgery of an empty workday, or a mind-numbing road trip into the teeth of a blizzard like fried eggs, a couple slabs of sausage, and a pile of potatoes, washed down with boiling hot coffee.

Let’s start with Chaps (1), where the menu is rife with pleasant surprises, and raises the bar a tad for standbys like Tip Top. The sizeable sausage patties are perfectly spiced and griddled to juicy perfection. Over easy eggs here means over easy —great for dipping the thick rye slices in. The home fries are cooked to the optimum consistency, fluffy but not mushy, and hot and soft all the way through. The Downtown Mall joint serves breakfast all day and throughout the evening. The coffee is great too and sometimes you can get a homemade donut for dunking.

Over on the other side of the railroad tracks, on Second Street SE, Bluegrass Grill & Bakery (2) puts out a hearty spanakopita omelet for the Appalachian gourmet set. There’s feta cheese, spinach, mozzarella, and gyro meat folded into a thin casing of scrambled egg. I go for the grits side. They are piping hot and perfectly creamy. And the plate comes with a hefty homemade, whole-wheat biscuit. At almost $11, it’s the most expensive option among this week’s considerations, but well worth the upgrade. The breakfast menu here is expansive and it’s served all day too, but the day ends at 2pm at Bluegrass. There’s always a line on weekends but it’s fairly accessible Tuesday through Friday.

On the days you just can’t be bothered to sit and interface with a human being, Calvino Italian Bar and Eatery at the Main Street Market (3) turns out some fine breakfast sandwiches, with evocative names, over the counter. Last time there I tried the Isolina and ordered with my sunglasses still on. Prosciutto (a thin-sliced, cured ham), mozzarella, basil, and scrambled egg on buttery grilled Italian bread. Butter, cheese and meat, what could go wrong? Nothing here. Plus, it’s five bucks. There’s also an array of fruit smoothies on offer. And solid espresso coffees at clearance prices.

This week’s winner for me was an old breakfast-in-the-afternoon standby: huevos rancheros at the Fry’s Spring Guadalajara (4), which is two fried eggs drowning in ranchero sauce alongside refried beans and Mexican rice with flour tortillas for scooping and sponging up all the goopy goodness. The sauce is a dark, oxblood color, rich and zesty. It is tomato-based, spiced with chiles, ancho and guajillo. If you’re getting a late start to the day and need a little extra wake-up boost, the spice will set you right. If, by chance, the rest of the day is all yours, nothing complements rancheros better than an icy margarita. Which gives me an idea for another cleanse. Orale.