The gourmet lunch spot and wine shop Ciboulette has always had a mixed reputation: great food, erratic service. (Both these qualities were widely attributed to the shop’s owner, Jose De Brito, who is described on one local blog as having “kind of a tart personality.”) Now the prominent Main Street Market space will start with a clean slate—new owners, new name and new concept—and presumably they’ll aim to keep the quality of the comestibles high while delivering cheery service to match.
Orzo’s the name (actually Orzo Kitchen and Wine Bar), and the game is Mediterranean—food from “Italy, Greece, and the South of France,” according to Charles Roumeliotes. He’ll take over the space along with his wife Katherine Korloff and Ken and Laura Wooten. Charles and Ken met when both worked at Fuel Co.; Katherine runs the Downtown antique store Cadogan Square, and Laura is an artist.
When Orzo opens on November 1, says Roumeliotes, it will be a full-service dinner restaurant with a big international wine list. Here’s the deal: Goodbye, deli cases (most of them, anyway), hello, tables and banquettes. Goodbye, retail operation (most of it, anyway), hello, meals of paella, risotto, pan-roasted salmon, escargot, and lots of other goodies from Europe’s balmier climes.
Roumeliotes says Orzo’s partners spent the last eight months hunting for a space. Deals at Vavino and L’Avventura (see below) fell through. But the searching paid off: Orzo will, Roumeliotes promises, “be a very pretty place.”
The adventure continues
L’Avventura, the Italian place next door to Vinegar Hill Theatre that closed earlier this year, has been bought by Brian Helleberg (who also owns Petit Pois and Fleurie) and will reopen any day now as Il Cane Pazzo. We’ll bring you more details soon.
Rough waters on the James
It’s been a bit of a culinary roller coaster lately for Scottsville residents. Restaurants have been coming and going at a pace that’s altogether dizzying for such a sleepy little burg. You had, a year and a half ago, the rise of the pizza-and-burritos-palace Brick Cafe. You had the demise of upscale Magnolia, the closing-and-reopening of the landmark Dew Drop Inn, and the arrival of tiny Minor’s Diner.
Meanwhile, Brick owner Timm Johnson, flush with success, went out on a limb and opened a steakhouse, the River Rock Chop House, next door. This proved an overly optimistic move; River Rock lasted less than six months, and now the Brick Cafe has followed its short-lived sister off the cliff.
This story’s not as sad as it may seem, though there is a little more bad news to divulge: High Meadows Inn, offering beds and prix-fixe dining, will close November 1. (Partners Rose Farber, Jon Storey, Jae Abbitt, and Peter Sushka are simply ready to retire from innkeeping, says Farber.) The good news: Farber has a new project in mind for Johnson’s Brick Cafe space.
Legalities were still pending when we talked with Farber, so she kept mostly mum about her plans. However, she did let slip the following phrases: “pizza, sandwiches and subs,” “jazz dance music” and “Rivertown Rose.” (That’d be the name of the new place.) More details when all those t’s have been crossed.
Y not, X?
Well, because “the stars didn’t line up,” says X Lounge spokesman J.F. Legault. He’s referring to the fact that he and his partners did not, in fact, sell the fledging club to Coran Capshaw, as recently hinted at in other local media. Though Legault & Co. are “honored to have received interest” from Capshaw, they are, at least for now, going full steam ahead with their Glass Building hotspot.