Author: Shea Gibbs

Almost nothing upsets me more than a poorly constructed sandwich. I’m not kidding. This may show my crazy a bit more than is appropriate for general audiences, but I have literally coldcocked a sandwich for falling apart in my hands. Yep. Dropped it on the plate, and decked it.

If you’re anything like me (God help you), please heed this warning when you try the burger at the Korner: Do not put it down. As soon as you bite into it, it will release its inner greatness in liquid form all over the very small plate it’s served on. Do not subject that bun to suicide by its own avarice.

Not that holding onto the Korner burger until it’s gone is a bad thing. This is one delicious sandwich. With hand-formed patties pressed to crusty on a hot griddle topped with American cheese that melts in an instant, L&T, and the dressing of your choice, it’s a no-nonsense take on the most American of sammies.

If the Korner burger sounds familiar to fans of Riverside Lunch across town, it’s for good reason. The two restaurants buy their beef fresh every day from the same vendor, and Korner owner Phillip Templeton manned the grill at Riverside for several years before taking over his family’s greasy spoon in 1983.

Indeed, the Korner and Riverside burgers are really only different in one way. Where Riverside balls its meat and presses it into patties right on the griddle, the Korner patties the meat first before finishing the press on the flattop. Hard to say whether this results in much difference in the final product—I haven’t picked up on much of anything—but perhaps it’s one of the reasons Riverside manages to garner top-burger accolades while the Korner is typically forgotten.

Templeton has another idea. Selling a near identical burger that actually costs less than Riverside’s, he figures the lack of exposure is mostly due to diners’ and wrongheaded journalists’ habits.

“It’s in your head,” he said. “The Riverside could do whatever they wanted and still sell their burger.”

Templeton admits the two restaurants attract slightly different clientele, with the Korner, at 415 9th Street SW, catering mostly to people on their lunch breaks, and Riverside attracting families in addition to the working people by staying open at night and offering beer and wine. As for atmosphere, if Riverside has one frill, the Korner is in debt by a few frills. This is a lunch counter, plain and simple. And as with anything, there are pluses and minuses to that fact. While you might not be hitting the Kor-
ner for a filling meal before a night out, you’ll feel right at home straggling in there in your sweats the morning after a night out on the Corner. While you might not want to hit the Korner with coworkers you don’t know all that well, it’s the perfect place to down a milkshake along with your burger and fries at 11:30am without fearing your health-conscious neighbors might show up.

To Templeton’s chagrin, all this amounts to the fact that you’re just about guaranteed a seat at the diner any time you come in these days. The restaurant opened in 1950 as the Kustard Korner but dropped the custard physically and in name in the mid-70s. By the 90s, the Korner had a consistent line out the door during lunch hours. Templeton thinks dine-in traffic has tapered since then due to several factors: a lot of local commerce has moved east along Main Street, the area around the Korner hasn’t been developed properly, and the 2008 recession lingers. The one thing that Templeton doesn’t seem worried about is the new wave of upscale burger joints whisking away his business.

“They talk about the gourmet burger, but this is still just a good old plain burger,” he said.

Which is not to say the Korner hasn’t adapted with the times. Seeing his dining room slowly grow emptier, Templeton has turned his family’s restaurant into a go-to catering provider. He bought a meat smoker years ago to crank out large cuts of pork and beef, and he’s landed customers like UVA and Martha Jefferson Hospital with his inexpensive bulk barbecue and handmade salads.

The dine-in customers benefit from the change too, as the Korner offers the barbecue pork sandwich on its regular menu. Templeton is quick to point out it’s nothing fancy—not like “that place down in Gordonsville,” he said—but it’s solid, with well-sauced, finely shredded smoked pork (add some Texas Pete for a kick) topped with the Korner’s own coleslaw (ask for extra).

As for maintaining the integrity of the barbecue sandwich as you munch through it, I have no advice. There is no keeping it together. Just take a deep breath and remember that eater-on-sandwich violence is never the answer.

Beer is like a moody lover. It can do you so right, before turning around (as soon as the next morning!) to do you so wrong. But beer still loves you, baby. Don’t be like that.

Seasonal beers, more than any other, know how to find the right mood. In the summer, you want to strip down to your ill-fitting swim trunks and caress the nearest icy saison. During the colder months, you might rather find yourself a lover with a little more meat on those bones—good malty backbones, to be exact.

“Winter beers are typically high in alcohol and warming,” Three Notch’d brewmaster Dave Warwick said. “It’s like a sweater you wear on the inside.”

If that sounds like a feeling you’d be into, consider these six winter beers you can try without ever leaving Charlottesville city limits. In fact, they’re mostly available within a mile and a half of one another, so throw on a snuggie and make it a pub-crawl.

Champion 

Champion Brewing Company releases so many beers so frequently, it’s tough to pin down one “winter seasonal.” The fastest growing brewer in Charlottesville is just finishing up its run of the Christmas beer “Yule Shoot Your Eye Out,” with two kegs left at the Belmont tasting room and six waiting to be sprinkled around the city by distributor Hop and Wine. Owner and brewmaster Hunter Smith said he intended for the beer to run out around Christmas, but if you can find one of the last few kegs around town, it’s worth a taste. With a spice mix that’s kicked up by the addition of ginger—it gives the beer something you can both taste and feel—it’s a unique twist on the classic “winter warmer” style.

Smith said the next winter beer to check out at Champion is the chocolate-cherry stout, a concoction that grew out of a suggestion by his wife. Since she’s been pregnant pretty much the whole time the brewery has been in operation, Smith figured she deserved a beer of her own. The stout, a lower-alcohol modification of Champion’s Red Scare Russian imperial, was just hitting taps at press time, and Smith said he wasn’t entirely sure how the cherries, added to the beer late during fermentation, would stand up to the chocolate. But knowing Smith’s over-the-top style (he added about three times the number of organic cherries that he thought was appropriate), they should come through.

“If we say something is going to be like something, we really try to make sure that it is, even if it is on the side of overdoing it,” Smith said. “There is nothing more disappointing than picking up a smoked vanilla porter and saying ‘I can kind of see that.’”

South Street 

With craft beer culture exploding around Charlottesville, it’s easy to forget about good old South Street. Don’t. The place still offers solid craft beers for some of the best prices in town.

As of last year, South Street added a new winter seasonal that’s a bit outside the box and worth looking out for (brewer Jason McKown said he’ll likely make one more batch before spring). Starting with the base recipe from South Street’s “Absolution” English brown ale, head brewmaster Jacque Landry added a hop bill that draws on the power of three varieties typically found in New World creations—Columbia, Centennial, and Cascade. The result, “C-Solution,” is a beer with a foundation in classic winter flavors but with the flavorful, bitter punch hopheads have come to love in modern IPAs.

“I like it because it has a good amount of malt character to give it a nice balance,” McKown said.

An older take on the winter seasonal but no less unique is South Street’s Sahti. The juniper-spiced ale is based on an old Finnish recipe, and it’s among only a handful of sahtis produced in the U.S. The brew is lighter bodied than what many of us have come to expect out of winter ales, but the piney juniper notes smack of the holiday season.

Three Notch’d  

The thing that puts me off about winter beers is their reliance on malt for flavor. I’m as guilty as anyone of allowing myself to get addicted to huge hops, so I often find malty beers excessively sweet and cloying. Needless to say, when Three Notch’d put its “Sweet Winter Ale” on the menu, I wasn’t running to the brewery to try it.

Somehow, it works.

“It’s sort of a made-up style,” Warwick said. “It’s a winter warmer but lower on the alcohol. It’s just a feel good, wintertime, sit-by-the-fire beer.”

Three Notch’d also offers a slightly off-center ale for the chilly season, a Belgian tripel known as “Brother Barnabas.” Tripels often get lumped into the winter category because of their high alcohol contents and full body. The Three Notch’d version, named after the only remaining Belgian monk in Virginia, has enough ABV and structure to warrant a winter tipple, but for me it lacks the fig and raisin flavors that suit the bigger Belgians of the season.

“Even though it is fruity and crisp, it’s not like something you’d want to drink in the summer,” Warwick said. “To me, it is a nice wintertime beer.”

It’s hard to argue with that.

The only thing that could make the banh mi sandwich better is if there were some obscure, obnoxious way to pronounce it. Then all the people who call pho “fuh” could lord their culinary superiority over everyone else in yet another way.

“It’s not a ‘bon-me,’” they’d say. “It’s a ‘boon-mh.’”

I take that back. There is one other way the banh mi could be better. There could be a couple decent options in Charlottesville. As it is, there’s really only one. Simple as the sandwich is, but one local purveyor puts all the requisite ingredients together at the same time in the same place: meat, paté, pickled veggies, jalapeños, cilantro, and mayo on a crusty French baguette. That purveyor is, not surprisingly, Moto Pho Co., the closest thing this town has to a proper Vietnamese restaurant.

“The banh mi wasn’t originally on the menu as I had only wanted to focus on the noodles, but after repeated requests from customers, we gave it a shot,” said Vu Nguyen, the restaurant’s owner and chef.

That’s not to say you can’t get a little banh mi flavor in places other than Moto. If you’re savvy with the Facebooks and Twitters, you can catch Beer Run’s “banh mi style” sandwich every now and then. Of course, not even Beer Run knows when or where the special’s ever going to strike, making it the 1.21 gigawatts of Charlottesville banh mi.

Then there’s the question of whether the Beer Run swipe is worth your trouble. I’d give it a reluctant yes. It’s a tasty sandwich, but calling it “banh mi style” is a bit of a stretch. For me, banh mi are all about the bread. If you don’t have the baguette, you have something other than a banh mi. Beer Run serves its house-smoked pork and pickled veggies on its (admittedly delicious) house focaccia. The Vietnamese didn’t suffer a half-century* of French rule only to have their signature sandwich served on an Italian-style bread. Plus, the dispersion of the ingredients on the Beer Run sandwich wasn’t quite right for me; some bites were good, but midway through the second half, I kind of wanted it to end.

Michael’s Bistro on the Corner offers a sandwich that skews the other way. It’s closer to authentic but not out-of-this-world flavorful. Lacking the depth and earthiness provided by paté and subbing a straight coleslaw for pickled carrots and daikon (an Asian radish), one of my dining mates called it “an accessible take” on a banh mi. The sandwich did feature flavorful roast pork and came on a proper French baguette. Unfortunately, the bread wasn’t the freshest loaf in the bag, and the sandwich could have used more mayo to bring it all together. For me, the worst part about the Michael’s banh mi came from my own expectations—the bistro does so many things well (their savory pies, the artichoke soup, the spinach salad, the beer list), it was a shock to get a mediocre sandwich out of the kitchen.

The Box off the Downtown Mall offers a nice short sandwich menu focused on a banh mi motif. On each slider-style sandwich, daikon, carrots, cucumber, jalapeños, cilantro, and mayo garnish your choice of meat. Unfortunately, the first time I went to the Box, I almost didn’t stick around to try the food. The wet, dirty menu hanging behind plexiglass on the patio, a glimpse of the chef’s soiled whites when he briefly stepped out of the kitchen, and sub-par service nearly sent me for the door before I could put my order in. It’s a good thing I powered through. The pork belly version of the sandwich is legit. The belly does a nice job on its own of replacing roast pork and paté, giving you the chew of the muscle in the belly and a “pork mayonnaise” effect from the threads of fat.

Still, Moto’s pork banh mi is by far the cream of the crop. At first glance, the bread looks softer than it should be, but it’s crunchy on the outside and pillowy on the inside. Tucked into the bread are refreshing pickled radish and carrots that contrast well with thinly sliced roast pork and earthy, rich paté. For me, the jalapeños give the sandwich just the right amount of spice, but I could see how some might find it too spicy. At any rate, the day I visited, there were a half dozen people in the restaurant, some of whom were speaking Asian languages, most of whom were crunching on banh mi rolls.

“I’d love to be able to tell you there was some magic behind the banh mi we serve and that we use locally sourced organic ingredients,” Nguyen said. “But the truth is it’s just regular commodity ingredients, which contribute to keeping the price at an affordable value.”

That means Duke’s mayo has stepped in for the house-made spread Nguyen was making when the sandwich first hit the menu, but the veggies are still pickled in house, and the chicken liver and pork paté is a homemade creation, as well. For two additional banh mi options, Nguyen marinates chicken and crafts a vegetarian paté.

“The appeal of the banh mi is the fact that it hits all the right notes in a familiar package,” Nguyen said. “You get sweet, savory, sour, spicy, and cool all in a portable vessel that isn’t so exotic as to be unapproachable.”

*An earlier version of this story said “a half-decade of French rule.” Vietnam was part of French Indochina, a colonial protectorate from 1887-1954.

I am a mindless follower, a sheep that would walk with the rest of you straight to the slaughter if given the chance.

About eight years ago, while living in Chicago, I started taking down espresso drinks two at a time. You might guess this coincided with the growing popularity of a certain coffee shop chain that rhymes with “hard lucks.” If so, you’re a good guesser.

I started primarily on two-shot lattes, with the occasional macchiato or doppio espresso mixed in. Then I moved to Americanos. I thought to myself, “say, if you’re going to go around drinking coffee, you might as well actually taste the coffee.”

So there I’d be, sipping my espresso with hot water, smugly declining when the barista would ask if I’d like “room for cream,” and looking down my nose at all the people who ordered milky, flavored coffees. This went on for several years. (The Americano drinking that is. The smugness continues.) Then, this past spring, I met Dan Pabst of Mudhouse. This dude knows more about coffee than Deepak Chopra knows about chilling out.

“There is a science to brewing coffee,” Pabst said. “If we could get everyone following the science, coffee would be better everywhere.”

When I first encountered him, Pabst was in the only place I’ve ever seen the man—standing behind one of Mudhouse’s single cup coffee bars. He was manning the booth on the south side of the Charlottesville City Market, carefully pouring hot water in a tight circle into an inverted cone over a cream-colored Mudhouse mug. He was talking about bitterness—coffee should have none if it’s prepared properly, he said. He was talking about water-to-grounds ratios—too much or too little H20, and you won’t achieve the right flavor profile, he said.

I took the cup of coffee he’d poured for me (not quickly, by the way). I sipped it. It was phenomenal. The floral notes Pabst had mentioned were there. The citrus notes he had mentioned were there. The bitterness he’d derided? Not there. It was, simply put, like no other cup of coffee I’d ever had. A question filtered into my mind: was this the next big thing in coffee in the post-latte world?

I figured Pabst could help me with the answer, so I visited him at Mudhouse last week to put him on the hot plate. While bitterness and water levels were the two things that struck me during my first meeting with Pabst, those two attributes turned out to be but a few details in the story of the perfect single cup of coffee.

Each morning, Mudhouse baristas select only one coffee worthy of being prepared on the shop’s hand-pouring bar.

“Every coffee has a blossoms-on date,” Pabst said. “After we roast a coffee, we taste it every single day. We are noticing how the flavor changes over time.”

Pabst said coffees can take anywhere from three to 15 days to reach their peak, but they typically achieve maximum flavor at four to seven days. Depending on the roast (where the beans fall on the spectrum of light to dark), each varietal lends itself to a certain ratio of water-to-grounds. Using a standard 400 milliliters of hot water, Mudhouse experiments to determine how many grams of coffee will yield the desired flavor profile. It’s usually somewhere between 22 and 25 grams. According to Pabst, all of this is done in the lab ahead of time.

Brew time, which is controlled by the consistency of the grounds, is also critical. Each cup requires between 2.5 and 3.5 minutes of water-to-grounds contact. For a coffee that needs more time, a finer grind does the trick; for one that dictates a shorter brew cycle, a coarser grind is in order. And what lab would be worth its salt if it didn’t also account for temperature? The water has to be poured at or just above 200 degrees to optimize extraction (the percentage of coffee flavor in the drink) and concentration (the ratio of actual coffee solids to water content).

Mudhouse makes sure all these science-y parameters are in place before starting the hand pour at its bar. The barista begins by washing the unbleached white filters favored by Mudhouse to cleanse them of paper flavor and distributing the pre-set amount of grounds evenly in the cone. A pre-pour follows. It’s a chance for the grounds to degas and the fines (extremely small coffee particles) to settle in.

“It’s like calisthenics for the coffee, stretching before the workout,” Pabst said.

Next comes the carefully practiced, circular pouring motion, designed to keep all the grounds moisturized throughout the brewing process and allow the water to spread from the center of the coffee bed to the outside before funneling to the bottom. When the pour is finished, Pabst said the grounds should be level enough to take a comfortable power nap on them.

The result is, undoubtedly, a damn good beverage. And Pabst believes the single cup preparation is indeed destined to be the next big coffee trend. He guessed Mudhouse’s hand pouring sales have increased by 500 percent in the last two years and called the trend the “third wave” of American coffee drinking, a natural follow-on to the second wave of espresso drinkers who were fueled by that Seattle-based behemoth.

“We treat coffee like an artisanal food product,” Pabst said. “In a way, what we are doing is taking the same approach as espresso—made fresh to order—and applying it to our brewed coffee.”