Category: 2023 Best of C-VILLE Staff Picks

Few local restaurants have as loyal a following as
 Guajiros Miami Eatery.

On weekends, newcomers and regulars alike flock to West Main Street, sometimes happily waiting an hour to get inside and dig into the mouth-watering Cuban dishes inspired by the flavors and culture of Miami and south Florida. 

The eatery is owned and run by the Mayorga family, and it’s been a family affair every step of the way. 

Three brothers run the restaurant day-to-day: Danilo Mayorga takes care of the front of the house, Harvey Mayorga Jr. curates cocktails, and Sebastian Mayorga runs the kitchen. Their father, Harvey Sr., keeps the books while mother, Jacqueline Roque, contributes family recipes—dishes she served to her children for years are now on the restaurant’s menu. Sometimes, you’ll see sisters Bessie and Dora, as well as Harvey Jr.’s wife Carla Chavez-Mayorga with their children, littlest Harvey and Eva.

For the Mayorgas, who are Nicaraguan in nationality and Miamian by American dream, their food is a way of celebrating diversity. 

“I don’t want to be labeled as a Nicaraguan restaurant,” says Harvey Jr., “because we want to have the melting pot of cultures.”

The menu includes all-day breakfast, sweet Cuban-style coffee, refreshing cocktails, and occasional specials. The classic Cuban with ham, seasoned pork, Swiss cheese, pickles, and mustard is one of the most popular items, and for dessert Mama Guajiros famous tres leches is a must-try.

Pint-sized Belmont pie hole/bar Lampo took over the former Bridge Progressive Arts Initiative space earlier this year and opened Bar Baleno (Italian for flash). With room enough for 60 guests, the small event space offers Lampo’s full menu for seated dinners or cocktail parties. On Thursday evenings the bar is open to the public, and industry folks should keep watch: Baleno regularly stays open late just for waitstaff, post-service.

We’d never deny the appeal of grabbing a perfectly chilled glass of wine and parking ourselves on a patio to overlook a mountain view. But sometimes the best view is coming from … inside the house. Such is the case at Glasshouse Winery in Free Union, where you can enjoy your Brosé (a Barbera rosé, that is) in the tropical conservatory. Air-conditioned with seats in partial or full shade (i.e. your glass will be the only thing sweating), it’s a unique experience to be seated among a tangle of banana tree, birds of paradise, and fiddle leaf figs.

Imagine you get your fortune told and it predicts you’ll get wet shoes. Or your flight will get delayed. Or you’ll step on a LEGO. Sounds like some bad luck, huh? Well, at Bad Luck Ramen, that’s all you’ll get at its fortune telling machine. Inspired by owner and head brewer Andrew Centofante’s trip to a Buddhist shrine in Japan, in which he received the worst fortune imaginable (“bad health, bad career, do not buy a house, do not travel, no romance, a black cloud will follow you … bad,” he says), the black cat machine only deals out dismal predictions.

BBQ is a labor of love. So when Brian Ashworth tired of the labor and threatened to close Ace Biscuit and Barbecue, a ’cue-lover stepped in to save it. “Ace was always one of my favorites—in my opinion the best barbecue in Charlottesville,” said Stefan Friedman, who bought the biz in March. What’s next for Ace? Friedman promises full dinner hours, grab-and-go menu items, live music, and big ’ol biscuits like the ones Ashworth made when he first opened.

Six individual national wins. Victory in all five relays. National team champs (for the third year in a row!). It was business as usual for the University of Virginia in March at the NCAA Women’s Swimming & Diving Championship in Knoxville, Tennessee.

Senior Kate Douglass won three individual national championships (200-meter individual medley, 100 butterfly, 200 breaststroke), while Gretchen Walsh won two (100 backstroke, 100 freestyle). And Walsh’s older sister, Alex, who along with Douglass medaled at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, won the 400 IM. As a team, the Hoos swept the relays with wins in the 200 medley, the 800 free, the 200 free, the 400 medley, and the 400 free. 

Before the meet, Head Coach Todd DeSorbo said, “Arguably, we’ve got the best team that we’ve ever had here at UVA, so I feel really good.” 

Turns out DeSorbo had reason to feel good: By meet’s end, Virginia’s nearest competitor, the University of Texas, had scored 414.5 team points to UVA’s 541.5. And in case the Cavs’ foes thought they had a chance to catch UVA, the 400-meter freestyle relay team put an exclamation point on the Hoos’ performance during the competition’s final event with a time of 3:05.85, which set a new NCAA and American record. It also made UVA the first team since Stanford in 2018 to sweep all five relays at the national championships. 

After the meet, DeSorbo talked to C-VILLE about saying goodbye to the seniors on his team. “They believed and trusted immediately, and were just really excited to be a part of the potential rise of our program. And they’ve all just been such great people and influences and leaders on our team. … They’re definitely gonna leave a lasting legacy, and they play a significant role in where we are today.”

But Gretchen Walsh, who will be a junior next year, is already looking toward 2024, when she hopes to help UVA match Stanford’s 1995 feat of winning four straight NCAA Swimming & Diving titles. “I think we can do it,” she said in April. “We’re creating a legacy, and that’s one of the coolest things about this experience.”

To help make a four-peat a reality, Walsh pointed to her list of individual goals for next season: Hit 20.5 seconds in the 50 freestyle and 47 seconds in the 100 backstroke—and add another American record by beating 45.56 seconds in the 100 freestyle. Then there’s that Olympic rings tattoo: Silver-medalist Alex Walsh refuses to get her rings tattoo until her sister, who failed to qualify for the 2020 Olympic team the summer before she arrived at UVA, also medals at the Olympics (Gretchen’s fourth-grade self-portrait was of her standing on the Olympic blocks).  

“Since coming into UVA, having this change and this new environment, I feel a lot more confident going into next summer, in my abilities and my training, all around,” Gretchen Walsh said. “I think [an Olympic medal] is definitely feasible.”

Two UVA track team members founded Run Charlottesville in 2018. Now, the organization is bringing together college athletes and area kids at three Virginia locations. The mission? Use running to better the lives of young people from up and down the socioeconomic spectrum.

“For me, to see the kids every week get an opportunity to socialize and have fun outside and get more exposure to running and activity in general … it’s special,” says Trina Barcarola, the organization’s incoming president. “It’s great for the UVA students, too, because we don’t get a lot of exposure to kids.”

Barcarola, a UVA track team pole vaulter, says sports has translated to success in other areas of her own life, and that pushes her to make Run Charlottesville the best service organization it can be.

Barcarola takes over as president from Owayne Owens, who’s been in the position for three years. Owens hopes that during his own time at its helm, Run Charlottesville has given a few kids the same opportunities running’s given him. “It has done so much for me—it got me a scholarship,” Owens says. “If we can get kids to start running at a young age, we have so much to offer them: working together in groups, discipline, enjoying hard work. I just want to see kids better off because they were made aware of running.”

When someone as fit and accomplished as Nicole Hawker opens her
first-ever gym, you might think she’d call it No Pain, No Gain, or Good Luck Keeping Up with Me. An ACE Certified Personal Trainer and CrossFit Level 1 coach, Hawker, 50, has crushed half-marathons and the Richmond marathon. She’s a Prolyfyck Run Creww regular, Crossfit weightlifter, and certified yoga instructor. Oh, and she’s also mom to three adult children and countless foster children, holds a master’s degree in counseling, and, until last year, worked full time in social services.

But when the Charlottesville native opened her nonprofit gym in November 2022, she named it after her fitness philosophy: Heart & Soul Fitness with Nicole. “When we are emotionally and spiritually well, we have greater capacity to take care of ourselves physically and vice-versa,“ says Hawker.

A peaceful studio in the Cherry Avenue Shopping Center, Heart & Soul offers an inclusive space for fitness classes, coaching, and events open to all, regardless of age, athletic level, or ability to pay. “I was drawn to Cherry Avenue because of childhood memories,” Hawker says. “I wanted to be accessible to a community that may not have access to larger, more expensive fitness studios.” 

Hawker also partners with the Women’s Initiative and Region 10 to provide women’s wellness classes, and this summer the gym hosted its first annual 5K community walk.

Whether you’re cranking out burpees or clearing your head, Hawker hopes you’ll find strength at Heart & Soul Fitness.

Jessica Carter believes that personal development should begin on the field. But not everyone has access to the kind of athletic opportunities that facilitate that kind of growth—and in fact, girls drop out of sports at double the rate boys do by age 14. So in 2020, the former Charlottesville High School JV girls basketball coach and Mary Baldwin University’s all-time leading basketball scorer founded HER Sports. An acronym for Hustle to Earn Respect, the nonprofit uses clinics, training opportunities, and partnerships with local organizations to break down the barriers that prevent girls from engaging in sports, and provide character and leadership development.

If you’d told a young Anna Williamson that one day she’d be atop a ladder at the John Paul Jones Arena, making the final snip to cut down the net after the UVA men’s basketball team won a share of the ACC regular-season title, she’d have thought you were pranking her.

But that’s exactly where Williamson, a then-fourth-year student manager who’s been an uber-fan fan of the team her entire life, found herself last March. 

“When [Associate Head] Coach Williford came up to me and said, ‘Anna, you’re gonna finish it off, take the rest of [the net down],’ and handed me the scissors, it was so special,” Williamson says. “And to look over and see my family on senior day … I thought about my little self, who’d go to games and watch UVA beat Carolina schools.”

Watching Williamson, the daughter of two University of Virginia alums, climb to the top of that ladder was especially moving because she was born with spina bifida, and is paralyzed from the knees down. A North Carolina native, she has undergone more than a dozen surgeries and wears a brace on her right leg to help her walk. Inclines are difficult for her.

Before last spring’s ACC Tournament, few UVA basketball fans knew much about Williamson, other than that she was one of 10 student managers whom they’d occasionally glimpse on the sidelines—that is, until ESPN reporter Holly Rowe shone a light on her. And that’s when Williamson says parents of children with spina bifida, a birth defect in which an area of the spinal cord in a developing baby doesn’t form properly, reached out to her on social media, looking for reassurance that their children were going to be fine.  

Williamson, who graduated in May and will open Revival coffee shop in Charlottesville this fall, is more than fine. 

“It’s a mental game,” she says when asked about the often grueling work of being a student manager for a D-1 college basketball program (she estimates that she worked eight hours on game days, and another three or fours on practice days). 

“I can do a lot more physically when I get my mind right about it,” Williamson says. “I’m 5-foot-4, and I’m not as strong [as other student managers], but I did the job to the best of my ability, which is what was asked of me.” 

That “ask” came the summer before she started at UVA in 2019. She was working as the first female coach at the Tony Bennett Basketball Camp, when Ronnie Wideman, associate athletic director for men’s basketball, spoke to her about being a student manager when school started in the fall. After considering her strengths and weaknesses, and thinking about what she’d bring to the program, Williamson said yes—and never looked back.

Her job was to “do whatever made the [members of the team’s] lives easier day to day. To oil the machine, do behind-the-scenes work, and watch [the team] shine,” she says. “UVA was my dream school since I was a kid, and I’ve always admired [Head] Coach Bennett,” who Williamson says taught everyone about much more than basketball.

“He taught me a lot of perspective on life, and about hard stretches, and how caring for your friends and family is more important than basketball.”