11 Months – C-VILLE Weekly

Cardamom dishes up contemporary vegetarian Asian food

Lu-Mei Chang can’t stay away from the kitchen, and we’re all better off for it.

Chang, who grew up in Taipei, Taiwan, started cooking when she came to Charlottesville 28 years ago. She worked at Eastern Standard, one of Charlottesville’s first Asian restaurants (located where The Whiskey Jar is now) for years before she opened Monsoon in 1992.

She sold Monsoon (now Monsoon Siam) in 2011 with the intention of taking a few years off from cooking to rest and repair her body. During that time, Chang taught the occasional cooking class at The Happy Cook and at Charlottesville Albemarle Technical Education Center and kept a steady blog, Cooking with Lu-Mei: Asian Cooking Adventures in Charlottesville, full of recipes for healthy Asian dishes, and tips on where to find the best ingredients for those dishes.

While she found teaching to be very rewarding, she missed cooking, and she just opened Cardamom, which dishes up contemporary vegetarian Asian food in the spot most recently occupied by Mican in York Place on the Downtown Mall.

In addition to Twisted Branch Tea Bazaar and The Spot, which both serve vegetarian and vegan cuisine, Cardamom is one of just a few vegetarian-only restaurants in the city.

For now, the menu is small, offering noodle salads and dumplings, and dishes like eggplant tofu with holy basil, deep-fried crispy eggplant and tofu with ginger-garlic sauce and holy basil served with brown rice; tofu balls with coconut-lime sauce, a deep-fried mixture of tofu, potatoes, mushrooms, spinach and holy basil, served with brown rice; and creamy leek soup with yogurt dressed with crispy mochi rice crackers and walnut oil. Dishes cost about $10, though most are less, and diners can order Vietnamese coffee and pots of tea as well.

Chang wants to show Charlottesville diners that with fresh ingredients, well-crafted sauces and the right seasonings, vegetarian food can be both delicious and exciting.

New beginnings

“I’ve always had an appreciation for things that operate on the plane that borders the absurd and the meaningful, like watching one of the original ‘Star Trek’ episodes where it’s totally camp but there’s also substance if you’re looking for it,” says restaurateur Hamooda Shami.

Shami, who owns 11 Months, the space for extended restaurant/bar pop-ups in the former Yearbook Taco location on the Downtown Mall, will walk that fine line between absurdity and meaning with the first 11 Months concept: Sorry It’s Over.

Yes, Charlottesville, for 11 months, we’ll have a restaurant/bar with a breakup theme.

“It’s a sad subject, but we’re going to have some fun with it,” Shami says.

Shami worked with Richmond branding and interior design company Campfire & Co. on the branding and remodeling of the space (and on the restaurant’s Richmond location as well). He says we can expect “tacky neon” and actual breakup letters on the walls, plus some posters of sensitive-sad icons such as Al Green and The Smiths. Chef de cuisine Johnny Jackson and John Meiklejohn of The Whiskey Jar have developed a small, contemporary new American cuisine menu that Shami says will emphasize “quality over quantity.”

Bar manager David Faina will create the cocktail menu, and Shami says they’re in talks with Three Notch’d Brewing Company’s Collab House to craft a special beer that would play off the restaurant’s theme.

11 Months Presents…Sorry It’s Over will open in early February, so keep an eye out for the pale pink sign with a cartoon heart crying three fat tears.

Good eats

Three local craft food producers and the farmers who provide them with ingredients were honored last month at the 2017 annual Good Food Awards, which are organized by California sustainable food nonprofit Seedling Projects and “celebrate the kind of food we all want to eat: tasty, authentic and reasonably produced.” Both JM Stock Provisions and Timbercreek Market took home awards in the charcuterie category, for beef tongue pastrami and duck rillette, respectively. Red Rooster Coffee Roaster, based in Floyd, was honored for its Washed Hambela coffee. The 193 winners in 14 categories were chosen from 2,059 entries submitted by top-notch food producers from all over the U.S.

New concept pops up at Yearbook Taco

When deciding on what to do next with the Yearbook Taco space, owner Hamooda Shami dug deep into a lengthy note on his iPhone, a note full of mostly wild hospitality ideas that ends with a Peanuts cartoon where Lucy, in her winter coat, hat and mittens, says to Charlie Brown, “I feel torn between the desire to create and the desire to destroy.”

Shami feels that he played it safe in creating the Yearbook Taco concept, which, he says, with its yearbook photos of staff and customers adorning the walls, has run its course. Yearbook reached its peak about 11 months in, Shami says, when the novelty wore off.

With that in mind, Shami will open 11 Months—a space for extended restaurant/bar pop-ups—in February. Every 11 months, he’ll close the restaurant for a month to rebrand, tweak the menu and bar offerings and redecorate the space for the new theme. The general restaurant layout and staff will remain the same.

“When you make a bold, innovative move, sometimes people respond, sometimes people don’t. Either people will respond well, or this will be my most public humiliation,” Shami says, laughing optimistically. He hopes that it goes over well, both here and in Richmond—he’s signed a lease to open an 11 Months there, too. It’s not likely that the two spots would host the same concept at the same time, but he’s open to anything.

And there’s potential for community involvement, he says. If the idea is successful, he’d consider presenting five different concepts for the public to vote on, and whichever concept won would be the next 11 Months Presents theme.

Shami wouldn’t go on the record as to what the first 11 Months concept is, other than to say it’ll be “weird, but not too niche.” But he did profess his love for Morrissey more than once during our conversation.

Juicy news

This spring, The Juice Laundry will open a new location in Washington, D.C., in the Arris apartment building, part of The Yards near Nationals Park. Owners Mike and Sarah Keenan say they were approached by the building’s developer, who had traveled to Charlottesville for a wedding several months ago and happened to visit The Juice Laundry on Preston Avenue.

“We see it as a really great and exciting opportunity to bring our products and passion for healthy living to a new community—and all the UVA grads now living in D.C.,” they say. As for The Juice Laundry here in Charlottesville, nothing will change, though the growth could allow them to expand the menu to include “even more healthy, delicious options.”

Homegrown gal

Allie Hull, founder of Homegrown Virginia and an Ivy resident, will be on hand from 2-5pm Saturday, December 10, at the Crozet Artisan Depot, during the Taste Virginia reception. A variety of foods created from local farm produce, such as jams, jellies and sauces, will be ripe for sampling. Homegrown Virginia makes small-batch recipes highlighting produce picked during the peak of ripeness.