Be there: Bouncing, bubbly, beers, barbecue, blues, and Boar’s Head Resort meet in a family-friendly event around the lake behind the hotel. On the docket for Bubbles, Brews and Barbecue? Nearly 30 craft beers, a selection of sparkling wines, and a smoker full of slow-cooked meat (started the day before). Just ease back with a full plate and a pint or a flute, while the kids jump for joy.
Saturday 3/7. $10-30, Boar’s Head Resort, 200 Ednam Dr. boarsheadresort.com.
BBQ, gas station, cheap eats
This no-frills roadside stop offers solid, reasonably priced pork and chicken barbecue slow-cooked on hickory and oak in smokers on the asphalt lot out front. What you have here is a convenience store with a kitchen, a counter with a few barstools, and a country music soundtrack. Sides and salads (including one made with smoked chicken) are housemade and unfussy, like you’d eat at a backyard cookout.
Service: Cheerful, quick
Space: Country store, linoleum floors
Apps/entrées: $1-2/$5-10
Drinks: Beer and soft drinks
Reservations: Not accepted
6:30am-6pm, Monday-Friday, 10am-5pm Saturday, 777 Monocan Tr., 293-0703
Farm-to-table, fine dining, great wine list
Chef Tim Moore spent more than seven years at the famed Inn at Little Washington before his recent arrival at this pastoral Madison winery. His small but dynamic menu changes frequently and delivers sophisticated fare to match Early Mountain’s next-level wine offerings. On a recent visit, local roasted beets with fromage blanc and Asian pear were served in an earthy sauce made from foraged black walnuts, and shrimp were brightly flavored with coriander, dill, parsley, and a lime vinaigrette. Surprise touches, like the peanuts in a dish of local pork belly with poached Virginia apples and braised cabbage, sealed the deal.
Service: Chatty, good pacing
Space: Large, farmhouse industrial, fireplace
Apps/entrées: $6-10/$12-26
Drinks: Wine
Reservations: Accepted; exploretock.com
11am-6pm, Wednesday-Monday, 6109 Wolftown-Hood Rd., Madison, (540) 948-9005, earlymountain.com
Mexican, upscale casual, Belmont
Former Mas Tapas manager Benos Bustamante and staff pay homage to the food of his childhood in Oaxaca, Mexico. The showpiece dish is the mole negro con pollo, which like many other menu items is homey yet refined, with great depth of flavor and chili-pepper heat that comes on slowly and never overwhelms. Standouts when we visited included pork tenderloin tamales with a garlic sauce and green salsa, pan-seared salmon tacos with pico de gallo and guacamole mousse, seared shrimp with a purée of roasted black beans and avocado leaves (think, basil), and braised pork ribs with guajillo mole and Caromont Farms queso fresco.
Service: Friendly, attentive
Space: Cozy, colorful
Apps/entrées: $8-12/$15-18
Drinks: Wine, beer
Reservations: Not accepted
5-10pm, Tuesday-Saturday, 816 Hinton Ave., 328-2519,
comalcville.com
It’s about time, right? After a soft opening on January 26, Modern Nosh will be fully up and running at 111 Water St. on February 5. Owned by Stephanie Levin, a Norfolk native who graduated from UVA in 1990, the restaurant will serve corned beef and brisket cooked in-house, pastrami imported from New York, and other traditional Jewish fare, such as tongue, latkes, and homemade matzo ball soup. A specially selected marbled rye made in Baltimore will be trucked in every day the restaurant is open (Tuesday-Saturday, from 11am to 8pm).
Levin is pulling a Paul Newman, and donating 100 percent of Modern Nosh’s profits to local charities. “Our tagline is ‘you dine, we donate,’ and it’s combining two important things in my life—giving back to the community and food.”
Equally famous for its artisanal cheeses and baby goat-snuggling events, Caromont Farm will host a summer program bringing 8- to 12-year-olds together with their kid counterparts—you know, goats. The Field-to-Fork Day Camps will provide instruction on local food and sustainability, and include activities such as cheesemaking, vegetable gardening, foraging, and cooking.
“Kids should have an opportunity to see the whole picture,” says Caromont owner Gail Hobbs-Page, who will hold the four-day camps at the farm in Esmont, Virginia, this June. “There are so many teachable moments in farming.”
In what may be a first for a Charlottesville restaurant, Ace Biscuit & Barbecue has posted a parental warning. It’s for Wu-Tang Wednesday, a weekly event featuring classic hip-hop and rap. “Due to the nature of the music, there may be language which may offend you or your kids,” the posting says. “Unless, of course, you take parenting advice from Ol’ Dirty Bastard, in which case, WU-TANG IS FOR THE CHILDREN.” (That’s a tongue-in-cheek reference to rapper Ol’ Dirty Bastard’s declaration at the 1998 Grammy Awards.)
“Every Wednesday we play unedited hip-hop music, anything of lyrical value, nothing that’s ‘drug use, drug use, drug use,’” says Ace Biscuit manager Andrew Autry, who’s better known as Wolf. “We’re trying to get back to ground level—we want fun customers in here.”
Barbecue is like religion. There are many different styles—Texas, North Carolina, Kansas City, Memphis—and people tend to think that their way is the right way, the best way. People argue over which is most delicious, the original, the one true barbecue.
For years, “every time we’d say we do Virginia barbecue at our restaurant, people would laugh at us” as if there were no such thing, says Craig Hartman of Gordonsville’s BBQ Exchange. Virginia is known for its ham and bacon and it’s salting and smoking processes, Hartman says.
Not for much longer. Joe Haynes, a tech consultant and curious lifelong barbecue fan, has spent the past six years uncovering the rich history of Virginia barbecue and giving Virginia barbecue cooks like Hartman fuel for the fight against the naysayers.
In fact, Haynes declares in his heavily-researched book, Virginia Barbecue: A History, what we call Southern barbecue was born in Virginia’s Tidewater region in the 17th century.
It did not begin in the Caribbean, he says (though a 2013 Smithsonian Magazine article claims as much). In the 15th century, Christopher Columbus was the first European to observe and report the Taino Indians’ “barbacoa” cooking technique, but “barbecue didn’t need a European to witness it for it to start,” he says.
“Barbecue—the cooking technique where you take meat, put it over coals and slowly cook it for hours—is ancient,” Haynes says. Nobody really knows where it started, though Haynes suspects it started in Africa, spread to the Middle East and Asia, then the ancestors of Native Americans brought it to the Americas.
Haynes’ research shows that Powhatan Indians threw festivals (pow wows) where they’d cook hunted game (venison, rabbits, squirrels, birds) for hours over beds of coals. When the Virginia settlers arrived, they were dependent on the Powhatan for food. The colonists brought cookbooks that included instructions on how to cook meat on grills using vinegar, salt, pepper and a little butter—the basic components of a Southern barbecue sauce, Haynes says—and showed that basting method to the Indians.
As Virginians migrated they took barbecue to the Carolinas and elsewhere.
Haynes didn’t set out to prove that Southern barbecue as we know it started in Virginia, but that’s where the sources led him. “It’s not like I’m pulling this out of thin air,” he says. Washington Post barbecue and grilling columnist Jim Shahin declared Virginia Barbecue “as deeply researched as any barbecue book I’ve read.”
It’s the sauce and, to some extent, meat choice, that defines a region’s barbecue, and here in Virginia there are four distinct styles. Southside and Tidewater’s tangy tomato- and vinegar-based sauces usually contain a hint of mustard.
The Shenandoah Valley and mountain region’s Virginia-style barbecue chicken is typically smothered in a vinegary sauce seasoned with sweet herbs, garlic, salt and black pepper and, occasionally, celery seed.
Northern Virginia’s tomato-based, herbed sauces sometimes include fruit and tend to be sweeter than other area varieties.
Our own central Virginia and Piedmont regions offer full-bodied, richly spiced tomato sauces, usually with cloves, sassafras and ginger in addition to salt, pepper and vinegar, Haynes says.
Locally, both BBQ Exchange and Brian Ashworth’s Ace Biscuit & Barbecue are doing Virginia barbecue right, in examples such as Ace’s Virginia red and BBQ Exchange’s Hogfire and Colonial bacon sauces.
Ashworth, who didn’t intend to make authentic Virginia barbecue (he just wanted to make good, smoky barbecue, he says), is glad to be a part of the long history that Haynes has brought to light. “If we’re not rebuilding a name for Virginia barbecue, we’re building the name now,” Ashworth says. “It’s cool to be part of that.”
Dying to taste authentic Virginia barbecue for yourself? Here’s what to order.
Virginia red sauce: Brian Ashworth makes his own tomato base for this sauce that Joe Haynes calls “just amazing.” Ashworth says it was inspired by Coca-Cola sauces he’s had further south, and it also includes red onion, root beer, fresh ginger and “choice spices.”
Brisket: is not a traditional Virginia barbecue meat (that’d be pork), but Ashworth cooks brisket—a Texas barbecue staple—Virginia-style, directly on the coals (which Ashworth sources himself from trees on his Barboursville farm).
Hogfire sauce: A classic southside Virginia barbecue sauce, says Haynes.
Colonial bacon sauce: “A whole lot of onions, a whole lot of bacon,” and similar to a sauce Haynes found in a book of colonial Virginia recipes.