Tag: Laura Galgano

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Living

But baby it’s cold outside: Wine and beer delivered to your door

Market Street Wine’s Thadd McQuade says the shop delivers anywhere downtown, up to a case or two for free. Photo by Eze Amos

In case you need one more excuse to avoid going out in the frigid weather, Wegmans is now offering beer and wine delivery through Instacart.

“We know our customers are busy, and the holidays are no exception,” says Erica Tickle, Wegmans e-commerce group manager. “We wanted to help our customers spend less time prepping and more time celebrating.”

You can place your order on Instacart online or through the app, and orders will be delivered between 9am and 10pm.

It turns out wine delivery isn’t altogether new in the area, as several local wine shops have long provided delivery service.

Market Street Wine has been delivering for 30 years, say new owners Thadd McQuade and Siân Richards.

“This was established by [previous owner] Robert Harllee and we have carried it proudly on,” McQuade says. “We’ll deliver anywhere downtown—up to a case or two for free. We have a number of long-term clients who order a case from us every few weeks. We do everything from single gift bottles to large parties and weddings, and have delivered as far as 100 miles away.”

Foods of All Nations has also long been on board with this courtesy.

“We deliver whatever customers want, wherever they want, whenever they want, and we have for many, many years—as long as you’re 21 or older,” says Tom Walters, the store’s wine consultant. “We have some older clientele and regulars we deliver to on a regular basis and we deliver for special events, catering and things like that as needed too.”

Erin Scala, owner of Keswick’s In Vino Veritas, says she provides free neighborhood deliveries on certain days of the week—Glenmore and nearby get free Thursday delivery and Pen Park and downtown customers have free Friday deliveries. She adds that any order of $200 is eligible for free local delivery.

And Doug Hotz, manager/owner of Rio Hill Wine & Beer, says he also delivers within a 10-mile radius of the store, although there’s usually a fee. He adds that most people simply call ahead or email their order and pick it up at the shop. “It’s ready when they get here and they pull up and we load it up and they go.”

Anything to stay warm and dry.

Beer for a cause

Local breweries Devils Backbone, Champion, and Starr Hill have joined Sierra Nevada Brewing Co.’s effort to raise funds for California wildfire victims—with a collaborative beer.

Sierra Nevada, which originated in Chico, California, released its Resilience Butte County Proud IPA in a campaign to aid those who lost homes and property in the devastating Camp Fire in Northern California. They’ve enlisted brewers nationwide to also brew Resilience and donate 100 percent of beer sales to the Camp Fire Relief Fund.

A Blue Moon by spring?

Blue Moon Diner owner Laura Galgano is counting the minutes till she can open the doors to diner regulars.

“Our hopes were that we’d be back in business by January 1, but it’s looking more like March at this point,” she says. “We should be back in the space by January, but we won’t finish with our portion of the renovations until late February or early March.”

The beloved diner closed in May, 2017, in preparation for construction of Six Hundred West Main, the six-story apartment building (featuring a private art gallery as well as retail space) going up behind the restaurant. The complex didn’t end up breaking ground until almost a year after the diner closed, and is now set to open in fall 2019.

“We are very anxious to return to our wonderful, wonky diner space, and our wonderful, wonky diners!” says Galgano.

Tavern & Grocery hires a “Top New Chef”

Tavern & Grocery has hired Joe Wolfson, named one of the Top 100 New Chefs in America by Food & Wine magazine, to be its executive chef.

“He brings an exciting new menu to Tavern & Grocery, with dishes including sweetbreads, duck, and osso buco,” says restaurant owner Ashley Sieg, adding that in January the West Main eatery will introduce a Sunday Suppers feature, served family style.

Wolfson was the executive chef at the Old Stone Farmhouse on St. Thomas in the U.S. Virgin Islands, and Ms. Rose’s Fine Foods in Charleston, South Carolina.

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News

Blue Christmas: Diner not ready to reopen

Six Hundred West Main, an apartment complex being constructed behind Blue Moon Diner, is also running behind schedule. Courtesy of Six Hundred West Main

When we last heard from the owner of Blue Moon Diner in May, she said she was closing the West Main Street institution for renovations until early 2018. Now, as the new year is upon us, Laura Galgano says it could be fall before the lights come back on at the beloved home of the huevos bluemoonos.

Not surprisingly, diner regulars are upset.

“The diner is Charlottesville’s living room,” says Dolly Joseph, who has worked as a hostess during weekend brunch at Blue Moon for the past couple years. When her mom came to town last week, the former employee says they talked about how much they missed Blue Moon for its affordable food and good company. “The diner was where I knew I could always find a familiar face,” she adds.

Joseph, Galgano and Ellen Krag run a nonprofit called Building Experiences, and Joseph says the diner is their home base for mentoring young adults. While Rapture on the Downtown Mall has served them well as a temporary location, the team is eager to go back home, she says.

“All my favorite people are waiting for the diner to open again so we can see each other for Wednesdays with Jim Waive, or a weekend brunch or a study group with BE,” says Joseph.

Likewise, local country-blues-rock musician Susan Munson says she misses her regular gigs at the diner.

“I was so bummed when it closed,” Munson says. “I don’t play as much now during the week, just mainly on the weekends. It actually became one of my favorite places to play, even though it was a tight fit.”

Galgano, who has held several Blue Moon pop-up brunches since the diner closed, says its reopening is “somewhat” dependent on the construction of a six-story mixed-use apartment complex going up behind it, which is also taking longer than expected.

“We have had several approval delays that, quite frankly, are the boring parts of complex development,” says developer Jeff Levien. His team anticipates that construction on the project called Six Hundred West Main will begin next spring, and will be completed by mid-2019.

The apartment complex “merges two historically significant street-front buildings with new construction in the form of a mixed-use, distinctly modern, luxury rental residence,” Levien says in a press release. “It is being purposefully integrated into the most vital, diverse and connected neighborhood in Charlottesville.”

The 65,000-square-foot building will have 53 studio, one- and two-bedroom spaces for rent, with private terraces, eight-foot windows, high ceilings and a “meditative courtyard,” according to the release. It’ll also have retail spaces, and Levien says he may lease some offices above Blue Moon.

The developer describes his project as “upscale, without having lost its edge,” and says it’s the “creative result of the old economy raising itself up with new favor to become an urbane playground.”

He compares it to composing a song, where the team is the band and the music is the building they’ve created.

Says Levien’s wife, Ivy, who’s had a hand in designing the project, “Is it a little rock ‘n’ roll? Definitely. But it’s where rock ‘n’ roll goes to kick back.”

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Living

Blue Moon pop-ups feed the community

Laura Galgano, owner of Blue Moon Diner, hopes to have brunch pop-ups in the Snowing in Space Lab on West Main Street about every other month. Photo by Eze Amos

Although Blue Moon Diner is closed during construction of 600 West Main, the six-story mixed-use building going up behind the restaurant, that hasn’t stopped owner Laura Galgano from serving her customers.

“I am a social being, and quite simply, [I] want to know what folks are up to, how their lives are and what new and fun things they’ve gotten to try,” Galgano says. It’s a reason why, in August and September, she and a few other Blue Moon staffers hosted Blue Moon pop-up brunches in Snowing In Space Coffee’s Space Lab at 705 W. Main St., serving a limited menu of biscuits and sausage gravy, pancakes and a variation on a grits bowl.

At the first pop-up on August 19, just a week after the deadly August 12 white supremacist rally, Galgano realized how much she missed her regulars. That day, there was “lots of hugging, and ‘Where were you?,’ ‘So glad you’re safe,’ etc.,” says Galgano. “Blue Moon has always been more than just a diner, and using the pop-ups as a way to check in with each other, and keep that notion of community at the fore, is very important to us.”

During one of the September pop-ups, Galgano saw four orders of pancakes for two people, and she stuck her head out of the kitchen to make sure there hadn’t been a mistake. But when she did, she saw two Charlottesville Derby Dames, Blue Moon regulars who’d come in to load up on the beloved diner staple after a training workout. “One of the skaters was housesitting for two other skaters, and planned to leave them each their own serving of pancakes to enjoy on their return,” says Galgano.

It’s been a treat for the Snowing In Space folks, too. “We are huge fans of Blue Moon Diner ourselves,” says the coffee spot’s manager Julia Minnerly, “and being able to offer such a community favorite was a big hit.”

Galgano says that more Blue Moon pop-up brunches will happen soon; the details haven’t been hammered out quite yet, but she hopes to have one every other month or so.

“I like that we’re just down the street, in the same neighborhood, and partnering with a newer business,” Galgano says. “These kinds of collaborations help to continue the sense of community that Blue Moon so values: We all succeed together.”

Lunch spot haven

On Wednesday, September 20, The Haven hosted its first weekly home-cooked lunch for members of the Charlottesville community, serving a meal that included a cheese plate or spinach salad, meatloaf or vegetarian lentil loaf, roasted herb potatoes, broccoli with lemon-butter sauce, homemade peach cobbler and vanilla ice cream.

About 26 people showed up for the inaugural meal, says Diana Boeke, The Haven’s director of community engagement, who notes they can accommodate up to 40 people for each lunch. Home cooks and regular shelter guests, who prepared and served the meals to customers, “were very excited and making sure they made everyone feel at home,” Boeke says, noting that for many attendees, it was their first time in the day shelter. “The big round tables that seat up to eight mean that you’ll meet new people, so even people that came alone became part of the community there.”

The menu will change each week (the September 27 lunch included salad, chili, cornbread and a strawberries and cream dessert), and Boeke says The Haven hopes to find a few other home cooks—perhaps people from other countries who could share specialty dishes—to help with the public lunches. The kitchen managers already plan and prepare breakfasts for more than 60 people, 365 days a year.

The home-cooked lunches are served from noon to 1:30pm every Wednesday and give members of the Charlottesville community, including guests of the day shelter (who are not asked to pay the $10 donation for the meal), the chance to get to know one another.

Do the Cheffle

Frank Paris III, who closed his downtown ramen and donut shop Miso Sweet in August, is now executive chef at Heirloom, the rooftop restaurant and bar at the Graduate Charlottesville hotel at 1309 W. Main St. on the UVA Corner. He’s currently working on a new menu.

C-VILLE’s At the Table columnist C. Simon Davidson reports on his Charlottesville 29 blog that after a yearlong stint cooking at the Michelin-starred Inn at Little Washington, chef Jose de Brito is back in town as chef de cuisine of Fleurie, located at 108 Third St. NE, and consultant to the Downtown Mall’s Petit Pois. The former Alley Light head chef and former chef-owner of Ciboulette, which inhabited a space in the Main Street Market building years ago, told Davidson he’s ready to cook French food again, which he says is his specialty.

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News

Feeling blue: Local diner set for closure

On the last day of May, Blue Moon Diner will close until early 2018. While a four-story mixed-use apartment complex is under construction behind and adjacent to Blue Moon this summer, the diner will undergo a few renovations itself. Rendering courtesy of Neighborhood Development Services

 

On a recent Sunday morning, a crowd of Blue Moon Diner patrons could be seen hovering outside the side door of the self-proclaimed “best little breakfast, sandwich, burger, dinner, live music, arm wrestling, vinyl record-playing, family-friendly neighborhood bar and activist spot” with menus in hand. Lovers of the eatery, a Charlottesville institution, are shoveling in their last bites before it closes—briefly.

Owner Laura Galgano says the diner will shut down for some renovations, or “more of a reboot,” at the end of May. And because the 31st is a Wednesday, she said her crew thought it would be fitting “to go out with Jim Waive to serenade us into a break.”

Blue Moon, built in 1951 at 512 W. Main St. and originally operated as the Waffle Shop, is an addition on the facade of a two-story duplex called the Hartnagle-Witt House, which was built in 1884. A six-story mixed-use apartment complex called 600 West Main, proposed by developer Jeff Levien and designed by architect Jeff Dreyfus is set for construction at that address, which includes Blue Moon, this summer.

Galgano says the diner will get a few “very unsexy updates,” to the HVAC and electrical systems and the bathrooms, and “just enough renovation to set Blue Moon up to grow with Charlottesville’s ever-expanding restaurant scene.”

The diner’s hiatus will last until early 2018. For the staff of about 15 people (including Galgano) that will find other work around town and the customers, she says “change is hard,” but she’s focusing on the positives—that this isn’t a goodbye.

“We’re just going to go out into the world for a bit to get some new stories to share,” she says.

“We will be back, and still very much Blue Moony,” Galgano adds.

Bye bye, buildings

Blue Moon isn’t the only downtown historic building facing changes. The Board of Architectural Review voted April 18 to allow for the demolition of the Escafé and Main Street Arena structures, but not without some hesitation.

“About the only thing the [Main Street Arena] building has going for itself is that it’s still structurally sound,” says BAR member Carl Schwarz. “The Escafé building is much older.”

The Escafé building was built in the 1920s, when it served as a warehouse for a department store on Main Street. He says it’s a small remnant of when Water Street had similar industrial and warehouse buildings, and every time one is demolished, the collection that remains becomes less significant.

“Additionally, while overall pretty simple in form, the building does have some interesting features with a stepped parapet and brick pilasters in the front,” he adds.

Though the BAR voted unanimously to allow demolition of the arena, the same vote for Escafé passed 5-2. Schwarz was part of the majority.

“My reasoning was that while old, the building is not significant enough to enforce preservation,” he says. “Even without it, Water Street will still maintain its defining warehouse character due to better examples along the street. To be clear, though, this was not an easy vote.”

Escafé owner Todd Howard says “there’s still a great deal of uncertainty” surrounding the future of his restaurant, but he hopes to open it in another location.

Corrected April 26 at 11:22am to reflect the correct number of floors at 600 West Main.