Tag: Lone Light Coffee

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Culture Living

Love in every dish: PLENTY Cville serves up more than prepared meals

Supplied Photo

Della Bennett has seen the effect that a home-cooked meal can have. She worked as a nanny for several years, assisting as many as four families at a time, and on the occasions when she  made meals, she noticed the positive impact it had on her clients.

“PLENTY Cville was born as a solution to a problem,” says Bennett, the owner and chef of the prepared-meal delivery service. “I learned that folks value the idea of a home-cooked meal, but they don’t necessarily have the time, patience, skills, or even sometimes the desire to pull it off every single week.”

Initially created to address the needs of families with small children, PLENTY has grown from a single-person, in-home operation to a small team with a commercial kitchen that supplies meals to busy professionals, students, and others.

Unlike other meal delivery services, these dishes are made right here in Charlottesville, from local farm-sourced fruits and vegetables, with other area small businesses, including The Pie Chest and Lone Light Coffee providing products.

PLENTY also differs from the competition through its commitment to reducing wasteful packaging. Prior to the pandemic, meals were delivered in reusable glass containers, but now single-use, recyclable plastic is used, with a post-COVID goal of moving exclusively to biodegradable packaging. “We want to maintain that integrity as part of our business going forward,” Bennett says.

Each week, clients receive a new menu via email on Wednesday, place orders on Friday, and get their meals on Monday. Contactless delivery is available within a 20-mile radius of downtown Charlottesville, with a pickup option coming soon.

“The menu is inspired by what I’m craving, but also by what people have really enjoyed,” Bennett says. The service offers creative breakfast, lunch, and main courses at various price points. There’s something for everyone—entrées include cauliflower piccata and ginger chicken meatballs. The team is working on a customization option to better serve those with dietary restrictions.

And what does Bennett crave? “Anything with buffalo sauce is my favorite,” she says, noting her roasted cauliflower tossed in buffalo sauce. “We either serve it up as tacos with homemade ranch and pickled onions, or we serve it as a grain bowl with quinoa and crunchy vegetables.”

Bennett and her team plan to host socially distanced workshops in PLENTY’s large kitchen space—build-your-own cheese board workshops and meal prep classes are coming soon.

“The feeling we want to invoke is that food is self-care. We also want to show our care about the community through food,” Bennett says. PLENTY donates a portion of its proceeds to area nonprofits, and provides meals to people who have lost their job or are recovering from COVID-19.

Whether it’s offering food or experiences, Bennett says PLENTY’s mission is ultimately to take care of people. “PLENTY started with a certain group of people who were able to afford the luxury of a stocked fridge,” she says. “I think our audience has actually grown because of the care and love that we put into each and every dish.”

Della Bennett’s prepared-meal service gives busy people an opportunity to eat well at home. “I started PLENTY with the intention of helping families grow and thrive by giving them more time to do what they love,” she says.

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Living

The Pie Chest and Lone Light Coffee open second location

The Pie Chest’s Rachel Pennington says her second retail location, at 1518 E. High St., will offer hand pies, pies by the slice, biscuits and honey chocolate chip cookies. Photo by Eze Amos.

On March 14, 2015, eager pie eaters lined up along Fourth Street NE on The Pie Chest’s opening day. They were ready to satisfy the cravings triggered by Pi Day, an annual celebration of the mathematical constant pi (you know, 3.14159265359), which the new bake shop opted to embrace.

When the door swung open at 9:26am, customers flooded in and gobbled up every s’mores tart and sweet and savory pie in the glass pastry case that two bakers had worked more than 150 hours combined to fill.

By 1pm, they had devoured every last crumb of pie.

After flipping the “open” sign to “closed,” head baker and co-owner Rachel Pennington and her partner, Tina Morrison, sat down inside the shop. Morrison looked at Pennington with glassy eyes and asked, “What have we done?”

A little more than three years later, Pennington echoes that sentiment as she looks around The Pie Chest’s second retail location, which opened last week at 1518 E. High St. It’s an added feature to The Pie Chest’s new baking facility in the same building, which Pennington says is “at least six times” the size of the bakery’s previous kitchen on Dale Avenue.

It was a necessary expansion. In addition to making by hand tens of thousands of pies each year for The Pie Chest, Pennington and her team make desserts and other baked goods for The Whiskey Jar, El Bebedero, Revolutionary Soup, Commonwealth Restaurant & Skybar and Brasserie Saison—all part of restaurateur Will Richey’s Ten Course Hospitality group. Richey co-owned The Pie Chest with Pennington until August 2017, when Pennington became sole owner.

The second location will offer hand pies and Pie Chest favorites by the slice, plus biscuits hot out of the oven, honey chocolate chip cookies (the first thing Pennington ever baked, with her Memaw) and special non-pie items that’ll spotlight the small baking team’s talents. Lone Light Coffee will share the space, offering its full range of coffees and teas at the front counter, and roasting its own coffee  approved by the SCAA certified brewers in the back room. Nothing will change at The Pie Chest on Fourth Street.

Pennington, a self-taught baker who years ago applied for a baking gig at The Whiskey Jar on a whim, says this growing operation isn’t at all what she and Morrison pictured when The Pie Chest was still just an idea.

They imagined a low-key endeavor, Pennington baking as Morrison worked the storefront, pouring coffee from a carafe and chatting with regulars over slices of pie. They’d both be home by 5pm.

What they couldn’t anticipate is how the community would shape what The Pie Chest has become. Within a year, the bakery had a regular clientele, those who take a slice to go, and those who order their pie to eat in the shop, a side dish to an hours-long perusal of Time magazine. They hired more staff to keep up with the demand in the kitchen and at the counter.

The Pie Chest sticks to its three original foundations—everything is fresh, everything is seasonal, everything is made from scratch—but Pennington says she’s learned to be flexible on the menu, interspersing what she thinks is good (blueberry nectarine and honey spiced pear) with what customers want (triple citrus, chocolate cream).

The Pie Chest’s Fourth Street location is just one block from both Emancipation and Justice parks, where the white supremacist Unite the Right and Ku Klux Klan rallies, respectively, took place last summer. Those who were tear-gassed by police after the July 8 KKK rally came into the shop asking for water and to use the bathroom—Pennington remembers the tear gas they washed from their skin and faces stained the bathroom sinks—and on August 12, The Pie Chest opened as a safe space, not so much “as a statement against what was happening, [but] a statement about who we are every day,” Pennington says, a humble place offering up some comfort.

Wes Knopp, who owns and operates Lone Light Coffee, which has subleased space from The Pie Chest since 2016, echoes Pennington’s sentiments. “The shop has become for myself and many others a gathering place for conversation, comfort and many new friendships. So much of who we are is the community around us,” Knopp says.

Before becoming a baker, Pennington studied divinity. On her calf, she has a tattoo of a dandelion and its departing seeds, a metaphor for life presented in the Old Testament book Ecclesiastes. “You’re uprooted, you’re going along, everything’s fine, and then the wind blows…you land where you land, figure out what your surroundings are, and you learn to be planted there,” Pennington explains. Amidst it all, “the three things that ground you are good food and wine, partnership with another human and work—that’s where the phrase ‘eat, drink and be merry’ comes from.” The Pie Chest offers all of that. It’s how she’s made sense of this whole baking thing and her shop’s place in the community.

Now, in addition to asking, “How?” Pennington says, “Of course.”

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Living

Five Finds on Friday with Alicia Walsh-Noel

Alicia Walsh-Noel, Manager of Brasserie Saison. Photo courtesy subject

Today’s Five Finds on Friday come from Alicia Walsh-Noel, manager of Brasserie Saison, which celebrates Sunday each week with  an “Eggs Benefit” brunch from 11am-3pm with live jazz and specials from the bar. A portion of proceeds goes to a different charity each month, and this month it is The Charlottesville Free Clinic. Walsh-Noel’s picks:

1) Kao Soi at Monsoon Siam. “This dish is an ultra comforting curry noodle soup. It’s the perfect juxtaposition of flavor and texture: the sweet curry to the funky pickled cabbage and onions and then the slurpy egg noodles to the crunchy noodle garnish. There’s a reason it’s not available from their to-go-go location—you have to eat it in the restaurant for the full experience. I crave this whenever it’s cold outside or I have a cold or when Antarctica is cold.”

2) Peanut Butter Pie at The Pie Chest and an Almond Latte from Lone Light Coffee. “If you didn’t already know about this place, when you’re walking up Fourth Street, the aromas will lure you into their door. When you enter, it’s as if you’ve been transported into a quaint New England town—there aren’t many places in Charlottesville that can do that. Tucked within The Pie Chest is Lone Light Coffee, which makes incredible coffee drinks and their own almond milk in-house. The stuff is delicious! I seriously have a hard time getting coffee anywhere else. Rachel Pennington, the owner/baker of The Pie Chest, is incredibly talented. You can’t go wrong with any of her sweet or savory pies but I really dig the peanut butter because it’s a little of both. The real deal-sealer is that the crust is PERFECT every time.”

3) Commander Chicory Blue Cheese from Twenty Paces. “So apparently studies are saying that cheese addictions are a real thing. I always blamed it on my French heritage but now even my doctor is telling me to stop! Le sigh. I first had this cheese at Lampo. Then again at Lampo. Then again. And then…well, my husband runs the kitchen at Champion Taproom and he put it on…get this: CHICKEN WING TACOS. OMG. I die now. Anyway, it’s stinky and smoky and I would most likely have it as my last meal.”

4) Whatever Lumpia is on special at Champion Tap Room. “Speaking of my husband, Jon Bray has this move where he puts things into Filipino egg roll wrappers and then fries them. Need I say more? Okay, I’ll say more. His original has ground pork and dates that he serves with garlicky vinegar sauce. But lately he’s been getting a little wild, making cheeseburger lumpia for a kids event and a buffalo chicken version another time. This week, it sounds like he’s going with a more traditional pork and shrimp version that should be tasty. Maybe it’s cheating to put your own spouse on this list, but if this is about a memorable and emotional connection to food, Jon’s super-creative twists on Filipino classics are both seared into my memory and make me so happy!”

5) Oyster Mushrooms and Grits at Oakhart Social. “I couldn’t possibly write a Five Finds without mentioning Oakhart. This place is like home to me, and I’m stoked at the love they have received so quickly from the Charlottesville community. It’s rare to find a chef that can execute vegetable dishes with the skill that Tristan does and these mushrooms are one of my faves! They make a delicious star of the show with pickles, buttery grits and crispy, fried chickpeas. Follow that up with all the Fernets and hugs for a foolproof Oakhart evening.”

This article originally appeared on C-VILLE’s At the Table columnist C. Simon Davidson’s website, The Charlottesville 29, Read more Five Finds on Fridays here.