Yearbook Taco – C-VILLE Weekly

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.

Meet Blue Ridge Pizza Co.’s new owners

With its portable wood oven hitched to a pickup truck and fired-on-the-spot pizzas generously topped with local ingredients, Blue Ridge Pizza Co. has been dishing out personal-sized pies at Lockn’, the Heritage Harvest Festival and other social gatherings in town and around the county since spring 2013.

Yannick Fayolle, former Clifton Inn executive chef, and Nikki Benedikt, who’s worked in the restaurant industry for years, first as a server and later behind the bar and in management, have recently taken over the company.

Fayolle, a classically trained chef who went to school in Switzerland, owned a restaurant in his native Mauritius and cooked at a few eateries in Dubai before coming to the U.S. and cooking at Farmington Country Club and the Clifton Inn, where he served first as executive sous chef and in October 2015 rose to executive chef.

Fayolle left the Clifton Inn this past August, after he and Benedikt decided to pursue a private, in-home chef and catering business, Fayolle’s Table. Then, the Blue Ridge Pizza Co. opportunity “just fell into our laps, really,” Fayolle says, adding that taking ownership of the pizza company quickly facilitated the move and immediately gave Fayolle a working commercial kitchen for both businesses. The duo plans to keep the Blue Ridge Pizza Co. logo and the wood oven, but that’s about it.

They’ll change up the menu and the look of the truck and trailer. Fayolle says he’s having fun using the wood oven and learning the science of making dough. His pie-of-the-moment? The Fall Foliage, topped with wood-fire-roasted pumpkin, crispy kale, goat cheese and balsamic drizzle. “Very simple, but very fall,” he says.

Roast of the town

In 2012, after years of serving coffee—beginning from a City Market cart in 1993 and later at the flagship café on the Downtown Mall—Mudhouse Coffee founders Lynelle and John Lawrence decided to get into the coffee roasting game for themselves. They wanted to learn the craft and expand their company, so “it was an obvious next step for growth…and way too much fun,” Lynelle says. Their work has paid off: Mudhouse was recently named Micro Roaster of the Year for 2017 in Roast magazine’s 14th annual Roaster of the Year competition. According to Roast’s website, the awards are meant to “help inspire further excellence and success in the roasting industry.”

“This is the tippy top, the third Michelin star. This is the highest preeminent award for all coffee roasters in the U.S. and abroad,” Lynelle says. “We’re standing on the shoulders of giants, of course, and now we sit in the company of the top coffee roasters in the world. It is an incredible honor, and it belongs to the whole crew at Mudhouse.”

Good weird

Yearbook Taco will close its doors by the end of the year. “One gets the sense that the Yearbook Taco concept has almost run its course at this location,” says owner Hamooda Shami. “But rather than be dramatic and somber about it, we’re keeping things light and closing things out the right way…with tacos and booze,” Shami says. Every day from now until Yearbook closes, the restaurant is offering one of its top-shelf tequilas for half price until the bottle is empty. The space won’t be empty for long, though. Shami plans to introduce a new concept that “will be a better fit for the space and the neighborhood. Things are going to get weird (in a good way), and hopefully it’ll capture the imagination of the city.”

Contact Erin O’Hare at eatdrink@c-ville.com.