Charlottesville Food Read Online Free PDF Page B

and picking up the freshest of ingredients before sleepy college students and hungry toddler-toting parents arrive on the scene. They work through the Local Food Hub for bulk onions and contact foragers in Staunton for ramps and mushrooms. These are even more resourceful and curious than the Charlottesville home cook, eager to transform the top of each season’s—if not each week’s—produce and the finest of local agricultural products into feasts fit for a president.

Chapter 4
    Charlottesville Dining
    How Lowbrow Sustenance Becomes Highbrow Meals (or Vice Versa)
    D INING AT THE F ARM AND ON THE F IELD : C URRENT T RENDS IN C HARLOTTESVILLE R ESTAURANTS
    As alluring as luscious, deep-purple plums and bundles of wiry scallions appear to the home cook at the City Market, seeing those items transformed on a clean white plate at a local restaurant is an arguably grander experience. Whether self-taught or trained at some of the most well-known culinary institutes in the world, chefs in Charlottesville truly know how to bring out the best in local ingredients. Weekly, if not daily, menu changes; prime seasonal ingredients; and personal relationships with farms and food producers characterize locavore-friendly spots in the area. Housed in old barns, tucked away in warehouse buildings or lofted up above the Downtown Mall, local-food restaurants in Charlottesville appear in all shapes, sizes and price points. Chicken tortilla soup, chock-full of the meaty shreds of birds from Timbercreek Organics, rings in at five dollars for an inexpensive lunch option at Revolutionary Soup; the same bird, dissembled and roasted at the Local, could cost a diner upward of twenty dollars. But the textures, smells and colors of local food as interpreted by a thoughtful chef at either diner or fine dining are worth a customer’s consideration and dollars.
    An increasingly visible character in pop culture and the culinary arts is the ardent locavore diner, one whose enthusiasm for local foodstuffs borders on the rabid. Viewers of Portlandia or Saturday Night Live are familiar with the customer so invested in the origin of a meal, he or she travels to the farm in order to see firsthand how the animal has lived and died. The character is an understandable one, as there is something seductive, if not addictive or necessary, about tracking visible connections between the fork and the farm. The humorous characterization of the inquisitive diner stems in part from a very real panic many Americans are beginning to experience: the anxiety of having no knowledge or understanding of the places, stories or even animals behind the meals we eat.

    The matchbooks at the C&O Restaurant. Photo by Kevin Haney .
    Too often, the only animals that diners see are the cows dangling from Chick-fil-A billboards or the dancing chickens of Pollos Hermanos on Breaking Bad . The industrialization of farming, the accessibility of fast food and the rise of the supermarket have all contributed to an extreme level of disconnect between the consumed and the consumer. While CSAs, farmers’ markets and alternative supermarkets allow the health and environmentally conscious to stock their homes with local products, these customers often want that same level of control and understanding when dining outside of the home or farm.
    Charlottesville is home to many offerings for diners committed to various levels or conceptions of locavorism, as well as offerings for those for whom a good meal is simply that. A popular catchphrase among Charlottesvillians is how the city has more restaurants per square mile than New York City. While the most recent ReCount survey conducted by the NPD Group situates Charlottesville between Portland and San Francisco as the fourteenth most restaurant-filled per capita city in the United States, the excitement and pride behind the restaurant scene in Charlottesville remains the same. 93 For, after all, what does a city like New York City