“We honestly have some people who are here daily. They take all of their meals here,” says Blue Moon Diner’s Laura Galgano. She and her husband and chef, Rice Hall, who have run the storied West Main Street diner since it reopened in 2006, have cultivated a cool but casual townie hangout that caters to no-nonsense neighborhood folks who come in for the same omelet every morning and glass of PBR every afternoon. It also attracts a young hipster crowd that gets its Sunday morning post-hangover cure of caffeine, cigs and hash browns on the bar seats out front. Like a worn-out pair of comfortable old shoes that just so happens to be of a slightly pretentious European design, Blue Moon has become second home to a unique crowd of educated diner dwellers who take their scene and favorite stools very seriously.
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Waitress Blanche Marshall always serves up the same local hospitality to the diverse crowd at Riverside Lunch. |
There are several of these kinds of places around town, the restaurants that know a majority of their customers by name if not their favorite dishes. The ones that, no matter what new hot spot, tapas trend or global financial recession distracts less loyal crowds, have the kind of insider notoriety where anyone who calls themselves a local should be able to walk in and say, “I’ll have the usual.”
At Riverside Lunch, there are other items on the menu, but if you’re in-the-know, you order the same juicy, actually-tastes-like-real-meat burger (something about they way they smash it with a spatula) and red-and-white-checkered-cardboard basket of fries that everyone from a UVA professor, to an off-duty cop, and a carpenter to a surgeon is enjoying next to you. Walking into Riverside is a lesson in the diversity of Charlottesville. Even parking at this place tucked away on Hazel Street serves that purpose. On a recent afternoon, Restaurantarama spotted at least four SUVs adorned with the numbers of favorite NASCAR drivers, the police cars of two off-duty Albemarle County officers, a Suburban with a “McDonnell for Governor” sticker, a Prius with an “Obama-Biden” sticker and beater pick-up truck decorated with the following: an image of a provocatively-posed, big-busted woman leaning against a deer with equally large rack and the words, “I hunt whitetail.” No doubt each of these customers was greeted with the same, “What’ll it be, hon?” that Restaurantarama received from the waitress. Not server. Waitress.
The atmosphere at Duner’s on Ivy Road is more refined, but its following no less fierce. Bob Caldwell, who started as a cook when Duner’s opened in 1983 and took over as owner in 1988, says “Some people have been coming in since we opened the doors, and now their adult children are coming. We start to get full between 6pm and 6:30pm and people get here early for their certain table. They get a little ruffled if it’s taken.”
At Duner’s you might not be able to order “the usual” as it boasts a daily-changing New American menu of fresh and mostly local ingredients, but we’re pretty sure that if you’re one of those 20-year regulars, you can ask for anything you want.
“One of our customers likes his drinks in a stemless highball, so we keep a special glass just for him,” says Caldwell.
La Michoacana’s small storefront on East High Street has a relatively short history, but already it has similar cache and characteristics of the foregoing favorites: an off-the-beaten-path location that makes non-regulars and tourists often too intimidated to enter and daily repeat customers. When the native-Spanish speakers line up regularly at a taqueria, you’d better believe something good is going on between those tortillas.
