As our Feedback blog first reported last week, Si Tapas on W. Main Street has closed. After a year in business at the old site of Starr Hill Brewery and Music Hall, the outpost of Richmond restaurant Si, from regional restaurant mogul Mo Roman, has ceased operations of both its kitchen and its upstairs music venue, Is. We’ll let Feedback figure out what this means for small live-music lovers, but Restaurantarama thinks small plate fans have nothing to fret about. We have plenty of tapas-related options around town—from restaurants explicitly built around the genre, such as Mas and Bang, to those who’ve recently gone the smaller portion route, such as Zinc and Al-Hamraa. In fact, we have almost as many petit portion places as we have pizza joints. And speaking of, we have two pizza additions to celebrate—one a done deal, the other, an exciting prospect. First, Rise PizzaWorks—a custom, made-to-order slice shop from John Spagnolo and Andrew Vaughn—opened in the Barracks Road Shopping Center a little over a week ago. Second, Crozet Pizza may be opening a Charlottesville branch in the near future.
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Mike Alexander wants to be able to show his face in Crozet. So though he’ll be expanding Crozet Pizza to other locations, including Charlottesville, he promises the original won’t go anywhere. |
Mike Alexander, a real estate investor who, with his wife Colleen, took over the much-heralded Crozet institution (once identified as a best pizza in the world by National Geographic driving guides) from its founders (and his in-laws), Bob and Karen Crum, says, “It’s no secret that we’ve been securing other real estate.” He’s already purchased other buildings on Crozet Avenue in part as a back-up plan should the vintage, once-condemned building on Three-Notch’d Road, in which Bob Crum founded his famed pizza shop in 1977, be at risk due to developer Bill Atwood’s redevelopment plans of that tract of Crozet, and now he says he’s in negotiations for a Charlottesville outpost location “on the west end of town.”
Alexander reveals that the Charlottesville location, which could open in as soon as six months, will be “bigger and broader” than the original, tiny shop that serves custom, made-to-order pizzas with dough made fresh on premises everyday with a wide variety of toppings (e.g., sundried tomatoes; shiitake mushrooms) out of a practically antique oven.
Interestingly, the Charlottesville Crozet Pizza won’t be the first branch of the Crozet neighborhood hangout where people line up for a spot at one of its beat-up picnic tables. Alexander is already in the process of opening a Virginia Beach location. Fortunately for Crozetians, none of this growth means a departure of Crozet’s eponymous pizza place.
The original Crozet Pizza “isn’t going anywhere,” says Alexander, who jokes: “I wouldn’t be able to show my face in Crozet otherwise.”
Scottsville’s shrinking scene?
Now that the dust has settled literally on Phase 1 of Scottsville’s messy streetscape project, the light from lovely new lampposts illuminates the open storefronts on Valley Street. Unfortunately, there are fewer of them than before the project started. Over the past three years, the Dew Drop Inn, Minor’s Diner, Rivertown Rose and Java by the James have closed. 330 Valley opened in the old Rivertown Rose location, but so far, that building’s owner, Stephan Hawranke, has yet to open anything at the other Valley Street buildings he owns, including the old Dew Drop Inn location and the old site of Magnolia, which he already renovated and told us in 2006 would reopen in 2007 as Horseshoe Bend Tavern. And now we discover that Donna’s Place, which took over from Java by the James at 370 Valley, is for sale.
