It’s 9:30pm on a Thursday. Mono Loco is finishing up dinner service. But the kitchen crew is just getting ready to start things up. They change into their street clothes and head over to Mas.
It’s 10am the next day. The Hamilton’s staff is walking toward the Downtown Mall spot for lunch service. A few stop by Miller’s to have a smoke or chat before heading into the restaurant.
It’s 4pm that afternoon. The Pasture lunch servers are closing out and making way for the dinner staff. They pocket their tips from the day’s work and pop over to Parallel 38 for a happy hour cocktail.
Charlottesville is a small town, a fact that’s never so obvious as when you sit down to chat with a few of the chefs, managers, and restaurateurs that make this place their home. Everyone on the restaurant scene seems to know everyone, and everyone has a story to tell about everyone else.
Sometimes, that can work against C’Ville’s culinary scene. It means ideas travel fast, and average dish concepts can burn bright and flame out as quickly as a boozy souvlaki. Worse, it can mean in-fighting, backstabbing, and a reluctance to push the community as a whole forward.
But a little scene can also be an uplifting scene. It means most chefs are close enough to a few other decent craftsmen that they can pick up tips and techniques to up their game. Best of all, it means when a patriarch of this food community unexpectedly passes away, the people he leaves behind rally around his memory and celebrate what he meant to them.
Longtime C&O owner Dave SImpson was a unifier. He was the first restaurant owner to join up for the inaugural Restaurant Week, whether he needed the publicity or not. He garnered favorable reviews from national media outlets, including the New York Times, Washington Post and Food & Wine magazine. His restaurant has long been the go-to spot for special occasion dinners. He was a success story that even those who didn’t know him could cheer for and draw inspiration from. When he died on April 29, C’Ville citizens came out of the cupboards to talk about him. Everyone all of a sudden had a Simpson story.
And yet Simpson is only the beginning of the story of how the chefs in this community are bound together. Follow along as we unwind a few threads of this giant web of close-knit culinarians.
