Living

The first time this Northerner ordered iced tea in a restaurant south of the Mason-Dixon, we didn\’t understand the funny looks from other diners when we stirred in a spoonful of sugar. One sip made it clear: This was sweet tea, and the sugaring had already been done. Now, for some there\’s just a little too much sweet in sweet tea.

Any “Brady Bunch” groupie will fondly remember Sam the Butcher, Alice’s longtime boyfriend, who took her on bowling dates and kept the Bradys well supplied with his best cuts of meat.

It\’s been around a month and a half since Restaurantarama first detected a certain lovely smell wafting across the Downtown Mall.

As I was looking back and reminiscing on the websites I\’ve pushed on people in the year since I began professionally pushing websites, I was shocked and appalled to realize that while I\’ve waxed poetic about some of the most random websites that the wacky World Wide Web has to offer, I\’ve neglected to praise some of the most obvious.

Attention, pig lovers! Long an isolated mainstay way out on East Market Street, Jinx’s Pit’s Top is set to make an entrance on the Downtown scene. You may have noticed that the Downtown Mall kiosk has been bursting with flowers in recent weeks, thanks to the entrepreneurship of Betty Jo Dominick. Any day now, Jinx Kern will be supplying her with boxed barbecue lunches schlepped over from his tiny original location.
The pork will be tucked amongst the blooms during the noon hour, and also at dinnertime on Fridays After 5. For $6, says Jinx, you’ll get a barbecue sandwich, along with coleslaw and some cucumber salad—”both of which we’re rather famous for,” he notes.
Jinx says this is the first toehold in a long-term plan for Downtown Jinxifica-tion. “I hope ultimately not just to be up there by proxy, but to have my own place on the Mall,” he says. We’ll lobby for seating when that day finally comes.

We love reader recipe requests around here, and we hate to disappoint loyal fans. So, when a reader asked us to “track down the absolutely delicious red pepper sauce from Sticks and publish it for the benefit of everyone’s taste buds,” we immediately placed a call to busy restaurateur Bill Hamilton. Not only is Hamilton co-owner of the Preston and Pantops Sticks locations, but he also oversees, with his wife, Kate, their eponymous establishment on the Downtown Mall. While Hamilton was incredibly gracious and willing to share a recipe with us, the red pepper sauce was, unfortunately, a bit too top-secret for that. He did choose a fine substitute, however, that also has red pepper as an ingredient: Sticks’ Grilled Vegetable Gazpacho. “This soup is very popular, and seasonally appropriate,” Hamilton tells us. It’s also easy and delicious, as well.’Pam Jiranek

To hear Fabio Esposito tell it, the pizza business just won’t leave him alone. When he opens Fabio’s N.Y. Pizza in the former High Street Pizza Hut building next month, Esposito will draw on seven years of experience running the original Fabio’s N.Y. Pizza in Gordonsville. “‘Your kitchen is our second kitchen,'” he recalls his Gordonsville customers telling him, before he and his wife Elena sold the place two years ago.