From the ground up

“Wine’s not expensive compared to what goes into making it. The work of bringing a bottle of wine to someone’s table is extremely varied, with thousands of gestures and centuries of traditions to honor and remember. It’s not an industry, at least not to us.”—Christine Campadieu, co-owner with her husband…

Good food is like good sex

Tom Dilello is in his eighth year as a Charlottesville waiter—which makes his career more than twice the average restaurant’s lifespan. He’s worked at Martha’s Café, Northern Exposure (where Dilello says a lot of local restaurant workers got their start), Papagayos ("the guy put a quarter million dollars into it and didn’t know what he […]

Full of bologna

The sandwich can tell us a lot about a person. For instance, in its earliest days, the sandwich said something like “you’re a compulsive gambler who’s caught a hot streak.” But since those days, it’s grown into a symbol of the workaday laborer, a mark of a nation on the move along its interstate system, […]

Certain inalienable bites

UVA graduation, or what’s known as Final Exercises, is a grand affair any way you measure it. Whether you count the 5,900 degrees awarded in May or the estimated 45,000 friends and relatives who come to witness their conferment, Charlottesville is packed to the brim every year for this 178-year-old tradition. The only thing more […]

Hey, small spenders

Ordering within a $20 budget at an upscale restaurant is like using two limited wishes granted by a frog whose soul bears no trace of a handsome young prince. One glass of one of the cheapest wines.

The Clean House

As far as I know, the theater lexicon doesn’t contain a word comparable to “chick flick,” so I guess that’s what I have to call Sarah Ruhl’s 2004 Pulitzer Prize-nominated play, The Clean House.

Fuzz

art Fuzzy art, it turns out, is something of a relief. This show’s title, says curator Patrick Costello, refers vaguely (fuzzily?) to the soft texture of the fabric that’s one of the collection’s favorite materials, and to its “warm and fuzzy” emotional slant. Though the Bridge, like most gallery spaces, tends toward the architecturally hard […]

Graduation

cd The album cover of the new Kanye West record, Graduation, is a purple, animated monstrosity. On the front, a letter jacket-clad bear is catapulted into the stratosphere from among a sea of cartoon animals tossing graduation caps. Bear necessity: Kanye West streamlines his sound on his third record, the cohesive Graduation, and proves that […]

Kluge’s estate project gets 4-star press

Forget the $6 million man. Try the $6 million “cottage.” Vintner-socialite Patricia Kluge completed one such 6,000-square-foot structure on her Blenheim Road property last month and the luxury subdivision it heralds, Vineyard Estates, promises bionic proportions of its own. Start with the marketing (which, right now, is the bulk of what’s under consideration, given that […]

Umbau breaks mold to fight sprawl

On the front page of the website for Umbau, a 2-year-old architecture school in Staunton, “we fight sprawl” is the most concrete statement of a shared goal, though certainly not the most high-minded. “At Umbau you will set the paradigms,” the site proclaims. “Total departure. Radical…What the world needs.” And: “Build Puccini.” The manifesto-worthy rhetoric […]