King of cluck: our judges rate the town’s best fried chicken
Buttermilk or brine? Floured or battered? Peanut oil or lard? Pan-fried or deep-fried? These are just a few of the secrets behind fried chicken so crispy on the outside and juicy on the inside that it’ll make you weep. Each method has its devotees, and nary a one of our 11 contestants spilled the beans [...]
Gettin’ sweet on sweet corn
Garrison Keillor once said, “Sex is good, but not as good as fresh, sweet corn.” To which we add—especially when it’s slathered in lots of butter. Corn tastes like nature’s candy, but it loses 50 percent of its sugar in the first 24 hours after it’s picked, so start gorging yourself now on these dishes [...]
Barboursville Vineyards’ Luca Paschina takes a chance with different grapes
A good deal of winemaking is experimentation. Inoculating with different yeasts, opting for shorter or longer maceration periods, inciting or preventing malolactic fermentation, aging in new oak or neutral oak—these are just a handful of the decisions with which our Mr. and Mrs. Wine Wizards are faced. Something not commonly experimented with are the types [...]
Lambrusco’s making a becoming comeback
Those of you who lived through the ’70s probably have quite a bit you’d like to forget about the decade.
Best power lunch spots in the city
Charlottesville’s power lunch scene’s a far cry from D.C.’s, but there’s still plenty of wheeling and dealing being done over the midday meal. Here’s where our town’s most influential go to discuss, deliberate, decide—and eat.
Collecting wine for business and pleasure
Managing your portfolio is never as fun for the rest of us as it is for the wine collector.
Hard ciders become easy mixers in summertime cocktails
Now that the markets are bursting with summer berries and stone fruits, it’s tempting to forget about ’dem apples ’til the fall, when they’re as crispy as they are prolific.
Pie in our eyes: Seven ways to get your fill
Dessert trends come and go, but a good slice of pie stands the test of time—especially when it’s filled with seasonal fruit and served à la mode. Here’s a deep dish worth of local choices of America’s most classic dessert. The individual peach pies at Albemarle Baking Company might be small, but the double-crusted delights [...]
June ABODE: My other kitchen: Tara Koenig
As the owner of Sweethaus, the old-fashioned bakery on West Main Street, Tara Koenig gets to satisfy both her sweet tooth and her love for design. Before opening her cupcake and candy shop last September, she fed her design habit by renovating the kitchen in her 90-year-old home in the Fifeville neighborhood. Not knowing whether or not [...]
A Spanish white, Verdejo captures the summer sun
Summertime’s all about indulging our whims and our desire to be a kid again.
All Zinc-ed up: The five-year-old restaurant finds its groove
We lingered long after we should have. Tables had been cleared, the swoosh of the dishwasher had replaced the sound of sizzling proteins, and the bar was quiet, apart from the occasional clink of ice in a shift drink. Still, after a meal like the one we’d had at Zinc, we felt an unspoken urge [...]
Herb-a-licious: Your guide to herby dishes around town
Once relegated to a scattering around the rim of the plate, herbs have come a long way—especially in this season when fresh ones flourish. Find them on area restaurant menus—from cocktails to desserts—and get herby with it. Prime your palate with Tempo’s strawberry basil martini made with freshly muddled strawberries and basil leaves, a squeeze [...]
A closer look at the revamped Governor’s Cup and its prized dozen
After 30 years, the annual Governor’s Cup competition, which pits Virginia wine against Virginia wine, got an overhaul, making it what the Virginia Wineries Association calls “one of the most stringent competitions in the U.S.” Improvements were made on every front—from the quality of the entries to the quality of the judges—and in February at [...]
C-VILLE Kids! The littlest shopper: Hitting the market with your child can be fun and tantrum-free
Too often, grocery shopping with kids is the scene of blood-curdling screams and tantrums. It’s no accident that balloons, gumball machines, and colorful packaging abound, transforming the best-behaved child into a pile of flailing limbs. Executives bank on the fact that parents will give in to purple ketchup and SpongeBob yogurt to avoid embarrassment. Maisie’s [...]
Nelson County’s newest brewery, Wild Wolf, quenches love for beer and nature
Someone with a 3,000-bottle wine cellar isn’t a likely candidate to also own a brewery, but last fall, Mary Wolf turned from Barolos to brewskis when she opened Wild Wolf Brewing
The joys of eating: Chefs’ dirty little secrets
Chefs and bakers may have an elevated palate, but that doesn’t mean they don’t have a weakness for junk food and drinks—especially after a long night when gourmet is the last thing on their minds. Here are some of our finests’ dirty little secrets. Ian Boden of Blue Light Grill: Corn chips with pump nacho [...]
Pink wines strong enough to stand up to the grill and those who man it
It’s that glorious time of year when the shelves of wine shops start to blush, giving drinkers an option beyond the usual bipartisan selection. But within the dozens of rosés that blossom between Easter and Labor Day, there’s a spectrum of colors and styles that vary as widely as whites do from reds. Since this [...]
Oh, sweet pea: An homage to the vegetable and legume
There’s not much cuter than a row of tiny peas in their pods and these springy spheres taste as sweet as they look. Plus, as both a vegetable and a legume, peas contain a host of vitamins and minerals and are high in protein and fiber, yet more easily digested than their bean-ier cousins. Here [...]
The fly-by-night benefits of pop-up restaurants
As the economy limps along, restaurant trends embrace informality with a shift from the stationary to the mobile. In 2011, the food truck business exploded, with owners in search of more flexibility and less overhead. 2012’s the year of the pop-up—a temporary eatery that gives chefs or restaurateurs a chance to dip their toes into [...]
Celebratory concoctions to follow the pomp and circumstance
Graduating from college is no small feat, but it’s the graduates’ parents who have the real reason to celebrate.
May ABODE: My other kitchen
You’d think that Dean Maupin, Keswick Hall’s Executive Chef—who also lists The Greenbrier (West Virginia), Tra Vigne (California), and The Clifton Inn on his resume—would be the cook in his family of five, but he’s sure to give credit where it’s due. His wife, Erin, who studied pastry at the CIA and worked at Fauchon [...]
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Fossett’s cellar at the touch of a screen
A 100-year-old estate with a croquet lawn and a snooker room isn’t where you’d expect to be handed an iPad when being seated for dinner, but Keswick Hall’s gone new school, taking Fossett’s leather-bound tome of a wine list digital. Sommelier Richard Hewitt and his team started the project last September to “innovate and expand [...]
Raring for rhubarb: 10 ways to stalk the spring treat
Rhubarb, that ruby-stalked rhizome that adds a tantalizing tartness to dishes both sweet and savory, is among the handful of spring produce that, just like the blossoming flowers and trees, seem to vanish in the blink of an eye. That’s why we’re practicing scorpacciata, or the act of consuming large amounts of a particular local [...]
Pick up a pack of Picpoul
Chances are you’ve never heard of Picpoul de Pinet, the sprightly white from southern France that typically costs under $10.
Hand me my spears: Asparagus is in for spring
Hand me my spears! Nothing heralds the arrival of spring like asparagus. Fat or thin, the spears rise obediently with the season, perishing long before a tomato might make its acquaintance on a plate. Sure, you can buy asparagus year-round now, but why defy nature? These dishes from around town honor the beauties during their [...]
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From our farms to our tables
Farm to table eating isn’t new. In fact, it’s as old as the farm day is long. But when it became cheaper and easier to produce and distribute processed foods, we went from a farm-to-table nation to a factory-to-drive-through one. In the past decade or so, as we’ve become more concerned with the safety, [...]
Farmers first, winemakers second
What’s struck me more than anything over the past three years as I’ve had the pleasure of getting to know our area winemakers through this column, is how they consider themselves farmers above all else. No matter how skilled they are at making up for a bad vintage in the cellar, they all seem to [...]