Charlottesville Food

by Casey Ireland

  The eponymous sign at Feast! Photo by Kevin Haney.

  An understanding of the market for local goods in Charlottesville naturally precedes a discussion of the various kinds of retailers from whom customers can purchase these goods. The wealth of some of Charlottesville and Albemarle County’s citizens is locally understood and nationally acknowledged, with Forbes magazine listing Charlottesville’s wealthiest as the thirteenth most prosperous group in the nation.79 With an average of 5.2 percent of this income set aside for charity, it’s clear that there’s a sizable contingent of individuals and families with a considerable disposable income and various ways to spend it. The music venues, theaters, arts community and restaurant scene are incredibly vibrant in central Virginia, drawing in both tourists and those hoping to create a home in the midst of mountaintop views and high culture. The University of Virginia and its teaching hospital draw in doctors, professors and highly educated individuals who are well versed in current affairs at both a culinary and a global level.

  Perhaps it’s no surprise then, given the trend toward organic, sustainable agriculture that has occurred within the last decade, that a community aided by the wealthy, enlightened by the educated and charmed with a southern appreciation of good meals and good fun has an abundance of citizens who deeply care about their food. To eat locally and sustainably, despite the war cry of traditional, back-to-our-roots marketing, is often to eat expensively. Which is not to say that there aren’t plenty of affordable options for lower-income families hoping to eat local or individuals seeking to make these options more accessible. Stephanie Andregg-Maloy of the City Market works closely with Charlottesville organizations for the elderly and the underprivileged youth to make market goods available to people from all walks of life. Similarly, it’s possible to shop at a gourmet grocery store like Feast! and get healthy local food for under ten dollars, thanks to the smaller packaging of produce and products. According to several farmers and producers in Charlottesville, local, organic foodstuffs can be accessible to a variety of incomes with budget adjustments. However, a large portion of the audience purchasing free-range duck, farm eggs and homemade Boursin cheese appears to have a larger budget to adjust.

  A monthly selection of Edible Blue Ridge. Photo by Kevin Haney.

  In 2006, Meg McEvoy, a journalist for popular newspaper C-VILLE Weekly, wrote an article titled simply “The $5 Tomato.” In this article, McEvoy discusses in no uncertain terms “a certain kind of Charlottesvillian” who “moves through the small sections of imported crackers and little jars of tangy tapenade…hunting for food in her native habitat” in the hallowed aisles of Feast!80 This woman picks up an heirloom tomato, weighs it and takes it, with satisfaction, to the register, where it rings up for $5. Even in 2006, McEvoy notes that “this rarified world of high-end organic and artisanal foods has exploded locally”—even more crucially, she finds that “to truly understand the trend, you’ve got to leave the market, get back in the SUV, and head out of town.”81

  The paradoxical economics of paying more for an unsophisticated, lumpy, hundred-year-old variety of tomato have been capitalized even further in other parts of the country. In 2010, Sotheby’s Auction House in New York City held an auction for crates of heirloom vegetables drawn from nearby farms and growers. The starting price per box? A mere $1,000. The benefit auction, titled “The Art of Farming,” was a first for Sotheby’s and took place in the Manhattan showroom of the auction house.82 The contrast between heirloom pumpkins and a world-renowned auction house is a startling one, just as the $5 price of a single tomato seems a surprising food choice, if not an exorbitant one.

  What Sotheby’s and the “certain kind of Charlottesvillian” understand about these high-priced, old-fashioned varieties of produce, a knowledge all too limited to those with disposable income or a higher level of education, is the economics of taste. The citrusy tartness of a Green Zebra tomato, the rich smoothness of a heritage pumpkin and the surprise beauty of fresh-picked carrots, with their smell of Queen Anne’s lace and knobby irregularities, are treasures of memory and the taste buds. The thought of a relished childhood BLT is most closely invoked by the smell of a homegrown beefsteak rather than a hothouse, imported hybrid. The remembrance of a great-aunt’s strawberry preserves is replicated more easily in a jar bought at a roadside stand than on the sugar-free aisle of a nearby super-saver. The connection between food and memory, between farmer and customer, between the land and the bounty it provides is an all-powerful tie all too distant from modern consumerist patterns. What people in Charlottesville understand in regard to the food they get and the places they get it from is the complex, unadulterated pleasure of buying local products and the economic satisfaction it brings to the individual and the community.

  THE GOURMET GROCER

  Grocery stores abound in the Charlottesville-Albemarle area, both individually owned and big-box. Gas stations in disguise offer handcrafted cappuccinos along with a tank of regular, while larger, more traditional-seeming operations offer bouquets of local tulips along with cans of Folgers. No matter what size or company, all grocery stores in the area know to cater to the epicurean interests of many of Charlottesville’s citizens. The gourmet store, a popular sight in the area, caters to the tastes of discerning palates even more directly, whether proudly marketed and displayed on Main Street or tucked away off the Rockfish Gap Highway en route to Crozet. While it may be difficult to purchase boxes of dishwasher detergent or bags of dog food in these shops, those looking for cheeses, wines, local produce and a variety of artisanal products find their needs well met.

  These gourmet stores are perhaps the most local of them all, run by Charlottesville natives or happy transplants with stories, smiles and never-ending culinary knowledge. This is the place where one is most likely to find the freshest herbs, most interesting salame or best dried pasta outside of the farmers’ markets. Particular markets have cult followings, whether it’s the die-hard dolma lover who picks up two dozen from Mona Lisa Pasta each week or the Crane Crest Real French Dressing fanatic who purchases two cases every holiday season from Feast! at the Main Street Market. Gourmet markets offer customers two commodities: delicious ingredients and the share of knowledge on how to use them.

  Feast!, the market and eatery of Kate Collier and Eric Gertner’s creation, has become a staple of the Charlottesville gourmet scene since opening its doors in 2002. A vaguely industrial space, housed in the larger structure of the Main Street Market, Feast! has both a welcoming and a utilitarian feeling. The uncluttered layout of the store, with its deli and cheese counters, dry goods section, wine rack and produce stand, facilitates easy browsing—and easy tasting. Samples of everything from duck liver pâté to house-made pimento cheese dot the entire store. When visiting, a shopper can almost make a meal out of the bits of cheese, spoonfuls of caramel and handfuls of nuts strategically placed in various sections. A walk-up café allows customers to try ingredients they wouldn’t have otherwise been exposed to. Fresh sweet corn, slivers of extra-aged gouda or house-spiced nuts excite customers’ taste buds and allow Feast! to showcase the best local ingredients in an accessible manner.

  The lunch cafe at Feast! Photo by Kevin Haney.

  Offering the best of what the area produces and importing the best of what it can’t has been a prime mission of Kate Collier since opening the store with her now-husband, Eric Gertner. The daughter of a Fauquier County culinary entrepreneur who became famous thanks to horseshoe-shaped shortbread cookies, Collier has been a part of the Charlottesville food scene since a young age. “My brother and I were involved in that, from rolling out the dough and cutting the horseshoes to her dressing us up in riding outfits and sending us to Neiman Marcus to hand out samples,” Collier says with a laugh.83 After working among chefs in San Francisco and a brief sojourn in Europe, Collier returned to Virginia with the goal of creating documentary films about the communal aspects of food before seizing an opening at the Main Street Market and beginning her business. />
  Collier is another heir to Jefferson’s high-low mix of gourmet and garden-variety. “It was mostly about cheese and perfectly sliced prosciutto and some local produce,” Collier relates of Feast!’s beginnings. However, the beauty and bounty of local produce has been Collier’s focus since day one. “We’ve always been ‘local first’ and telling the story of the local producers and offering samples,” she relates. The samples, quite literally, put the experience of local eating right into a customer’s mouth and negate the need for much preaching from Collier or any of her employees at Feast! To any customer who’s tried a bite of Virginia ham off a toothpick or snacked on a swipe of fresh chevre on a cracker knows the power of Collier’s methodology. However, Collier is quick to point out that a good food store is not necessarily a health food store. “We’re not buying into every new trend,” Collier insists, though gluten-free options have made headway at the store. “We’re curating a collection of great food; we’re not trying to offer them every option in the world.”

  So who are the customers taking advantage of this collection? Collier cites her market as a diverse one, noting that over half of her customers are women. “The common denominator is people that love good food and find value in buying and eating it,” Collier says. Feast! draws customers of a certain taste with specific expectations as to the quality of products and their places of origin. Fresh arugula from a local farm cozies up to organic Hass avocados from Florida, while a round of Monastery Gouda from Crozet sits next to selections from Holland in the cheese case. It seems that Feast! shoppers expect the best of what central Virginia has to offer, whether it’s produce or cured meats or horseshoe-shaped shortbread, without losing an interest in general gourmet niceties. Collier’s desire to own a good foods store means that it’s not incompatible to showcase both local fare and imported Parmesan and French wine.

  Collier has found that her store attracts a lot of regulars, people who visit upward of four times a week for either lunch or groceries. Feast!’s central location, easily accessible by those downtown as well as the UVA hospital with commuters aided by a large parking area, allows for quick stop-ins and leisurely lunches. Though shoppers may get their San Pellegrino in bulk at Sam’s Club, the easily customizable structure of Collier’s store allows for buying in small quantities. “European-style marketing” is a popular option at Feast!, meaning that customers choose to do their shopping throughout the week rather than in a single fell swoop on a Sunday or weekday. Collier finds that Feast! works well for single people “because you can get smaller amounts than you can at big-box stores.”

  Collier’s ownership of Feast! is not the only role she plays in the Charlottesville food scene. Along with co-founder Marisa Vrooman, Collier started a consolidating distribution nonprofit, Local Food Hub, in 2009. According to Collier, the “primary short-term goal is to develop events, educational programs and local connections to enable our community to be more involved in our local food system.”84 Ideally, the Local Food Hub, along with local food production, will “[contribute] to land ownership, [build] a stronger tax base, [create] opportunity for entrepreneurship in the areas of farm inputs and support services, and [encourage] responsible land stewardship for the future.”85

  The Local Food Hub works with Relay Foods, a popular online grocery retailer; numerous restaurants; and other food-related small businesses to funnel larger quantities of local produce into the local economy. Emily Manley of the Local Food Hub notes that the nonprofit provides small farmers with “the infrastructure and services they need to access schools, hospitals, grocery stores, and other markets that they have traditionally been unable to reach.”86 All these products, including “locally grown fruit, vegetables, meat, eggs, and value-added items from more than 70 small family farms in Central Virginia,” are stored at a central warehouse with 3,500 square feet and multiple temperature zones. The Food Hub ships these products out to over 150 regional locations in an eighteen-foot refrigerated delivery truck and refrigerated van. For businesses unable to sample their way through Feast! or buy in bulk from the farmers’ market, the Local Food Hub provides an essential path for funneling local ingredients into receptive channels.

  As with the core structure of the Local Food Hub, which carries food from farmers “fresh, frozen, and preserved” through every month of the year, seasonal agriculture gives a backbone to Feast! The produce selection changes with the seasons, as do many of the samples and the café offerings. Collier describes the seasonality of Feast!’s offerings with poetic delight. “In winter, when kale and turnips and greens are plentiful, there’s kale every day in soups, roasted turnips,” she notes. “In the summertime, the menu drips with tomatoes and basil. Seasonality is what keeps Feast! really fresh.” The café offers a seasonal special grilled cheese and a seasonal special salad, which allows Feast! to consistently buy from local farmers.

  Whether through the Local Food Hub, Feast! or personal experience, Collier is a wealth of knowledge about local farmers and agriculture. Having formerly employed Joel Slezak of Free Union Grass Farm and responsible for the success of Cville Candy Company, Collier has an apparent eye for nurturing culinary talent. The trend of young farmers and homesteaders has not gone unnoticed, nor has the increased specialization of certain farms. Such specialization works for businesses like Feast!, which now have the opportunity to order from farmers with heritage products almost tailor-made for menus and fine dining.

  OUTSIDE THE BIG BOX: CSAS AND ONLINE RETAILERS

  The success of the gourmet grocer in Charlottesville reflects one side of its unique culinary tastes: the taste for the fancy, the unique, the highbrow. Yet the down-home, get-your-hands-dirty and meet-your-farmer appeal of community-supported agriculture connects with an overlapping yet distinct interest of the area. Community-supported agriculture programs, or CSAs, abound in the area, subscribed to by a variety of customers. College students, young mothers and die-hard hippies can all go to the farm or to a pickup site to grab their “subscription”: a basket of the freshest fruits and vegetables the farm can produce. A CSA’s most basic purpose is to link the producer and consumer directly, allowing for a greater understanding of food origins and a deeper appreciation of local food sourcing.

  CSA subscriptions can vary in subscription length, size and frequency of pickups. One of the constants of CSA-style grocery buying is the consistency of beautiful, just-picked vegetables, fruit, flowers and herbs. The relationship between farmer and consumer in this case is a symbiotic one: the CSA subscriber gets direct access to the freshest local produce, and farmers get funding upfront at the beginning of growing season. If bad weather, machinery problems or unforeseen issues disrupt the growing season or the farm’s ability to produce, both farmer and subscriber shoulder the burden of costs. This alternative to more conventional, industrialized methods of food distribution gives the customer a more active role in food production and allows the farmer to keep his or her products locally purchased.

  But what happens if a consumer wants to try different offerings from different farms? What if a long drive to the farm isn’t part of one’s getting-off-work schedule? Though the economic and agricultural model of community-supported agriculture is a thriving business in Charlottesville, others have figured out a way to promote the CSA culture with less time and more options. Brett Wilson of Horse & Buggy Produce has figured out a way to offer grocery subscriptions with a flexibility that fits a variety of lifestyles. Horse & Buggy allows customers to purchase weekly or biweekly shares of products such as produce, dairy, bread, dry goods and various meats. Shares are available for pickup or home delivery, a boon for those too busy to schedule time for meet-up sites.

  With a well-tailored website and an easy personality, Brett Wilson has a Yale education and a love of heirloom tomatoes. Horse & Buggy began officially in 2006, unofficially in 2004, when Wilson was growing produce for restaurants and peddling cider. One day, a group of local women saw the produce in the back of Wilson’s pickup truck an
d inquired about his foodstuffs. The demand for his product exceeded its supply, so Wilson partnered with Mennonite farmers in the valley. Due to such “mom requests,” Wilson made his produce available in 2006 via Horse & Buggy subscriptions.

  Wilson’s partnership with the Mennonite farmers, born from the realization that his own farming capacity was not suitable for keeping up with the demand for heirloom products, is crucial to his business. Wilson himself is no longer a farmer but a distributor. Having to make the choice between roles and lifestyles, Wilson chose to “be the link between populations,” whether the populations are grower and consumer or the Mennonite community and the local populace at large.87 Wilson’s decision to buy from the Mennonites led to an exodus from conventional jobs for the community members, who have now begun raising poultry and dairy as well as produce. Beaming, Wilson tells the story of a Mennonite man whom Wilson has seen grow from childhood, now the owner of a five-acre produce farm partially funded by Horse & Buggy.

  Wilson is now considering adding organic, regional and conventional items to Horse & Buggy’s traditionally local offerings, seeing as “people still eat bananas.” “We can’t be so absolute in our convictions that we ignore what people need,” Wilson insists. Horse & Buggy itself is now a year-round operation, freezing berries, cider, cherries and tomatoes and offering black beans and non-produce foodstuffs such as Albemarle Baking Company bread and Aqui Es Mexico tortillas to round out its offerings.