The Charlottesville 29

A common myth in the food world is a preference for “simple” food — the idea that food is best in its natural state, free of human manipulation.

In some cases, this may be true. A ripe mango has no room for improvement. When heirloom tomatoes are in season, a little salt is all you need. And, once you crack open an oyster, no chef can make it better.

But usually, human intervention enhances food, and the preference for simplicity is illusory. “I like simple food, with as little human intervention as possible. I am happy with just some bread, cheese, and wine.”

Say what?

Few foods require more manipulation than bread, cheese, and wine. Take bread. Try gnawing on a piece of wheat in the field. Somehow, humans figured out how to grind that wheat into flour, mix it with water and a living microorganism that consumes sugars and releases gas, trapping bubbles in stretchy dough, and then apply heat so the bubbles set into a light, solid loaf.

Bread is delicious not because it’s simple. But because it’s not.

The Greatness of Ciaccia

Ciaccia is an ode to the human triumph of bread. Next to its sibling Belle, the tiny, order-at-the-counter shop builds an entire menu around a single bread. And if you’re going to build a restaurant around just one food, Scott Shanesy’s schiacciata is as good as any.

With a few basic ingredients, Scott calls schiacciata “deceptively simple.” The complexity and the challenge are in the process. “There’s a finesse to it,” said Scott, who has baked for most of his life, and trained at one of the nation’s best bakeries, Sullivan Street Bakery. Even the cookware matters. The common thread among great schiacciata, Scott said, is baking it in a blue steel pan, whose non-stick surface allows using very little oil, preserving the bread’s light texture without it becoming too chewy from excess oil.  The result is a product that makes people swoon– a crisp exterior with a soft and tender interior.

At Ciaccia, the schiacciata is available two ways — either as sandwich bread or pizza. For the sandwiches, their inspiration is Florence – where order-at-the counter joints offer schiacciata sandwiches with toppings like cured meats, creamy cheeses, and a few other adornments. Enough to enhance enjoyment of the bread without impeding it.

For the pizza, they looked south to Rome. Also known as pizza al taglio, Roman pizza is traditionally baked in long rectangles and then sliced to order for a snack or quick meal. It’s the same dough as the sandwich bread, topped with combinations like Scott’s favorite: zucchini, pecorino romano, gruyere, dill, and mint. As in Italy, the pizza is sold by the weight — depending on how large a slice you’d like cut off for you.

Before 2025, few people may have realized how much Charlottesville could use a Florentine sandwich shop. We’re better off now that we do. Among a great group of finalists, Charlottesville’s 2026 Best New Restaurant is Ciaccia.

It’s almost time for the release of The 2026 Charlottesville 29, this year’s answer to the question: if there were just 29 restaurants in Charlottesville, what would be the ideal 29? To be eligible, a restaurant must have been open before January 1, 2025.

But restaurants that opened in 2025 also deserve recognition, and they are in the running for Best New Restaurant. Among last year’s openings, the winner will be announced on April 1. The finalists:

• A Squared Pizza
• Ciaccia
• El Tako Nako
• Mint Kitchen
• Noble
• The Jervey

Wilson Richey was not present for this month’s tenth anniversary of The Bebedero. Or was he?

Biologists define death as the irreversible cessation of an organism’s integrated functioning as a whole. Fine, the tree that Wilson’s car hit in December 2023 may have done that. But, against other aspects of his life, it was powerless.

Richey poured his life into The Bebedero, and at the anniversary celebration, its presence was impossible to ignore.

Present was his creativity. An insatiable creator, Richey would be thinking of his next project while still finishing his current one. His idea for The Bebedero was to bridge a gap by combining traditional Mexican flavors with a polished restaurant experience. Richey enjoyed a taco truck as much as anyone, but he wondered why so few sit-down restaurants that called themselves Mexican served food you’d actually find in Mexico. Hence, The Bebedero.

Also present was Richey’s grit. Like any restaurateur, Richey faced constant challenges. He never let one stop him. The Bebedero embodies this so well because it is now in its third location. The restaurant opened in 2016 in The Glass Haus, which Richey and his staff took months to build into a dazzling two-story space that would transport guests to Veracruz. When the landlord hiked the rent to an unsustainable rate, instead of closing the restaurant, as some owners might, Richey relocated it. And a few years later, after another rent hike, he moved again. Building a restaurant just once takes enormous effort. Building it three times over is almost unheard of.

But Richey’s biggest inspiration for The Bebedero was his inspiration for everything: people. First, his staff. “Up or out” is the typical employment progression, but for restaurant staff, there can be a ceiling: what happens once staff master management, and there’s nowhere to promote them? Richey had a solution. To avoid losing valued staff, he would make them co-owners for his next project. And so, The Bebedero is owned by people who first worked for Richey at other restaurants: Cesar Perez, Yuliana Perez Vasquez, Cheley Napoli, and River Hawkins.

The other people who inspired Richey were guests. They were the reason he did what he did. “I like to make people happy, and I seem to draw joy from and be decent at doing it from a restaurant,” Richey once said. A deep empath, Richey built restaurants to feel others’ joy.

And so, as I sat at the bar sipping mezcal on the tenth anniversary of The Bebedero, the joy that filled the room kept prompting the same thought: “If Will’s gone, how’d he make all these people smile?”