The Charlottesville 29

“Charlottesville needs a food hall.”

It’s something I’ve heard often. And, there’s good sense to it. Food halls and public markets have exploded in recent years in other food-loving parts of the country, like New York, Napa Valley, Portland, and Atlanta. Why not us? The food-centric nature of a food hall seems a natural fit for a city like Charlottesville – passionate about food, but not fussy about it.

So, would a food hall work in Charlottesville? Next year we will find out.

In Spring 2020, Dairy Market will launch in the historic Monticello Dairy building on Grady Avenue, once home to businesses like McGrady’s Tavern, Three Notch’d Brewing, and Harvest Moon Catering. Renovation of the 1936 building is well underway, and once complete, the market will put side-by-side purveyors, chefs, and artisans in a single, open-market space, hosting up to fourteen stalls around communal dining areas. Employees of Dairy Market’s developer, Stony Point Design/Build, have traveled to dozens of food courts around the world and aim to bring to their hometown the best of what they’ve found. 

The site is an appropriate one. Designed by local architect Elmer Burruss, the Monticello Dairy building was not just a production facility of milk, butter, and cheese, but also a gathering place, known for its event space and ice cream parlor. Keeping intact much of the original construction, Dairy Market aims to revive the building’s historic use as a gathering place.

Founding Merchants

What will the market hold? While not all tenants have been finalized, if the market’s Founding Merchants are any indication, expect a mix of local legends, rising stars, and a few imports. Stay tuned for news about additional merchants, including another addition that will go public next week. And, if you’re interested in running a stall yourself, email here.

Starr Hill Downtown

Anchoring the food hall will be a giant of local brewing: Starr Hill Brewery. Before moving to Crozet in 2007, Starr Hill first opened in 1999 in, well, Starr Hill. Now, in a homecoming of sorts, the brewery will add its newest location at Dairy Market, Starr Hill Downtown, just around the corner from its original site. The massive 4,200 square foot space with an additional 1,000 square foot patio will be home to what Starr Hill is calling a “pilot brewery and taproom.” While the taproom will offer the brewery’s standard line of favorites brewed in Crozet, a 5-barrel onsite brewing system will also allow experimentation with small batch beers, and interactive customer feedback. As for grub with the beer, guests can enjoy food from any of the Dairy Market’s food stalls, so not everyone in your group needs to be in the mood for the same cuisine when you go out for a beer and a bite. Starr Hill Downtown will also revive the live music for which its original Charlottesville location was known. “We have been looking to find a great location in Downtown Charlottesville for many years,” says Starr Hill’s Duke Fox. “We are thrilled to partner with the Stony Point team to bring their vision of a local food hall to our home town.”

Angelic’s Kitchen

First a catering company and then a food truck, Angelic’s Kitchen will find a brick and mortar home at Dairy Market. Owner Angelic Jenkins is excited not just to have her own restaurant, but also to be part of history, she says. “This is a milestone for Charlottesville and it feels amazing to be a part of it,” says Jenkins, who made news last year when a crowd-fundraiser helped her replace a stolen generator in just hours.

In addition to the fried fish for which Angelic’s is known, the Dairy Market location will offer an expanded menu of barbecue chicken leg quarters, homemade macaroni and cheese, collard greens, candied yams, corn pudding and more. Jenkins envisions her place as more of Mom’s kitchen than Grandma’s kitchen. “When people think about soul food, they sometimes think about eating at their Grandma’s house, but for my customers it will be a more of a contemporary look, with that feeling of being in Mom’s kitchen,” says Jenkins. “I always think about when my son was in high school and he would come home with all his friends – and teenage boys are always hungry.  I would start cooking for everyone, and they would call me Mama Angelic.”

Take It Away

Famous for its house dressing, Take It Away sandwich shop has been a UVa tradition for nearly three decades. Yet, despite plenty of opportunities, it has never expanded in Charlottesville beyond its Corner location. What makes Dairy Market different? “I could see the potential to reach folks beyond our Corner district location,” says owner Thomas Bowe. “Even though we’ve been serving Charlottesville for 27 years now, a lot of folks still don’t know about us.” As for menu, Bowe says to expect something very similar to the original location’s menu: sandwiches built from all-natural ingredients, and, of course, house dressing. One addition for the new spot: hot sandwiches. Details to come on those, Bowe says.

Eleva Coffee

If you want to be the gathering place that Dairy Market’s developers envision, you need coffee. For that, the developers turned to Eleva, a new Brooklyn-based, farm-to-cup company committed to connecting coffee drinkers with the small farmers who produce world-class coffees. After fifteen years as a global coffee trader, owner Emilio Baltodano could no longer turn a blind eye to living conditions of some of the small farming communities that produced the premium coffee beans he sold. He was determined to open a business that could serve outstanding coffee while also radically improving the standard of living of the farming communities from which the beans are sourced.

The close relationships Baltodano has cultivated with farmers during his fifteen years in the business are a win-win. Customers benefit from single origin coffees from the best small farms Baltodano has found, in top regions of Ethiopia, Guatemala, and Nicaragua. Farmers benefit, meanwhile, from the duty Baltodano feels to help the communities of the farmers with whom he has become close — through direct trade coffee and infrastructure projects. “I just got back from Guatemala and Nicaragua, where we were refurbishing schools for local children,” says Balodano. “It’s the relationships we have with our farming communities that motivates everything we do.”

With just one other Eleva location in Brooklyn, Baltodano saw Charlottesville as the ideal next place to pursue his dual-vision of making great coffee and helping its farmers. “College towns really respond to Eleva’s great tasting coffee and social impact focus,” says Baltodano. “We hope that Charlottesville, which is home to a great mix of students and locals, will respond to Eleva’s uplifting message of bringing communities together through amazing coffee.”

While Eleva is serious about its coffee, it is not overly so. “We’re not about measuring grams to nth degree,” says Baltodano, who encourages baristas to have fun and experiment. One barrista creation, for example, – homemade blueberry lavender latte – has become a favorite of regulars.