The Charlottesville 29

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?”