The Time of My life Randy Fitzgerald
I’ll have the Nostalgia on Rye
Randy Serves Up Restaurant Memories
I remembered recently that Barb and I had once tried to go a whole month
without eating out—no fast-food stops, no nabs at the 7-11, no dinners on
the town, no lunches except from a brown bag or across the kitchen table.
It was hard. We didn’t realize how often we were eating out until we tried
to stop it. Our impetus for the experiment was threefold: we wanted to see
how much money we had actually been spending on restaurants every month, we
wanted to start a strict new diet and get it rolling without outside
temptations, and we wanted to see if we could do it.
We did it, but I wouldn’t do it again. I grew up in a family of
restaurateurs—my father and three of his brothers were all in the restaurant
business. I grew up busing tables, washing dishes and taking cash at the
register. My brother Terry often cooked, and from an early age he was darn
good at it.
A favorite family story is the night Terry was cooking at one of Dad’s finer
establishments and a diner was so delighted with his lamb chops that he
asked the waitress to bring out the chef to receive his compliments.
The waitress demurred, but the diner was not to be denied, so out from the
kitchen strolled a 15-year-old boy with a peach fuzz face, red Keds and a
baseball cap.
I was less successful at my own attempts in food service. Dad for a while
had several restaurants going at once, among them a sandwich shop popular
with high school students and truck drivers.
It was always busy, and with other family members working at Dad’s other
places, I was more or less running the show one particular day at the Pig N’
Whistle off Hydraulic Road in Charlottesville.
Soon the place loaded up with my fellow students from nearby Albemarle High
School, and I was hard pressed to take orders, fix sandwiches, take cash and
supervise the front end, but I thought I was doing fine until a big bruiser
about seven feet tall came back in. He slung a cellophane-wrapped sandwich
down on the counter and informed me that the ham and cheese sandwich I had
fixed him had no ham on it.
Thinking quickly, I told him I was sorry, I thought he had asked for a
cheese sandwich. To which he replied, “Well, that’s no better, because
it doesn’t have any cheese on it either.”
Whoops.
Maybe because I spent at least a dozen years of my youth working and eating
in those restaurants, eating out has always been a big part of my routine.
Barb still reminds me that when we first married, I would come home from
work at dinnertime, sit down in the dining room and say to her, “I think
I’ll have meat loaf with mashed potatoes and green beans.” That got a laugh
from her only the first few times I did it.
Most of my dining out these days is done in either Richmond or
Charlottesville, and both those cities have a number of restaurants where
Barb and I like to go—but I must say we do miss some of our favorites that
are no longer around.
I grew up in my family’s own Dogwood Restaurant and The Gridiron in
Charlottesville, ate many a time at Arthur’s Grill on Main Street and at the
University Cafeteria—surely the best cafeteria ever, with the possible
exception of Willow Lawn’s long-gone S&W.
Both Richmond and Charlottesville lost their popular Miller & Rhoads Tea
Room, though Richmond may have absorbed that loss better since we had so
many more restaurants here than C’ville did at the time. But there weren’t
too many in either town, Barb reminds me, where the ladies got to enjoy
fashion shows as they lunched.
A Richmond reader wrote recently to ask if I remember Neilsen’s, which I
certainly do. I always wondered what happened to it. That place closed so
fast I never knew it was gone until I pulled into the parking lot one
evening to find it boarded up. Wright’s Townhouse is gone, too, but it was
still in our Ginter Park neighborhood when we moved here in ’86, and even
our kids fondly remember its Chicken in the Rough.
But I know from family history that the restaurant business is a tough
pursuit, and if you have a favorite that’s been around a long time, like
Byram’s or Joy Garden or Robin Inn, count your blessings that you still have
it in ’08.
By the way, one of my best dining-out experiences lately was at Ashland’s
Ironhorse Restaurant on New Year’s Eve. Everything was perfect—the service,
the food, the ambiance, the coffee.
In fact, it was all so good I thought about complimenting the chef, but I
was a little afraid to ask for him.
Randy Fitzgerald is chair of the English and journalism department at
Virginia Union University. He is a former Richmond Times-Dispatch columnist
and University of Richmond administrator. His blog is
www.randyfitzgerald.blog.com.
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