Olio's cart

A couple of weeks ago, I attended a gathering of RVA food bloggers at Olio's which was a rather interesting event in and of itself. Olio and the event has been blogged about (among other places) here, here and here.
Olio (formerly European Market, the menu and the environs dont appear to have changed significantly since this earlier incarnation) has been a good and cheap visit for some time now. They make good use of cheese and vegetables (which I like) and have some really good deals on beer as well. I must confess that everytime I've been there, I've sort of wished they made it a bit more "comfortable" and welcoming as a place to dawdle but I digress....one of the revelations from this event was the fact that Olio has a food cart in the VCU area! A couple of false starts later (they need some sort of real time feed like their neighbor Nate's Taco Truck ideally with position and menu for lazy people like myself), I finally got to try them. I am glad that we have a nice addition to the lunch options around the VCU campus. The sandwiches while a trifle greasy, were fresh and well put together. And with some limonata, were just the ideal components for an alfresco lunch.

A perfect day for some observation, we watched the lines at NTT and O. while we ate. The throughput (time to walk away w/ food - time to order) was roughly estimated: NTT has the entire process down very efficiently and generally seems to average 3:30 +/- 15 sec (it also appears that people typically order 2 tacos). O. takes a little longer at roughly 4:00 +/- 30 sec. We're obviously not considering complexity of food preparation here ! However, at a given time, NTT appeared to have 2x to 3x the number of people in the O. line, so it makes for an amusing optimization problem (if time calculations are important :)).

With sandwiches in the $6-$8 range, the Olio mobile is a wonderful alternative to the chain places* around, especially with the nice weather days coming up.

Adding to my list of good vegetarian options around campus, I finally made my way to the Harrison Street Coffee Shop and quite liked the offerings there.

* - viz Panera, Subway et al. Now, I know Subway is not exactly a point of reference but useful as a price floor (I recently had the misfortune of eating there and found that their subs - at least the kind available in the VCU Commons could be well fit to an f(cardboard) function! Oddly enough, I kind of remember them being better when I was in grad school)

cheap date nights via richmond.com

A very useful list...thanks Richmond.com

http://www2.richmond.com/content/2010/mar/23/eat-beat-cheap-date-nights/

so many places on the list worth going to... and good to see so many of the "higher range" (in pp terms) places at least temporarily dropping into the mid-range.

Style-ing data

I guess the talk of the week has to be the "State of the Plate 2010" in Style Weekly this week. I generally agree with most of their picks and cant think of any glaring omissions. Like everyone, I have some dissenting and consenting views so blah....
(coincidentally, i wrote about a few of the out of town picks in this blog; so it was rather amusing as a personal note).
But I just wanted to look at the data presented statistically from a different angle and out of a general curiosity about the state of the plate and what it may say about RVA (the answer to which I dont know of course).

Looking at the lists from 2009 and comparing it to the one from 2010, it was rather interesting to observe:
2009 - 55 (primary) 'favorites' listed
2010 - 52 'favorites' listed
36 restaurants overlap both years. Of the others - 2009 set (19), 4 have closed in the last year.
2010 set (16), ~50% are relatively new (within the last year+) and ~50% have been around for a bit (and presumably made the list at some point in the past). These numbers are rather interesting and open to interpretation.

Number of restaurants from 2010 list on Opentable - 5 (under 10%) !!

State of the wallet: This was of great interest to me. Using some quickly acquired data from urbanspoon and Style, I found the following distribution. The y-axis represents the average cost of an entree. Within error (I think the numbers actually skew upwards), it was a rather expected trend.

The final thing which I dont have the time to research, but would have liked to know is the concept of local sourcing and generally supporting local farms, produce, livestock and/or sustainable fish and which restaurants win some points for being proactive in this regard. At some level, looking at all the data, I think the lack of this information is also telling.

Dan Barber - How I fell in love with a fish

I guess this isnt really about Richmond dining, but I just wanted to document it (mostly so I knew where to find it) and because I have been recently thinking about the concepts of sustainability. This was an extremely fascinating talk on real world, profitable and sustainable fish farming. I wish we had more people/chefs like Dan Barber...

Dan Barber: How I fell in love with a fish | Video on TED.com

continuing on this theme, I revisited the latest version of the Monterey bay seafood guide (noting in the process how, lately, I was doing my part to contribute to the destruction of the piscine ecosystems). It will make a ~nanobit of a difference (assuming population = 6e+9 !!) to get back into the habit of making better choices.
http://www.montereybayaquarium.org/cr/cr_seafoodwatch/download.aspx

modern american

I am going to use a single post to write about recent dining experiences in what appears to be a rather popular "cuisine" in Richmond (at least at a certain ubiquitous price bracket that I had alluded to earlier). While it appears that I am generally doing away with my multiple-visit-informed-opinion rule (I still strongly believe in the principle but with some serious budget watching on hand, it is increasingly becoming difficult to justify spending three digits* on patronage at places that dont seem to deserve a repeat visit).
Three recent uneven visits in this somewhat fuddled genre have been to Water Grill and Bonvenu in Carytown and Lemaire at the Jefferson, all typified by essentially similar sets of offerings.
Avoiding specifics and admitting that it is probably not fair to use a negative set of adjectives to describe the food based on an n=2 (same visit) but WG and BV fall into my category of avoid-in-future. The food and the service left so much to be desired. Long waits (in WG's defense, they comp'd our appetizer as an apology), clueless wait staff, poor presentation, quality and preparation left quite a bad taste in the mouth, pun intended. Restaurants may have an off night but in some cases, I think one can get a general taste of the overall philosophy, if you will.
Noise levels at WG and BV were very high. These places were packed on the weekend nights. Once again, I found myself at odds with such a large section of the populace. Urbanspoon has rave reviews for WG. The positive at WG was that it had a nice list of (reasonably priced) beers and a nice interior (plus its on Opentable)! The less said about BV the better.
Lemaire on the other hand was rather satisfactory. There was an 'emphasis' (a novel concept :)) on local sourcing that was quite nice. It was interesting to see VA bison on the menu, the taste of which was well liked. Random tidbit detour - bison can rotate on their back legs ! Despite the wide selection of VA wines, we ended up with some awfully good Australian wines in honor of our Aussie friend (the Margaret River wines have recently been quite impressive). What it lacked in general diversity, it made up in taste, presentation and service. This place on a weeknight was packed with business types and expense accounts, which is not an "issue" per se but does tend to give the place a rather stuffy interior. Vaulted ceilings and turn of the century rubenesque portraits added to this vibe. But I guess its no surprise that the grand old Jefferson can be quite grand. The lighting and the decor did give it a nice intimate feel though. Conversation was definitely easy here.

Digging around I found this rather amusing quote by Ed Vasaio, the local owner and chef of MZu - "I’ve never made a claim at [sic] this was haute cuisine. This amount of foodies and blogs … it’s vulgar. The preoccupation with food is an eating disorder. I love to cook and I love to eat."
I've come to feel (in apparently a bit of a minority opinion) that some restaurants in RVA (at least judging from their menus, prices and attitudes) seem to harbor the impression that they're haute cuisine. And patrons seemingly oblige.

* Checks were with typically - shared appetizer, an entree each, shared dessert and ~ a glass of wine each + t&t !