The Belmont Stakes

(North) Belmont Ave has become an interesting gastronome destination of late. If one walks towards the museum district from the VMFA, I believe Belmont is the first street where one can find food. And a varied set at that, well worth a nice walk along ! While the Belmont Butchery (not a restaurant) and Zeus Gallery & Café have rooled the roost for some time, they were joined earlier this year by Stuzzi (the subject of much commentary all around). A few blocks (near Narnia :)) away hides Chiocca’s, a down the stairs bar that’s apparently been around since the 1950s! Two recent eponymous additions have been the Belmont Pizzeria and the Belmont Food Shop. Over the past few months, I had seen the latter at various intriguing stages of development and finally got to have lunch there recently. Or technically speaking, I picked up my lunch there a couple of times recently. Touting itself as “Back to Basics food”, the BFS is our city's latest addition to the eat local movement. Not fully a functional restaurant yet, they are open for takeout. The BFS bakes its own bread each morning and features meats and eggs from that Omnivore’s Dilemma darling - Polyface Farms. Incidentally, I’ve been seeing a lot of PF products all around town as restaurants attempt to burnish their “pollancred”.
For $12 including tax, you get a sandwich, a side and a drink (little 8 oz soda cans). I’ve tried the roast beef with caramelized onions on focaccia and the smoked mozzarella with terrine on pepper potato bread. I have been quite satisfied (satiated?) with my choices coupled with the sides (deviled eggs and potato salad so far, recently embellished with a little chocolate truffle). The cost is a trifle more than a comparably decked sandwich elsewhere (for example, around VCU, the Olio cart - $6-$9). BFS plans to expand to regular service and while it is quite out of the way for lunch (for me), good luck ahead. With interesting dynamics involved, have to keep an eye out on how they mature.
I’ve also had pizza from the Belmont Pizzeria a couple of times now and I timidly venture that I found it quite ok (other than the one occasion where the pizza turned into a soggy mess by the time I hiked back home). Their one “outlier specialty” - the potato pizza is quite interesting. I tread lightly because there are too many sophisticated palates around who take their pizza extremely seriously :). For a medium pizza @ ~ $15 (w/t&t) and a large one ~ $20, the prices are comparable to several places around. Definitely no gourmet offerings here but BP provides supply in the pizza demand supply equation for the area when one doesnt want to patronize any chains (for example, on google maps searching for “pizza” around a 1 mile radius of the VMFA results in Mary Angelas (which some people swear by but I haven’t liked much) and Chanello’s – never been). They have a couple of bar stools where you can sit by the window and get pizzas by the slice but I haven’t dawdled here or even tried the pastas (perhaps easier and healthier to toss some together than eat takeout pasta !).

Speaking of Belmonts and since it coincides nicely with the ceremony going on as I type – random fact: apparently, at one time, Belmont, MA near Cambridge, MA had the highest per capita concentration of Nobel Laureates residents in the world. And speaking of NLs, one of my favorite signs on the UC Berkeley campus. Talk about a faculty perk!

Postscript: Admittedly, the previous post was a bit of a hello world curiosity trial just to see where posts would land on the new spinning wheel of blogs. I must say, given my general degree of quasi-wallflowerishness (not to mention general subject matter (or lack thereof) on this blog), I was quite mortified to see it prominently displayed on ER before the algorithm mercifully found another posting to supplant it. Must think carefully now before flippantly tossing out some markovian musing or hope to coincide with other prolific writers (of the real variety). Thankfully my overall blogennui will self-correct this.

data bubbles continued

Following up on my previous post on mint.com’s data on average check sizes at different dining establishments in RVA, I recently played around on rather cool site called bundle which also tracks spending. Bundle has some nifty little flash bubbles that you can customize to see how people spend money across the country on different categories each month (food, travel, home, entertainment etc). Since this is a “food blog” (sic), I only looked at some Richmond data, specifically, how much the average Richmonder (a nebulous concept - one can also get data from Midlothian or Henrico county) spends each month on food, dining and the like.
In addition to location, you can specify age group, income level (the rich spend more - surprise !!) and even household types (for example, in an interesting bit of socioeconomic behavior, average spending on restaurants & bars in Richmond – single male, no kids - $303, single female, no kids - $197 and married, no kids - $269). Overall average across all groups - $253 on eating out and $248 on groceries. Depending on your fascination (mine is obviously high) with this kind of silly information, you can spend quite a bit of time trying different permutations and combinations.
Avg monthly spending on restaurants and bars in other cities: Washington DC - $473, San Francisco, CA - $419, New York, NY - $287, Boston, MA - $335

Again, mathematically speaking, despite the claimed 20 million data points, it is easy to get misled by averages (vs. medians) and statistical errors including demographics represented, location and such. But looking at the distributions is probably more telling, although I do wonder about that as well. The graph below shows the average distribution on dining out across Richmond.



acknowledging the excellent work of RVAfoodie in redesigning the eatingrichmond.com aggregator - what has become a fascinating glimpse into so many musings across town.