Food news: Fests, a Main Street curse, and the return of a legend

If each piece of this week’s food news were a delicious morsel, you’d get a T-shirt and your picture on the wall for eating them all.

September 5, 2013; 6:55 AM • by Ross Catrow

The very first FALL LINE FEST kicks off this weekend downtown across multiple venues, galleries, and restaurants. Food is one of the festival’s core components, and there’s a lot going on this weekend FLF-related that you won’t want to miss:

• On Saturday, The Camel will host Fueling Richmond, a panel discussing the crossover in creativity between food and music. This will be unbelievably interesting and is only available to FALL LINE FEST ticket holders. Grab your ticket now, it’s only $20! Plus free food provided by The Camel!
• On Friday and Saturday, the future site of VCU’s ICA (Institute for Contemporary Art) will host food trucks, local brews, and…video art installations inside of PODS. No joke!
• For this weekend only, each of the five official restaurants (Ipanema, The Well, Saison, Rappahannock, and Pasture) will offer three-course prix-fixe meals inspired by one of the Fest’s bands. Menus and restaurant/band pairings can be found here.
• The fine folks over at Hardywood have brewed up a special, limited edition FALL LINE FEST Ale that’s only available this weekend at Fest locations.

That’s four whole bullet points of stuff for just $20, and I didn’t even mention the 40+ bands, and a million and a half art galleries. It’s going to be an incredible weekend. Don’t miss out!

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The Richmond Folk Festival, which as far as I can tell is biggest and most awesome folk festival in the whole entire universe, has launched a new (and delicious) fundraiser called The Richmond Folk Feast. Drop $100, with proceeds benefiting the Folk Festival proper, and you’ll get beer, wine, and food from “the brightest stars of Richmond’s restaurant community.” Get your tickets now because they’re going quick!

The Richmond Folk Feast takes place on October 8th from 6:00 – 9:00 PM at Tredegar Ironworks. Tickets are available online.

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The Curse of 1201 W. Main Street continues as the owner of Boo’s Brown Bag has put the corner restaurant up for sale. In our time on west Main Street, the RVANews office has seen at least four different lunch options pop up in that spot and then slowly fade into the distance. High points: Sweet Peas and Ruchee Express. Good times, good times.

Anyway, if you’ve got $55,000 a (possibly) cursed restaurant could be yours!

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Remember when Sugar Shack opened up a couple months ago, and you immediately thought to yourself “Man, I sure wish that place was open late so I could get my post-dinner doughnut fix?” It’s like they heard you, man! Sugar Shack will now be open until 9:00 PM.

They’ll also, for a limited time, be switching up their fritter steeze from apple to peach. First, know that their apple fritter is absolutely mind blowing. Second, before you get all “blah, blah, but it’s fall and apple picking season,” I direct you to this from their Facebook:

But as peaches draw to a close there are many great peaches to be had…and while everyone else is moving into apple this and apple that we can be a little different for a while. Trust me, they’ll be delicious.

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Speaking of doughnuts, due to a lawsuit over franchise fees the Dunkin’ Donuts in Carytown has closed. Bummer?

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EAT Restaurant Partners–owners of The Blue Goat, Osaka, Wild Ginger, and Fat Dragon–have purchased the old Main Art space located at 1537 W. Main Street, aka directly across from the RVANews offices. In an imaginary press release about the new restaurant, I said the following:

RVANews is incredibly excited to have another walkable option for lunch–especially one from the EAT Restaurant Partners. The future restaurant will join Bellytimber Tavern, Bombolini, and others as places we frequent for meetings and when we’ve left our lunches at home on the kitchen counter. We’re thrilled!

The purchase of the new space comes just weeks after EAT’s The Blue Goat temporarily closed down to reboot and shift their concept away from more exotic, nose-to-tail fare.

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BIG BIG NEWS!!!!!!! Starting Monday Chef Nate will be bringing the Flair back to 4th and Grace! Look for him… http://t.co/xLR1klahXC— Louisiana Flair (@LouisianaFlair) September 3, 2013

I’m not sure I can put into words how excited I am about the above tweet. It’s been a little over two years since Chef Nate closed down Louisiana Flair, and Richmonders wept and rent their garments. In the mean time, the wonderful Rappahannock opened in Chef Nate’s former spot and Richmonders bought some new garments.

But now he’s back, just down the street (temporarily) at Aurora while he looks for a more permanent location–possibly in the West End. Beignets!

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This morning, via a sad, sad sign posted on their door, Perly’s announced that they had to “close for now.” All of my excitedness about the above return of Chef Nate has now been drained out of me by this ultra devastating news. I just…augh.

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Sparkletastic in The Room! For a quick second I thought that this was going to be a foam party but with glitter instead of foam. I was only slightly disappointed to learn that this is, in fact, a class about sparkling wines put on by Secco. While glitter is definitely awesome, it’s just not practical, and, let’s face it, sparkling wine is way easier to clean up.

Sparkletastic takes place on Tuesday, September 10th from 6:30 – 8:00 PM. Tickets are $40 and get you “five wines, snacks, and loads of information.”

Photo by: Madison Price

September 5, 2013 6:55 AM 2