One of Richmond's newest food brands came to life after a dark period for Danny Sterling. It was 2016 and the chef was shocked to learn he had cancer. The surgeries and recovery that followed (along with the support of his wife) convinced Danny to take better care of himself by making better food choices.

"It doesn't hurt to look at holistic health and see how food can play a role in that. And it's changed my life dramatically," Sterling said. "I feel better. There's been a lot of just a lot of benefit that's come from really focusing on what I'm putting in my body."
With that in mind, Sterling started ELYA after he moved to Richmond. 

ELYA, which stands for Eat Like Your Ancestors, provides meals-to-go placed in refrigerators around Richmond.

While popular menu items include a beef burrito bowl and chicken, bacon, ranch bowl, Sterling said ELYA offers diners a healthy, convenient alternative to fast food. 
"The way that we look at [healthy food] is to make sure it comes from a good quality source," he said touting food purveyors such as Joyce Farms for chicken and Autumn Olive Farms for bacon. "We're here to support you, whatever your health journey is."

ELYA meals are available to the public at 3121 W Leigh St. in Scott's Addition and 7 E 3rd St. in Manchester.

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The world's best tomatoes come from Hanover County, Virginia. And some of Hanover's best tomatoes are grown at Village Garden Farm.

"Amazing soil here," founding farmer David Hunsaker said about his Hanover farm tucked away on 10 acres near Kersey Creek. "We are east of the fall line in Hanover County. There's plenty of Hanover County that really does not have our soil. If you're west of I-95, you're on the other side of the fall line. And you don't have this glorious, coastal plain soil that we have."

It is that soil, Hunsaker and his partner Barbara Hollingsworth, said, that helps keep Hanover tomatoes consistently great.

"You eat with your eyes as much as your tongue. So if you've got these beautiful fruits there and the textures are perfect, and the colors are beautiful. That's certainly going to amplify it," Hunsaker said. "I don't know that you'd really be able to sit down on a blind tasting and have a clue [whether or not a tomato was from Hanover]. But if you found tomatoes that didn't taste as good. They're probably not a Hanover tomato."

A recent write-up on Food and Wine went into great detail about the soil that helps Hanover produce "the best heirloom tomatoes."

Over the last decade or so, Village Garden has grown from a farmer's market mainstay to one of the most sought-after providers of tomatoes for Central Virginia chefs.

"It's really hard to keep up," Hunsaker said. "We continually have new people who hit us up. And depending upon the harvest time, it's like, well, we may have some for you in a few weeks."

The garden recently teamed up with several Virginia restaurants to pair their Hanover tomatoes with Barboursville Vineyards wine in a series of Supper, Summer, and Somm dinners.

Village Garden tomatoes are also featured in several of Duke's Mayo #HotTomatoSummer dishes available this week at participating Richmond restaurants.

Learn about all the events, the tomatoes, and David and Barbara on this week's episode of Eat It, Virginia!

This week's episode is sponsored by Duke's.

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On July 1, 2021, Virginia's marijuana laws changed making it legal in Virginia to grow up to four marijuana plants per household and possess up to an ounce of the drug.

While smoking may be the most well-known way to experience marijuana, it is not the only way.

Chefs Nikki Gregory and Paul Polk, who own Charlotte's Southern Deli and Tapas in downtown Richmond, appeared on the Eat It, Virginia podcast to discuss how best to use marijuana as a cooking ingredient. They also shared their plans to incorporate marijuana into future menus and business ventures.

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When Joe and Emilia Sparatta arrived in Richmond about a decade ago, they hit the ground running. From helping Jason Alley open Pasture, to opening their wildly successful Richmond restaurant Heritage, to opening a second successful Richmond restaurant Southbound, to expanding from a couple to a family of four, there has not been much downtime for the Sparattas.

That all changed in March 2020 when COVID-19 shut down the restaurant industry.

"It was really hard to try to completely shift gears and amazingly stressful to try to make these decisions," Joe Sparatta said about the month the COVID-19 pandemic hit Richmond. "Being worried about people's health. Not knowing how the virus worked. Not understanding, are we keeping people safe? Is this a terrible idea being open? It was just very challenging, to say the least."

After a few weeks of limited service and to-go orders, the Sparattas decided to temporarily close their beloved restaurant.

"It was super traumatic. It was so hard to have to close down. It was so hard to think that this might be the last time we're ever in this building," Sparatta said.

One year later, the Sparattas are preparing to reopen Heritage -- with some modifications.

"I just feel fortunate that we're able to come back," Sparatta said. "I probably think we will be disappointing some people by not being open for brunch or they might not be able to get a table for a little while, because we're doing such a limited capacity. But we're just happy to be back and trying to move on. There is certainly a little PTSD from that. I think everybody has that now. My mental health was certainly shaken up a bit."

On this week's Eat It, Virginia! Joe Sparatta shared what it's going to take to reopen Heritage and maintain a healthy family dynamic.

"Trying to find a middle ground is challenging, but we're working on that, and that's part of our reopening strategy with Heritage. We're going to start out really small," he said. "So just right now the team is myself, my wife, we have great bar managers lined up, we're still working on a couple of servers, but only doing a couple of days a week to start, because that's currently what we have with staffing. And we're going to kind of see how it goes from there. We might only do Friday and Saturday to start, maybe 20 or 30 people, and just keep it super low key. Just go to the Farmer's Market every week, get everything I need, and make the menu weekly."

Sparatta said he hoped to have Heritage reopened sometime in mid-July.

"It's really going to be me and one other person cooking in the kitchen. And that's it. And it will be Emilia, plus a bar manager and a server, super minimal start," he said. "We're just going to take it literally day by day. But I'm excited to work with my wife again. We haven't really worked together for last few years because she took on a larger role with our family and taking care of our children. She's a wonderful mom and she's also incredibly talented. I'm excited to see her on the floor again and she does such an amazing job she makes Heritage work, I just make food."

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Drive just about 15 miles east of downtown Richmond on Route 5 you are in another world. The Lilly Pad, which dubs itself Richmond's only waterfront bar and restaurant, sits at Kingsland Marina along the James River in Varina.

While the Lilly Pad has been around for decades, it has a new owner and a new menu which has created a new vibe in the old spot.

"I've been in Richmond long enough to know that the restaurants that have the good food are the ones that sustain," owner Max Walraven said. "Mamma Zu's is a perfect example. Crappy little building, weird little location, line out the door for 35 years because the food was so good. I don't want to run a restaurant that has a subpar menu and say, 'oh, but the view is nice.' I want to have a great menu. I want people to come out here in the winter to eat and huddle up under the space heaters that all the restaurants have now to have a good piece of fish or a burger."

Walraven has pushed for many changes at the Lilly Pad, but there are some aspects of the old restaurant he refused to touch.

"We have the buckets of beer, which I must say we've done a lot of comps to other bars and restaurants around Richmond and I have yet to find a restaurant with a domestic beer special, as inexpensive as ours. That bucket of beer for $10 is $2.50 a domestic and we run that every day. That's, you know, we that's not a happy hour special. That's every day," he said. "That was one of the things from the previous Lilly Pad that I said, we've got to keep the burger and bucket, we got to keep the bucket of beer special. There are these elements that kind of make the Lilly Pad the Lilly Pad. And I wanted to keep those intact, including the name you know, I purchased the name from the previous owner because I said we can't rename it. It can't be River Grill. It can't be the something bistro. It's got to be the Lilly Pad."

The Lilly Pad features live music on Saturday nights and Salsa dancing every Thursday.

It is located at 9680 Osborne Turnpike in Varina.

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Can you keep a secret? Chef Steve Glenn sure can. The Chesterfield native is about a make his national television debut on Hell's Kitchen Young Guns with Gordon Ramsay. A secret the 23-year-old Manchester High School graduate had to sit on throughout the pandemic.

The competition, which begins its television run at the end of May, was actually filmed in 2019. The pandemic pushed back the start date, forcing Glenn to keep quiet.

"I had to pretty much be silent for two years," Glenn said. "Of course my family knew and, of course, the people that compete with you. But as far as everybody else, we just kind of had to go back to normal life, which was really weird. Just, going through all of that and then coming home like, alright, go back to normal life as nothing happened. I'm glad I can finally let the world know. It's good to get that off my chest."

In the kitchen, the former executive sous chef at Richmond Country Club said he gets inspired by music and his grandmother's cooking.

"She would make all types of stuff. She loved to do fish and grits. She made the best greens and mac and cheese I've ever had in my entire life," Glenn said. "She got me in the kitchen, at like 10, peeling potatoes and cleaning collard greens. I was just always amazed at her ability to transform these raw ingredients into you know, something I could eat two bowls of."

You can follow Chef Steve Glenn on social media here.

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Adam Musselman and Joshua Franklin, two of the forces behind Cobra Burger in Church Hill, come on the podcast to discuss the Cobra Burger name, the importance of local ingredients, and how their past experiences as a "meat guy" and "cheese guy" melted into one of Richmond's hottest new spots.

Cobra Burger

400 N. 27th Street

Richmond, Va. 23223

 

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Life is good for Donnie Glass. The husband and father of a baby boy spent the last 13 months successfully guiding his Richmond restaurant Grisette through pandemic-related shutdowns and restrictions.

A challenging time, for sure, but not the most challenging time in the restaurateur's life.

The Northern Virginia native was in high school on 9/11. An experience that led him to enroll at Virginia Military Institute and enlist in the Army. Before graduation, Glass was overseas in Iraq. The experience changed his outlook on life.

"Very, very quickly those ideals that make one 15-year-old boy enamored with joining the military are in absolutely no way reality," Glass said about his time overseas. "I was disenchanted by it. I was crushed that the way I thought my life was going to be was no longer an option at all."

Glass returned to Virginia and graduated from VMI. But his previous military experience was enough to convince him to do something else with his life.

That something else was restaurants.

"Life changes so quickly and what you think you want when you're 18 and 19, and 20, and 21, and  22, and 23 can be five different things, and then you can flush that whole plan down the toilet and start over. And it doesn't matter, it really doesn't matter," Glass said.

Glass's culinary journey took him across the country and put him in a position to meet his future wife Megan.

The couple eventually settled in Richmond where they opened Grisette in Church Hill. 

"The goal of this whole place is to just have everybody that walks through the door. Have a great time. That's it. And our way of doing that is providing them with good food and good wine and not having it be super expensive."

Learn more about Glass, his food, and his family on Eat It, Virginia! with Scott and Robey.

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Carlos Ordaz-Nunez went from working on his parents' Virginia farm, to managing a series of successful pop-up events, to opening his dream restaurant TBT El Gallo in Richmond in one year.

A pandemic year in which he learned a lot about his food and himself.

"What I've learned [during the last year] is to love who I am and what I cook and to really embrace that and not pigeonhole myself or put myself in a box and not be like, 'yo, this is Mexican cuisine, you have to do this, or this is Southern cuisine and you have to do this.' For me to accept my perspective of my culinary influences and to do food the way I want to do it," Ordaz-Nunez said about his new venture. "

We encourage you to try his food -- but order ahead of time  -- to ensure you get what you want.

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David Dunlap was at the top of his game in March 2020. The executive chef, who gained experience in notable restaurants like The Inn at Little Washington and The Ashby, was running Maple and Pine at the Quirk Hotel in downtown Richmond and had just opened a second location in Charlottesville when the pandemic closed restaurants statewide.

"Fifteen days of 'slow spread' turned into four months," Dunlap told Scott and Robey on the Eat It, Virginia podcast. "Then I got a call saying they weren't bringing back my position."

The husband and father was now faced with a life-changing decision. Move the family to a place where restaurants were hiring during the pandemic or figure out a new plan. Fortunately for David, his wife Brittany took over.

"My wife is a hustler. Her background is in marketing. She made a website and started to promote private dinners," he said. "I reached out to a bunch of wineries and breweries and started wine dinners and beer dinners for small groups of people and then kept myself really busy throughout the summer."

And it was Brittany who found the space that would be the family's next adventure -- Midlothian Chef's Kitchen.

"I needed a commercial kitchen. Where my daughter goes to cheer, that's where Midlothian Chef's Kitchen is now, and my wife kept passing by it. It used to be Shane's Rib Shack. They, unfortunately, didn't make it and this restaurant was open has had an awesome patio," Dunlap said. "And so in October, we signed a lease and got to work. We built the whole thing out ourselves. We didn't take on any investors so kind of just poured our life savings into this restaurant."

Opened in early 2021, Midlothian Chef's Kitchen offers indoor/outdoor dining, curbside pickup, and prepared meals that can be reheated later. 

Midlothian Chef's Kitchen

11501 Busy Street

North Chesterfield, Virginia 23236

804-893-3562

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