Eat It, Virginia!

Thank you for another awesome year. We appreciate your support and feedback. Please go back and listen to one of the 72 interviews we've uploaded since the podcast started in 2019. We look forward to launching a new season in 2022. Send us a message on Instagram if there's someone you'd like us to interview.  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Jay Bayer: Saison and Bingo See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Daniel Harthausen: Young Mother See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

To say Daquan and Nicole Woodberry have a lot of irons in the fire would be an understatement. The chef and entrepreneur power couple hopes to transform the way Richmond orders food with both the LoCo food delivery app and virtual restaurants. "A virtual restaurant is essentially a restaurant within a restaurant. It thrives and operates solely off of delivery platforms," Dequan, who goes by Chef DQ, explained. "So if you go on any of the delivery apps such as [his app] LoCo, Uber Eats, GrubHub and DoorDash. And you're like, hey, I want fried chicken sandwiches, and you're scrolling down and you'll see [his new brand] Absurd Bird pop up. Well, you'll be able to order. And that food will be made at [his restaurant] RVA Cafe and it'll be delivered to you and you may or may not know is coming from RVA Cafe. So the big thing here is a lot of bigger chains and a lot of bigger corporations are getting into this. Maybe people have heard of Hootie's Burger Bar, that's a virtual restaurant from Hooters. But you walk i

Evrim and Evin Dogu are the brother and sister team behind some of the country's best bread. Their Richmond bakery, Sub Rosa, has become a favorite of locals and a tourist destination for traveling foodies. Five years after opening Sub Rosa Bakery in Church Hill, Evrim and Evin were named James Beard Award Semi-Finalists outstanding bakers in the country. A feat the duo repeated in 2018, 2019, and 2020.   What's the secret to their success? Quality ingredients, a nice brother-sister balance, and their wood-fired oven.   "We load each bread by hand into a wood-fired oven. And the wood-fired oven is the whole thing." Evrim shared on the latest episode of Eat It, Virginia. "It has fire in it from around 3 p.m. till 10 p.m. So it's just fire inside of the oven." "So even if we wanted to bake more, there's a cut-off at 3 p.m., we can't bake anymore, because we have to start the fire for the next day," Evin added. It's a baking method the Dogus can trace back to ancient Egypt. "It's the same thing. They built

Bobo Catoe is a self-described nerd on topics such as beer, vinyl, and superheroes. But what Bo knows best is food. The past Elby's nominee for the best rising chef in Richmond, Catoe can be found creating award-winning dishes in the open kitchen at Alewife in Richmond's Church Hill neighborhood. Listen to the podcast to get some pointers on what to talk with Bobo about before striking up a conversation at Alewife. Click here for tickets to the VisArts Chili Throwdown on October 1. Click here to attend a live Eat It, Virginia podcast recording with Sub Rosa Bakery founders Evrim and Evin Dogu. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Richmond native Libby Lewis left the familiar confines of office and city life for the family's Shenandoah Valley farm. But don't call her a cow farmer. "Maybe a steward of the land," Lewis said when asked about her new job title. "Someone dedicating their life now to bringing healthy meat to families in Virginia." As the CEO of Lewis Cattle Company, her mission is to get high-quality beef onto kitchen tables across Virginia. "I decided about a year and a half ago that I was super frustrated with the food industry and the quality of the meat that you can find in grocery stores and knew that we could do it better,"  she said. To accomplish her mission, Lewis had to first convince her husband to let her change the way their family farm did business. "His first thing was, 'no, you're going to get tired of it. You're going to do this for a month, and then you're going to quit because you're not going to like the farming aspect of it,'" she recalled. "After about six weeks, I came to him and I had found a ref

When Chef Ida Mamusu fled Liberia after a coup d'état in 1980, she landed in New York City alone and without a plan. A stranger approached Mamusu, crying at the airport, and took her back to her apartment to help get her on her feet.  After connecting with family in the states, Mamusu made her way to Richmond where she opened businesses to earn money to bring her family over from Africa. It was family, she said, specifically her grandmother, who set her on the path to opening her restaurant Chef Mamusu's Africanne on Main. "When I turned 10 years old, she put an apron on me and gave me a cooking spoon," Mamusu said. "That day was the day that I knew that I was going to be a cook, just the apron and spoon was in my hand, it transformed my whole idea of what I wanted to do in my life." It wasn't long before her father made Mamusu the chef of the house. She was just 13 years old. "I was feeding 11 people, doing the menus, the budget, everything," she said. "I knew that this was it, there wasn't anything els

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 sai

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 goo

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. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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 w

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

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

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   See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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 ch

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. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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

When Sequoia Ross enters the room, everyone knows she has arrived. Ross, known to viewers of Virginia This Morning as Chef Coco, is the force behind Favour Cookie Company. She credited divine intervention for her vegan cookies business that is now expanding across Central Virginia. "Jesus. I have to tell you that it was Jesus. I started really at Unbound RVA and they were trying to help me figure out what kind of business I wanted to start. And I was always having to bring my own treats to the meetings because there was nothing ever there for me to eat. I would bring my cookies with me. And I'm coming to them with all types of business ideas, and they're like, but what about those cookies? Cookies, what are you talking like I didn't I was like cookies, I'm just bringing this and other people would buy those cookies, they would not believe that they're vegan," she said. Ross shared her life story with Scott and Robey on the March 15 episode of Eat It, Virginia! Subscribe to the podcast and listen today. Se

When it comes to sandwiches, bigger is often better. Now some of Richmond's biggest sandwiches are being created at Hatch Kitchen in South Richmond. Fat Kid Sandwiches launched last year during the pandemic as a to-go concept. Later this year, Fat Kid will be one of the restaurants opening in the now-under-construction Hatch Local food hall. Liz Clifford and Jon Martin, the couple behind the concept, said when it came to naming their business -- the choices came down to naming it after Jon's grandmother or Fat Kid.   "Well, we were sort of trying to explain to people what kind of business we wanted to run, what kind of sandwiches we were gonna make. The easiest way to explain it to people is we're gonna make real fat kids sandwiches," Liz Clifford said. "Our plan is to put mozzarella sticks on a chicken parm and have a club that's so tall you have a hard time eating it. These are really big, serious sandwiches. And we could never come up with a better name you know? I mean, it really got the point across t