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Smoked brisket tacos (Photo by Justin Chesney)
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Pizza with spicy sausage and black-pepper honey (Photo by Justin Chesney)
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Shrimp and crispy polenta (Photo by Justin Chesney)
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Chocolate budino (Photo by Justin Chesney)
Among a certain hipster subset of foodie, there lurks a strange and secret appreciation of fast food, even if that appreciation tends to be expressed ironically. Think of all the odes to Taco Bell, for instance, in which the overwrought scribe’s late-night, post-hangover desire for a cheesy gordita is turned into a kind of mock-Proustian epic. Or consider the bizarre elevation of Waffle House. Once the domain mostly of truckers and cops, it became “the agora” on an episode of Bourdain a few years ago for the philosopher king of Southern chefs, Sean Brock.
For the midlevel chains of the world with their limitless salads and complimentary biscuits, however, there is no appreciation, even of the ironic kind — only scorn from this hipster foodie subset. It’s not just that these midlevel chains stand for the opposite of everything they who live for food deem holy, it’s that these restaurants are too mediocre and too boring to invite either their irony or snark.
But somehow or other in this generation, a disdain of the midlevel chain has widened into a general disdain for the very notion of the midlevel itself, as if aiming for the masses were tantamount to spitting on all the many identities and cultures that make up the culinary margins. Look around. The energy, the excitement, is in food trucks, in pop-ups, in “fast-casual” spots, in ambitious bistros, in faux fine dining, with the result that, outside of the corporations, few restaurants these days are interested in mining the middle.
That’s one of the things that makes Tazza Kitchen so interesting.
Tazza is not a midlevel chain. It is smaller, for one thing: six locations, stretching from Richmond to the Carolinas. It is also more ambitious, and more conscientious: a midlevel chain for the age of local, artisanal and seasonal. Within its shiny corporate casing, if you look carefully, there beats the heart of an indie pop-up, which, initially, is what investment manager John Davenport had in mind when he installed a wood-burning oven in his backyard off Riverside Drive in early 2013 and began hosting dinners.
To look at the menu of the group’s newest location, an inviting, glass-enclosed structure in booming Scott’s Addition, is to see a grab bag of a document that gestures to Baja California and southern coastal Italy, but amounts, in practice, to a lot of pizzas and a lot of tacos.
The perceptive diner will notice that nowhere on the menu or the website is a chef credited — evidence of a restaurant determined to de-emphasize an individual vision (and that individual’s creative handiwork) in favor of the group, the brand.
Add in a bar that pumps out a lineup of cocktails that any restaurant could have come up with five or 10 years ago, and, if you are a food lover, you might wonder why I’m bothering to tell you about the place.
Here’s why: because often enough, Tazza pays attention to the distinguishing details that non-chains — particularly the creative, ambitious indies — care about. Like the fact that those pizzas are topped not just with fresh mozzarella, but with bufala mozzarella, a markedly richer, creamier product.
Or the fact that the ham of the house is not just prosciutto, but San Daniel prosciutto, renowned for its concentration of flavor that comes from 24 months of dry aging.
The cost, by the way, for this little luxury: $14, or roughly the amount you would pay for a pie from Domino’s covered in grated, bagged cheese and factory ham.
Now, about those tacos.
Every salsa is ground by hand from locally supplied, dry-roasted chilies. It’s the first thing you notice when you bite into one of the tacos, the great depth and pop of the red and green salsas — in part, it should be said, because some of the fillings tend to retreat into the background.
The steady exception is the brisket. Tazza smokes 600 pounds of it every week, which, in a decidedly inefficient and entirely non-chain move, provides meat for one dish.
If you value the artisanal, the small-batch, the hand-crafted, you might look at that number, 600 pounds — or the 3,000 pounds of pork that Tazza purchases every week, or the 300 pounds of goat cheese purchased every week — and turn away instinctively.
That pork comes from Heritage Farms, a local supplier, and that goat cheese is from Caromont, outside of Charlottesville, which speaks to the operation’s conscientiousness in sourcing, but it doesn’t change the essential question for many of us who live to eat: How can a restaurant that’s scaled to those proportions possibly put out cooking that matters?
Genericism does creep in, like the bland and watery tomato sauce that drenched my shrimp and fried polenta on a recent dinner in Scott’s Addition. Or the arugula-and-feta salad that night that arrived overdressed. On an earlier visit, it was a plate of nachos that had been hastily assembled, a collection of incoherent parts.
But for every indifferent plate, there are plenty more that please, and sometimes deeply, betraying the sort of care, thoughtfulness and (occasionally) finesse believed to be beyond the reach of a chain, midlevel or otherwise. My short list includes the spicy sausage pizza drizzled with a black-pepper honey that brings equal parts sweetness and balancing heat; the smoked carnitas tacos with tangy pickled onions and tomato jam; the meatballs, fashioned from an old-world-style blend of pork, veal and beef, which are so tender and soft as to beggar comparison with a matzo ball; and the chocolate budino, an Italian pudding, its almost-chewy top layer drizzled with olive oil and sprinkled with coarse flakes of salt.
With its detail work and rich, developed flavor, the budino would not be out of place at a more celebrated foodie indie. It’s almost guaranteed to send you out on a high — one accentuated and not punctured by the arrival of the check, when you realize to your surprise that you’ve paid only slightly more than you did for that meal you ate last year (on the road, you had no options, it was late) at Applebee’s.
3 out of 5 stars
1500 Roseneath Road
804-372-0702
(other locations)
