(From left) Harry Hopkins, Brandy Adler, Tres Adler (Classics manager) and Carole Hopkins of Classics Sandwiches & Subs (Photo by Hadley Chittum)
Everyone has that classic sandwich. The one you grew up with or discovered in college — the perfect ratio of meat to bread to nostalgia, pressed into your consciousness as the sandwich against which all others will forever be judged. If you grew up in Sandston in the 1980s and ’90s, chances are that yours is from Classics Sandwiches & Subs, an East End outpost quietly nearing 40 years in business.
Classics is a time capsule stuffed with old toys, movie posters, vintage cola signs and a collection of tin lunchboxes — personal relics of the original owners, Carole and Harry Hopkins, and their family, including their daughter and current Classics owner, Brandy Adler. The menu boasts steamed subs on Amoroso’s bread from Philly, triple-decker club sandwiches with crispy bacon, impossibly sweet limeade and glistening crinkle-cut french fries.
Among the memorabilia on the walls are photos of Carole standing alongside a who’s who in music, from B.B. King to ZZ Top. From the mid-’80s until around 1999, Classics was the caterer on call for just about every major musical act to visit the Richmond area. They operated without a formal contract, just an understanding: Classics would feed the band and crew well, and for a fair price.
“There was no such thing as concert caterers back then,” says Harry, who stumbled into the gig by way of a friendship with the enterprising Bobby Melatti, who first had the idea to bring Cellar Door Productions and bigger musical acts to the Richmond market.
(From left) Classics customer, Carole and David Crosby (Photo courtesy Classics)
Carole was the personality behind the catering, and though she leaned on Harry for help and advice, everyone knew it was her show. “We started with nothing,” she recalls, “but they liked what we did, and they never bid against us. Every caterer in Richmond wanted that job.”
She says it was the little things that meant the most to the bands. “I can make the blackest coffee you’ve ever put in your mouth,” and that’s what the bands were looking for, especially the Brits. “I make coffee so strong you can stand a straw up in it,” Carole says. “The truck drivers came in and said, ‘This is how we like our coffee.’ And I fixed it that way all through the catering, and everybody loved it.”
At the height of its catering work, Classics fed an average of 100 musicians and crew members per show, and worked 30 to 40 shows at the Richmond Raceway’s Classic Amphitheater, now Virginia Credit Union LIVE, every summer. They also held gigs at the Richmond Coliseum, the Mosque (today the Altria Theater) and Innsbrook — sometimes as many as five concerts in a single weekend — and would lean on their go-to staff and even Brandy and her best friend, Brooke, to staff the gigs.
Brandy recalls a youth spent bumping elbows with her musical idols and crushes. “We were into glam rock, so we would go in the dressing rooms and fill the ice in their beer coolers like four times in a few hours,” she says, laughing.
“They were like Frick and Frack,” Carole chuckles, remembering Brooke and Brandy’s exploits. Between peals of knowing laughter from mother and daughter, Brandy recounts the day she and Brooke were charged with delivering a platter of still-warm Krispy Kreme doughnuts to prog-rock legends Rush onstage at the Coliseum. A photo from the Richmond Times-Dispatch hangs by a window inside Classics to this day. “They brought up the house lights and stopped the show so we could bring Geddy Lee his doughnuts,” Brandy says. “We were wearing bunny ears, and we had no idea what we were doing. We just did it.”
Classics staff delivering doughnuts to Geddy Lee of Rush (Photo courtesy Classics)
There was never a set menu, just whatever the bands requested, always made from scratch, Carole says. “We would have a full breakfast — bacon and eggs to order, pancakes, sausage, potatoes, grits, Danishes.” Lunch was a mixed bag of burgers or sandwiches, occasionally from the restaurant, and dinner was a table-buckling spread of country favorites from stuffed pork chops to prime rib.
When running through a few of their greatest hits from this period, Carole and Harry light up, laughing and one-upping each other’s stories — like the time country music star Alan Jackson told Harry he couldn’t eat chicken for one more night (after having it for five shows in a row), so Harry whipped up a feast of spaghetti and meatballs, salad, and Silver Queen corn. Jackson loved it so much that he requested the corn on his next tour stop, much to the dismay of that venue’s owner, who was told by Jackson’s manager, “You’ve got until tomorrow night to figure it out.”
Carole and Harry took pride in their work, and that resonated with the road-weary musicians. Over the years, the bands began to ask for Carole and Harry by name and would thrill at the sight of the Classics trailer on site at a show.
When the fairgrounds were sold in 1999, it signaled the end of Classics’ catering reign. Bands started traveling with more elaborate tour crews, which included private caterers, and the Hopkins’ advancing age pointed the way toward the end of the road. But Brandy is there to make sure little else changes. “There’s a way we do everything, from the way we layer the ingredients on the bread,” she says, “and it just wouldn’t be the same if we changed that now.”
Find richmondmag on Spotify to hear a playlist featuring some of the acts the Classics team fed during their catering years.
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