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Inside Southbound Market
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Southbound Market is attached to the restaurant and located at 3036 Stony Point Road in the Stony Point Shopping Center.
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(From left) Co-owners Joe Sparatta and Lee Gregory and General Manager Shane Conlan
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Cold-case offerings at the market
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The market carries local beer selections in addition to canned cocktails.
“Six or seven years ago, Joe was trying to open a market, and we started talking about restaurants [instead],” Southbound co-owner Lee Gregory says of his partner, Joe Sparatta.
Approaching a year into the pandemic, the restaurateurs and chefs decided to revisit those plans, recently unveiling Southbound Market, a namesake addition connected to their restaurant in the Stony Point Shopping Center at 3036 Stony Point Road.
Multitasking and amping up portion sizes, Gregory, the James Beard Award-nominated chef who also helms Church Hill’s Alewife restaurant, and Sparatta, whose Heritage restaurant in the Fan is currently on pause, have had to rethink how to operate their business amid the pandemic.
The cold case is a collection of grab-and-go items, many of which General Manager Shane Conlan says feature “the Sparatta-Gregory touch” — pimento cheese, house-made pickles, smoked fish dip and dried pastas including black pepper creste di gallo, along with take-and-bake shepherd’s pie and mac and cheese, canned cocktails, banana pudding cannolis studded with toffee bits, and plenty of fried chicken.
“So much comfort food,” Sparatta says. “Everyone is a little uncomfortable now, so we’re trying to provide that [comfort] for them.”
For the two chefs, accustomed to cooking in intimate dining rooms at their solo spots and focusing on plating and preparation, it’s been an interesting transition. At Southbound Market, the focus has shifted to filling shelves and producing mass batches.
Conlan, an industry veteran who has led the effort to stock the market’s shelves, has worked alongside Gregory since the chef’s days at The Roosevelt. He says takeout service at Southbound has been steady, and successful — while not all customers feel comfortable with indoor dining, they all still crave restaurant-quality fare.
“[It's] interesting to see a whole new business model, to see how you can operate without having to make every single thing,” Sparatta says of the market venture. “It's such a new, novel concept because we’ve had to make everything for last 20 years."
The addition of a market also allows the partners to support other local and regional businesses, stocking products from Rostov’s Coffee to Staunton’s The Shack and Richmond-based kombucha makers Bitchin’ Bucha.
"We like being able to cross-promote our friends and local purveyors," Sparatta says. "That's always been important to us, especially with farmers, but now we can do that with people that are producing cool, interesting products."
With the market's shopping center location, the hope is that it provides another stop for shoppers in the area and that it stands out with its homegrown touch.
“We’re in between two grocery stores, so … we’re having to curate a more local side,” Conlan says. “Restaurants aren’t the only places suffering during COVID — we’re supporting other businesses by supporting ourselves, and also separating ourselves from the other places in this strip.”
Southbound restaurant is currently open for indoor and patio dining at limited capacity. Takeout from the restaurant can be ordered online and picked up at the market. Alewife reopened for indoor and patio dining last week.
Southbound Market is open Tuesday through Saturday from noon to 8 p.m.
