Neighborhood: 29/Barracks Rd

Aberdeen Barn 

The infamous cheese jar with breadstick.Sometimes you can only take so many organic vodka drinks and fusion tapas at swanky places downtown. You need something different for date night. You need the Aberdeen Barn. The Barn is a Charlottesville classic that takes you back to the days when the drinks were strong, the steak was red, the lettuce was iceberg, and one only heard rumors about people called vegetarians that lived in California.

On our recent visit, we got gussied up and headed to the red barn off Rt. 29. The hostess led us into the dimly lit room that was awash with white hair patrons and bow-tied waiters. We tucked into our cozy… Read More

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Tara Thai 

tara thaiI am deeply skeptical about Asian chain restaurants. So while I was initially excited to hear that a new Thai restaurant was coming to town, my enthusiasm fizzled when I heard it was a chain restaurant. That was going into Barracks. Chain restaurant, shopping mall, meh.

We went to Tara Thai with lowered expectations and left mostly satisfied, if not awestruck. Outside Tara Thai is the typical madness of Barracks, inside it’s swanky nightclub meets aquarium. The ambience is much nicer than expected and definitely a welcome departure from the usual dependence on fluorescent in many local Asian joints… Read More

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Burger Cage Match: Five Guys vs. Riverside Lunch

five guys - 7The saturated fat heavyweights of Charlottesville’s burger scene have to be Riverside Lunch and Five Guys. A fight promoter here and there has tried to throw Boylan Heights, Cheeseburger in Paradise, and sometimes even Red Robin into the ring, but those wealthy froof burgers, delicious though they may be, can’t help but succumb to the relentless body slam assault of Riverside and 5G.

In one corner is Riverside Lunch, a long-standing favorite among Charlottesvillians. In some ways it is both the defending champ and the underdog, having been here much longer than Five Guys and… Read More

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The Tavern 

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One of the charms of Charlottesville dining is that the most uninviting exterior can conceal some of our town’s most delicious treasures. Like the carpenter’s chalice in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. The Tavern is one such diamond in the rough… Read More

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