Crescendo will open in Bistro's Main Street location
By Don Del Rosso
Crescendo |
Until early last week, the Main Street Bistro had occupied the building’s ground floor and basement since 2002. Owner Al Nosrat, who owned and managed the restaurant for the last two years, shut it with little notice.
Nosrat, who couldn't be reached for comment, on May 5 also sold Napoleon's restaurant at 67 Waterloo Street, Warrenton.
Walt Story owns the 34 Main Street building. He terminated Nosrat’s lease with two years left. “It was sort of a mutual decision,” Story said. “Al was ready to get out of the business.”
The Crescendo menu will be defined by “glamorous comfort food,” Fleming said. “It’s taking simple, forgotten dishes and bringing new life to them.”
For example, lunch starters ($4 to $9) will include bacon- wrapped scallops, crab and sweet corn fritters and a sampler of spring rolls, scallop and fritters.
Lunch entrée salads ($7 to $9) will include classic Caesar salad with grilled chicken, salmon, flank steak or fried Rock shrimp.
Fleming also plans to offer a few lunchtime sandwiches ($6 to $8) like chicken panini and shrimp po’boy.
The dinner menu will feature three salad choices ($5 to $7) – a warm asparagus, Caesar and a make-your-own concoction that Fleming calls the House “Canvas” Salad.
Initially, dinner entrees ($17 to $28) will include pork, a seafood stew, sea scallops, crab cakes, rib steak and chicken.
He will use predominantly fresh and seasonal ingredients, Fleming said.
He plans to keep the menu straightforward, carefully expanding it only as he perfects new dishes.
Starting from scratch
Born and raised near Pittsburgh, Fleming found his calling early in life, at his mother's side.
“Most of my best memories take place in a yellow kitchen at home, next to my mom,” said Fleming, who played middle linebacker for the Storox High School Vikings and stands 6 feet, 4 inches and weighs 265 pounds. “I kind of knew from the time I was a child I wanted” to be a chef.
His mother set the bar high for him, cooking and baking from scratch, he said.
After graduating from the Pennsylvania Institute of Culinary Arts in Pittsburgh in 1989, Fleming worked for two years at Jacquie’s Restaurant in the city. There he produced the weekly menu and worked and supervised lunch and dinner shifts. The restaurant specialized in classic French and bistro Italian food.
In 1990 he moved to Northern Virginia to become an executive chef at Morton's of Chicago in Tyson's Corner.
During the last 13 years Fleming also did executive chef turns at Ruth’s Chris Steak House in Arlington, McCormick & Schmick's Seafood Restaurant at Reston and, most recently, at the Old Homestead Steakhouse at Bethesda.
For a dozen years or so, he’s thought about opening his own restaurant.
“I’ve made a lot of money for a lot of people,” said Fleming, taking a break from his seemingly endless cleaning duties. “The next logical step would be to make a lot of money for my family” by starting a restaurant.
Divorced, he has two young daughters who live with their mother in Charlottesville.
Fleming’s search for a restaurant began in earnest about two years ago. He limited it to this region so he could remain within “easy reach” of his daughters.
He considered possible locations in Charlottesville, the Town of Culpeper (a small but up-and-coming foodie Mecca), Leesburg and Front Royal. He found out about the Main Street Bistro through a Washington Post online advertisement placed by Nosrat.
Fleming visited the Main Street Bistro in mid-April, soon after contacting Nosrat.
He dropped by during lunch one day, around noon.
Even though he saw just one customer and the place had been long neglected, Fleming believed it still showed great promise.
"Look at this place," he said with a wave of his hand. “If you can see beyond the lack of care that’s been going on for two years, it’s charming. When I walked through those doors I knew I was home.”
Dressed in a powder-blue T-shirt, the traditional black-and-white hound’s-tooth check chef trousers, and white New Balance running shoes, the ebullient chef holds forth like the lord of the manor.
“This place reeks of historic, casual charm and personality,” said Fleming, who has a tattoo on his right forearm of the “Celtic band” of the Holy Trinity – God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit. “I fit in with that. I consider myself a Southern gentleman, even though I grew up in Pittsburgh.”
He talks effusively about the restaurant’s exposed brick and beams, its tin ceiling, fireplaces and wood floors, which will be sanded and refinished.
Fleming will personally scrub the 100 seats and stools. He will repaint the restaurant and make basic repairs.
Sous chef Ellery Aranjuez, 35, will wash the kitchen, grubby with grease.
The kitchen also will get a new floor, probably an easily maintained and waterproof epoxy surface.
Fifteen-hour days already have become the norm at Crescendo.
So far he and Hoffman, who will manage the dining room, have sunk about $20,000 into the business, Fleming said.
The couple signed a six-year lease with Story for 2,730 square feet and already talk of renewing it.
Story, who declined to discuss financial details of the lease, says he will do what he can to help them succeed.
“It’s their first venture,” Story said. “We’re going to hold their hands as long as they need us to.”
For their part Fleming and Hoffman “are in for the long haul.”
“We’re going to be a part of the community,” Fleming said.
As for the restaurant’s name, Fleming chose Crescendo partly to honor his maternal grandparents, who were classical musicians, and because the word, as he defines it, means a “rapid increase in the volume and tempo of a composition.”
He surveys the cluttered room. Keys and a pair of tiny padlocks fan across the dusty bar. An empty Aquafina water bottle, a large Styrofoam Sheetz coffee cup and two packs of Marlboro Light cigarettes rest on one table. Four one-gallon buckets of Behr Premium Plus pain, a paint roller and a rubber mallet cover another.
Fleming wants to make plenty of noise and quickly establish a reputation for top-notch fare. Scanning his work-in-progress, he says: “I’m hoping this is my crescendo.”
E-mail the reporter: ddelrosso@timespapers.com