A private affair
At Commune, diners can reserve a personalized dinner experience prepared by a new generation of young chefs
In any 11-course meal, there should perhaps be a little mystery. At Commune restaurant in January, this came courtesy of our server, 16-year-old Carson Poulos. “Does anyone know why bread and butter pickles are called bread and butter pickles?” he called out to the room, apropos of nothing in particular — the dish in front of us at the time was a fried oyster plate of admirable complexity, layered with the crisp lemon of locally foraged chickweed greens you might recognize from every lawn you’ve ever stepped on.
Poulos waited, eyebrows cocked above his mask with the confidence of someone who had all the answers.
He didn’t. He didn’t even have a guess. He was just hoping maybe someone could tell him about the pickles.
This wasn’t, as it turns out, an unreasonable expectation. After all, our server was also a student. Since December 2020, Commune’s locations in Norfolk and Virginia Beach have been hosting a series of private dinners that amount to an experiment within an experiment.
One the one hand, the Commune X CROP dinners are an exercise in how to provide the classic experience of a finedining meal amid the anxiety of a worldwide pandemic. Twice a week, Commune offers up the restaurant’s entire space to a single group of diners at a time, free of worries about what other customers may have brought into the room.
With a reservation from Commune’s website, even a solitary couple on their anniversary — who’ve ventured forth for the first time in months — can have a five-course wine-pairing dinner entirely by themselves for $150 a person, a brief respite from a world gone scary.
“We had one party ask if they could come in an hour early and have a so-called ‘happy hour,’ ” said Commune Norfolk executive chef Kip Poole, “It was their first time coming out since March, because they had a newborn. They said, ‘We just really want the whole experience.’ ”
But on the other hand, these dinners are part of a much bolder experiment in how to train a new generation of chefs and food industry professionals.
Beginning last August, in partnership with the restaurant, Poole’s nonprofit CROP Foundation has instated a four-season educational program in which chefs as young as 14 learn to prepare sophisticated food from ingredients they may have grown or plucked themselves from Commune owner Kevin Jamison’s farm in Pungo.
And so for Poole, the pickles became a teachable moment. “Why don’t you go get the big book?” he told Poulos, pausing the dinner so his student could fetch a tome on the history of Southern cooking.
The answer, procured eventually from Google, was that the pickles weren’t Southern at all. Bread and butter pickles came about in Illinois during another time of hardship: The Great Depression.
“The people who were making the pickles from their house used to barter them for bread and butter,” Poulos announced, triumphantly.
Teachable moment: redeemed.
A new generation of chefs
The student-assisted dinners are in some ways a culmination of work begun years ago by both Poole and Jamison — a confluence of Jamison’s longtime focus on locally grown and foraged sustainable ingredients, and Poole’s work in student culinary education.
Before coming to Commune, Poole founded his nonprofit, CROP Foundation, in Delaware seven years ago, teaching young students from often underprivileged backgrounds how to make lives for themselves in food — funding scholarships to culinary schools, and sending students to extern with chefs like Thomas Keller, or Michelin-starred chef Jeremy Fox in California.
Poole returned to his hometown in Hampton Roads four years ago and helped inaugurate a scratch-cooking program at Virginia Beach Public
Schools. The initiative brought in fresh-prepared food for the first time in decades, while also teaching middle- and high-school students at the schools to cook.
At Commune, those strands have all become intertwined.
More than three years ago, Poulos had been part of Poole’s inaugural class of students at the Old Donation School in Virginia Beach, where students grew their own ingredients in a garden on school grounds.
“I started with chef Poole in the seventh grade, really,” Poulos said. “We made all the different meals from the school garden… that was something that got me interested in cooking and gardening.”
That led to Poulos serving crab and oysters for a meal with famed Virginia farmer Joel Salatin, and helping out at middle schools even after he’d moved on to high school, along with making summer meals for local students during the coronavirus pandemic. Poulos also picked up a paid gig working at Jamison’s bakery, Prosperity Kitchen.
“The people are always super enthusiastic about what they do and the greater purpose behind serving food, how to support the local community with our food that we’re serving,” said Poulos.
He mostly helps out with events, he said. But the program’s eight official students, ages 14 to 23, are paid a small stipend by the CROP program for each season while learning the business of food at a working restaurant. Soon, Poole hopes to also offer college credit at local culinary programs.
The two mentors at the Commune X CROP program, both also chefs at Commune, are former students from CROP’s Delaware days who’ve since gone on to work with some of the most renowned chefs in the country.
Brent Hillard, author of the aforementioned fried oyster plate, went to the prestigious Culinary Institute of America in New York on a CROP Foundation scholarship in 2016 before working with chef Sean Brock at McCrady’s in South Carolina and Jeremiah Langhorne at The Dabney in Washington.
The other mentor, Beatriz Balderas, came to work at Commune after a stint at Israeli restaurant Zahav in Philadelphia, perhaps the most decorated restaurant in America in recent years.
But when Balderas, first met Poole, she said she was a high school student too shy to speak English after her family moved to Delaware from Guanajuato City in Mexico.
While learning about food through CROP, she said it all started to click. She got a culinary scholarship from the foundation, which she also parlayed into a bachelor of arts degree. “I didn’t even think I’d be able to attend college,” she said. “It was something that was not even on my radar. So the fact that I got that opportunity was eye opening. It was mind blowing.”
Balderas plans to eventually work in education and sustainable agriculture, so the program’s many prongs — farming at Jamison’s New Earth Farm, the seasonal influx of new students — were tempting enough to draw her away from working with chef Michael Solomonov at Zahav. She said she’s currently teaching herself fermentation and traditional earth-oven cooking via online coursework.
The educational program at CROP is just months old and is still being formalized, Poole said. Eventually, it will be a progressive program that begins with job-shadowing by the students at the restaurant, and will proceed until the students are able to run the restaurant themselves under supervision.
For now, it’s a more improvised affair, with different students coming on at different times on a somewhat catch-ascatch-can basis, learning both at the farm and the restaurant. But there have already been a few revelatory moments for the students, Poole said.
“One of my students, he has autism,” Poole said. “So he isn’t experienced in a lot of things. He’s eaten fish at home, but he had no idea what a whole salmon looked like: that it had eyes and fins. So when we got rockfish in fresh, I got him to help me break it down, and he had no idea — it might seem simple to you — that those little pieces of fish came from a bigger fish.”
Was he horrified at the realization, we wondered?
“Oh, he was excited. He ate a little bit of it raw. He didn’t like it, to be honest with you,” Poole said. “But we used that fish to make a stock, and now hes running home excited that he made a soup.”
Improvised private fine-dining
The elaborate private dinners, however, were not part of anyone’s plans until recently.
Those came about by accident, Poole said, after a group of local restaurant employees asked in December whether they could have a catered meal at Commune. The service-industry workers had been leery of going out during the pandemic, Poole said, because their job was so public-facing.
Poole quickly agreed, enlisting his students to help.
“And then after the meal, a student actually said, ‘Oh, man, that was fun. I wish we could do that again,’ ” Poole remembered. “And I was like, ‘Why not?’ ”
Commune is generally a breakfast and lunch restaurant, closed by 3 p.m. During dinner hours, the restaurant sits empty. So Poole called up Jamison, and the two hatched a plan to run private fine-dining dinners a couple nights a week.
Diners in groups as small as two can sign up on Commune’s website by sending a query message, and this will start a back-and-forth process. A new four- or five-course menu is specially designed for each group, depending on the ingredients available and the allergies and predilections of each diner.
“If you want foie gras and A5 wagyu beef, I might have to charge you more,” Poole said.
Poole first draws up a draft of the menu, then works with Ramirez, Hillard and the young culinary students to flesh out each dish before proposing the menu to the customers. The customers’ response might spur a new round of adjustments. In all, the process of putting together a menu might take a week.
“We’ll even change the music for them, change the lighting according to what each diner wants,” Poole said. “Our idea was, what’s not being offered in the entire world right now? It’s this. It’s the full experience of dining in a restaurant. I had four people last Saturday, just joking around, pretending it was their restaurant, that they were the owners. I loved it.”
Not just the food, but the art on the walls may come from students — in this case, art students from Old Dominion University and the Governor’s School for the Arts. The wine, beer and cocktails are local, whether offbeat natural wines from Early Mountain Vineyards in Madison, or a tequila toddy made with hemp grown on Jamison’s farm.
And as it turned out, the student-assisted meals are far from elementary. A recent meal
in January included some of the more sophisticated food available anywhere locally — if also inflected with the up-and-down experimental fervor of recent culinary school graduates.
The courses might include bread smoked on local fig-tree wood, served hanging from a gnarled branch of that same tree, alongside a massive smear of fresh-whipped and ashy wild-onion butter. There might be a crudo of rockfish caught the day before, topped with coalroasted turnip. Or a bouquet of sugary winter carrots splayed out as an ode to the farm, accented with a complex guajillo-pepper chili oil.
Hillard’s fried-oyster small plate was both one of the most restrained and successful dishes — a play of crispy corn and freshly foraged green, accented with the light give and acidity of rutabaga relish.
But the dessert, a parsley cake designed on the fly by Ramirez, was the most welcome surprise.
Parsley isn’t an herb you often think of for dessert. It is a side sprig and forgotten character actor, the Margo Martindale of herbs. It’s also one of few greens that grow fresh in the dead of winter, which meant New Earth Farm had a bumper crop.
As it happens, when mixed into a sweet and fluffy cake, the herb’s brightness and light pepper and bitterness open out into aromatic splendor, a Grinchgreen crumble that can warm the heart, beneath a delicate quenelle of brown-butter ice cream.
The dessert was, in some ways, what the dinner was — an improvised showcase for the locally grown and maybe otherwise overlooked, allowed to bloom in an unexpected way.
Commune X CROP private dinners are available for reservation at communevb.com/private-dinners for dinners at Commune, 759 Granby St., Norfolk or 501 Virginia Beach Blvd., Virginia Beach. A baseline price of $150 a person includes at least four courses and alcohol pairings, but not gratuity.
PARIS — From her bulletproof case in the Louvre Museum, Mona Lisa’s smile met an unfamiliar sight the other morning: emptiness. The gallery where throngs of visitors swarmed to ogle her day after day was a void, deserted under France’s latest coronavirus confinement.
Around the corner, the Winged Victory of Samothrace floated quietly above a marble staircase, majestic in the absence of selfie-sticks and tour groups. In the Louvre’s medieval basement, the Great Sphinx of Tanis loomed in the dark like a granite ghost from behind bars.
Yet out of the rare and monumental stillness, sounds of life were stirring in the Louvre’s great halls.
The rat-a-tat of a jackhammer echoed from a ceiling above the Sphinx’s head. Rap music thumped from the Bronze Room under Cy Twombly’s ceiling in the Sully Wing, near where workers were sawing parquet for a giant new floor. In Louis XIV’s former apartments, restorers in surgical masks climbed scaffolding to tamp gold leaf onto ornate moldings.
The world’s most visited museum — nearly 10 million in 2019, mostly from overseas — is grappling with its longest closure since World War II, as pandemic restrictions keep its treasures under lock and key. But without crowds that can swell to as many as 40,000 people a day, museum officials are seizing a golden opportunity to finesse a grand refurbishment for when visitors return.
“For some projects, the lockdown has allowed us to do in five days what would have previously taken five weeks,” said Sébastien Allard, general curator and director of the Louvre’s paintings department.
Louvre lovers have had to settle for seeing masterpieces during the pandemic through virtual tours and the hashtags #LouvreChezVous and @MuseeLouvre. Millions of viewers got a spectacular fix this month from the Netflix hit series “Lupin,” in which actor Omar Sy, playing a gentleman thief, stars in action-filled scenes in the Louvre’s best-known galleries .
But virtual reality can hardly replace the real thing. Louvre officials are hoping the government will reopen cultural institutions to the public soon.
In the meantime, a small army of around 250 artisans has been working since France’s latest lockdown went into effect Oct. 30. Instead of waiting until Tuesdays — the sole day that the Louvre used to close — curators, restorers, conservators and other experts are pressing ahead five days a week to complete major renovations that had started before the pandemic and introduce new beautifications that they hope to finish by mid-February.
Some of the work is relatively simple, like dusting the frames of nearly 4,500
paintings. Some is herculean, like makeovers in the Egyptian antiquities hall and the Sully Wing. Nearly 40,000 explanatory plaques in English and French are being hung next to art works.
Even before the pandemic, the Louvre was taking a hard look at crowd management because mass tourism had meant many galleries were choked with tour groups. While travel restrictions have slashed the number of visitors, the museum will limit entry to ticket holders with reservations when it reopens to meet health protocols.
Other changes are planned — such as new interactive experiences, including yoga sessions every half-hour on Wednesdays near Jacques
Louis David and Peter Paul Rubens masterpieces, and workshops in which actors play scenes from famous tableaux right in front of the canvas.
“It’s a callout to say the museum is living and that people have the right to do these things here,” said Marina-Pia Vitali, a deputy director of interpretation who oversees the projects.
When I walked the halls on a recent visit, I felt a thrill upon seeing the Venus de Milo rise from her pedestal — minus the glow of iPhones — and admired, at leisure, the drape of sheer fabric chiseled from unblemished marble.
In the cavernous Red Room — home to monumental French paintings including the coronation of Napoleon as emperor in Notre Dame, and the Raft of the Medusa, depicting gray-skinned souls just clinging to life — it felt uplifting not to be swept along by throngs.
The pandemic also has wreaked havoc with planning for special exhibits. The Louvre lends around 400 works a year to other museums and receives numerous loans for shows.
“It’s really complicated because all museums in the world are in the process of changing their planning,” Allard said.
As governments order new restrictions to contain a resurgence of the virus, special shows are being pushed back. A loan reserved for exhibits at several museums may get caught in confinements, making it tricky to deliver the promised artwork, he said.
Nearby, workers climbed a rolling scaffold to remove an enormous Anthony van Dyck painting of Venus asking Vulcan for arms. Destined for an exhibit in Madrid, the painting was whisked through the Dutch halls, past Johannes Vermeer’s Astronomer studying an astrolabe, before getting stuck in front of a small doorway.
The workers turned the painting on its side and slid it on pillows to the next gallery, where it would go on to be packaged and — pandemic restrictions permitting — sent on its way.
“COVID has been a force majeure,” said Allard, as a duo of Dutch paintings were hoisted to replace the van Dyck. “At the moment we have so many question marks — it’s hard to know what the situation will be in two, three or four months,” he said.
“But despite COVID, we continue to work as always,” Allard continued. “We must be ready to welcome back the public.”
Was the hair accessory that Amanda Gorman wore to the presidential inauguration a headband? Or was it a crown?
The wide padded satin piece by Prada, in a shade the brand calls Fiery Red, sat not astride Gorman’s head but on top, encircling her braided updo. It heightened the presence of the 22-year-old poet behind the large lectern with the presidential seal, drawing the viewer’s eyes from her sunny yellow coat up to her face as she recited her work.
Accessories aficionados rejoiced. “It read so powerful and strong, like she had crowned herself,” said Jennifer Behr, an accessories designer in New York.
“We saw that — the whole world saw that — the way Amanda Gorman held herself like a ... queen,” said Ateh Jewel, a British beauty journalist and diversity advocate. Jewel began wearing headbands last spring when the pandemic started, both at home for herself but also in her television appearances, as a celebration and a call to action.
“The headband has made me turn the volume up on who I am, my ambitions, my aspirations,” she said. She collaborated with Roseings London, a hair accessories brand in the U.K., on a limited-edition pink embellished style called the Kamala.
The humble headband has morphed from a preppy status symbol to an empowering exclamation point, its purpose now less controlling than crowning. The designs trending today, puffed up with padding and glittering with gemstones, have the height and sparkle
of fine jewelry reserved for royalty. Cast aside your childish “Alice in Wonderland” connotations; these headbands are about making a statement.
This maxed-out headband moment is just the latest in the accessory’s long history. From Grecian goddesses to bobbed flappers, there has been a headband for every fashion era. Just think of its visible roots in modern times: the simple band Grace Kelly wore or how chic Catherine Deneuve looked with her oversize black bow. Diana, Princess of Wales, stripped an emerald choker across her forehead in 1985, and Whitney Houston sported a wide white headband with her tracksuit to sing the national anthem at the 1991 Super Bowl. Hillary Clinton donned a padded headband as first
lady, then a super thin version as secretary of state. Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy opted for the tortoiseshell look. Would the style of “Clueless” be so iconic without headbands on
Cher Horowitz and Dionne Davenport? As if!
“Headbands are such a potent place for personal expression,” said Elizabeth Way, assistant curator at the Museum at FIT and co-curator of an upcoming accessories exhibition, “Head to Toe.” People must wear shoes or carry bags, but headbands are something “completely accessory,” Way said. “Decadent” is how Lele Sadoughi, the founder and creative director of her namesake accessories brand, describes them.
Today’s headband craze owes a special thanks to another queen bee: Blair
Waldorf of “Gossip Girl.” Hers were preppy, yes, and prim on occasion. But the embellished, oversize pieces had a hint of campy rebellion to them when worn tucked into tousled hair.
“In the beginning, people just didn’t know how to wear headbands,” said Behr, the designer. The teen drama gave people “a visual of how to have fun with them.”
Back in the summer of 2018, Catherine, the Duchess of Cambridge — née Kate Middleton — arrived at her youngest son’s christening in a towering Jane Taylor creation. The padded, woven piece was dotted with beads and topped off with a corsage’s worth of faux flowers. It looked like a headband aspiring to be a hat; a hatband, if you will.
“One could wonder if the duchess just sparked a new trend of chunky headbands going forward,” Marlen Komar at Bustle mused. A few months later, Prada sent a parade of padded headbands down the runway for its spring 2019 collection.
In the years since, the statement headband crowd has split into two factions, the have-knots and the not-knots (padded). Both have been bedazzled in a big way — pearls, beads, rhinestone, bows. Babba Rivera, founder of the hair care brand Ceremonia, recently launched the Frida Headband, a voluminous braided piece inspired by Frida Kahlo. Eugenia Kim was so inspired by the inauguration fashion that soon her accessories brand will launch a capsule “Unity” collection with headbands in red and yellow, à la Gorman, but also the other colors on the stage, including vibrant purple and deep burgundy.
Today’s bold pieces demand intentionality.
“It’s not something you put on without thinking, it’s something you pick out,” said Carmen Myer,
31, a Montessori teacher in Houston. Myer has two dozen headbands, including a pink knotted pearl one. A parent mistook it for a costume last Halloween, commenting that she loved Myer’s “princess” look. It was an aha moment for her. “This is what it projects to people,” she said, meaning regalness.
As a new year dawned, Myer feared the headband trend could be waning. Then she saw Gorman at that lectern, single-handedly securing the accessory’s continued reign. It was particularly meaningful for Myer as a Black woman.
“It was a great way to show anybody can wear this. It’s not just for a white woman who has straight thick hair,” said Myer. “It could also be for braided, curly, kinky and coily hair.”
If you’ve never worn a statement headband, it can take a bit of courage to wear your first. “Ummm, am I even worthy to wear this gorgeous piece?” someone on Instagram asked Autumn Adeigbo, who designs headbands as part of her eponymous fashion label. “Um yes you are queen,” Adeigbo wrote in her repost, punctuating her reply with a crown emoji. Her creations, she told me, are “to remind ourselves that we’re worth it.”
Gorman recently wore one of Adeigbo’s designs on “The Ellen DeGeneres Show,” but the designer assures me that there’s no need to go anywhere in order to wear a fancy headband. You can be “the queen of the Zoom,” she said. “Or the queen of your home, or the queen of your car.”