Struggle, heartache bring new beginnings
After a year, a Chesapeake restaurant finally opens doors
On June 5, a tiny restaurant opened its doors in Chesapeake.
By the time it finally welcomed patrons, the sign for Flavor Bar and Grill had already been up for more than a year — nestled between a Quik Shop and a salon in an Airline Boulevard mini-mall home to more than one church.
Flavor is a grab-and-go spot with room for just three tables, and the walls remain mostly bare. On opening day, the kitchen was hidden behind a hinged door; the service window was still forthcoming. But dozens turned up to eat Flavor’s food.
Tony Holland, who cooks under the name Chef Star, serves a small menu of comfort food treats: lemon pepper and garlic Parmesan wings, burgers and chicken sandwiches, crab cakes shaped into five-pointed stars, and troublingly addictive Bada Bang shrimp that are a bit like shrimp’s answer to General Tso.
“Those shrimp are already our No. 1 seller,” Holland said.
But as at many restaurants, what you don’t see is the long and arduous struggle it took for its owners to follow through on their dream.
Flavor began in a hospital. About two years ago, Holland’s partner at Flavor, Tray Bailey, almost died. He suffers from sarcoidosis, a painful inflammatory disease affecting the lungs. And when he caught pneumonia on top of that, his wife had to speed him to the hospital to keep him alive.
“I lost the ability to breathe on my own,” he said. “I hear my wife crying, the doctor is saying I have a (messed-up) lung, and I can hear myself saying, ‘Don’t pull the plug.’ But I was just talking to myself.”
While in a hospital bed “plugged up to machines,” Bailey started thinking about a legacy for