New Norfolk eatery to train emerging chefs
Norfolk’s Neon District will be home to a culinary experiment that’s likely the first of its kind in Virginia — a for-profit restaurant designed as an incubator for young chefs.
The restaurant will be familiar to diners in Hampton Roads: In Virginia Beach, Kevin Jamison’s Commune restaurant already is a local institution. Its second location, in Norfolk’s Neon District, opened three years ago, serving farm-to-table comfort fare from heirloom tomato sandwiches to pastureraised fried chicken and waffles.
The Virginia Beach restaurant will continue unchanged. But starting Saturday, Jamison said, the Norfolk location will re-found itself as a partnership with student-mentoring nonprofit The CROP Foundation, called “CommunexCROP.”
“It’s a new kind of operation, not just a restaurant or nonprofit but both combined, working together for the same goal,” Jamison said.
CROP, founded by chef Kip Poole six years ago in Delaware, is a program devoted to mentoring students and young people interested in culinary careers. CROP has sent students from often disadvantaged backgrounds to work with some of the finest chefs in America, whether at Jean-George Vo ngerichten’s ABC Kitchen in Philadelphia or the Ritz-Carlton in Miami. After yearlong mentoring, the program also provides some of its students with scholarships to culinary schools.
The new restaurant, tentatively called CommunexCROP, will allow Commune’s kitchen to serve as an educational facility and a source of funding for CROP.
The idea came about, as many do, at a barbecue. Poole and Jamison had collaborated on a series of drive-thru events during the pandemic, including events for Jose Andres’ World Central Kitchen.
“Kevin and I have always worked together pretty closely, and his passions are really the same as mine when it comes down to community growth and education,” Poole said. “We started doing some drive-thru barbecues, sandwiches one week, smashburgers one week, and we were selling out every time. And from there we chatted and chatted.”
For Jamison, the partnership made simple sense: The restaurant and the nonprofit could serve each other’s needs.
“We said, ‘Why don’t we form a partnership between Commune and CROP, where the mission of CROP can be accomplished by operating the restaurant?” Jamison said. “You know, having these students and young people who are looking to get into the food business get real-world experience in operating restaurants: front of house, management, and kitchen.”
For the first year, Poole said, all of the profits from Commune’s Norfolk location will go toward the CROP Foundation. “Kevin was very generous with that,” he said.
Poole has a storied history in student culinary education. In 2018, he helped instate a program to bring scratch cooking to Virginia Beach Public Schools for the first time in decades. By the end of the 2020 school year, under Poole’s guidance, 11 Virginia Beach schools had transitioned to scratch cook-ing.
At CommunexCROP, Poole will run what he describes as a four-season curriculum.
In the first season of the program, high school and culinary students will shadow the restaurant’s paid staff, and learn about growing sustainable, local food at Jamison’s New Earth farm in Pungo.
By the final season, the students will be the ones running the restaurant: The restaurant’s staffers will shadow them, instead of vice-versa.
The restaurant will serve many of Commune’s “greatest hits” dishes, Jamison said. But it will also feature dishes created by the new generation of culinary students, and serve as a showcase for its students’ other creative projects, including art on its walls.
The restaurant plans to start small, with takeout and curbside service and with an emphasis on social-distancing and safety, Poole said.
“We’re going to do a small scale menu on Saturday, and then the menu will grow,” Poole said. “We will have a small market available with coffees, sandwiches, beer and wine to go. But we’re really anticipating growing fast. From there, we will be having events — we’ve got 10 events scheduled over the course of the next four months. But safety is our main concern: If we can’t do it safely, we’ll postpone.”
For Poole and Jamison, one of the most important effects of CommunexCROP will be to help incubate a new class of sustainablyminded culinary professionals in Hampton Roads, in a way they hope will help change the landscape of local restaurants.
Indeed, one of the mentors at the restaurant will be a former student. Brent Hillard, Commune’s sous chef in Virginia Beach since August 2019, was a student in one of the first graduating CROP classes in Delaware.
In 2016, CROP offered Hillard a $10,000 scholarship to the prestigious Culinary Institute of America in New York. He’s since worked his way into the famed kitchens of chef Sean Brock at McCrady’s in South Carolina, and Jeremiah Langhorne at The Dabney in Washington.
As a CROP student, he said, he learned how to run a kitchen, and also how to think entrepreneurially. He and other students also learned to broaden their horizons.
“It’s just having more of a positive and creative mindset. I’ve seen people wanting to go out and see more, and achieve more,” he said, citing a classmate who went to Amsterdam to work at a Michelin-starred restaurant. “We have that mindset of owning businesses, educating people, working sustainably and helping the environment.”
Hillard helped develop the opening menu for the Norfolk restaurant, with new dishes that include an heirloom tomato and compressed watermelon salad, and a brisket sandwich made with earthy-spiced berbere mayo.
As a former CROP student, he hopes he can provide a useful perspective for students at the new CommunexCROP restaurant. But he also wants to pay forward what the program helped him achieve in the first place.
“I get to show them the things I’ve learned,” he said. “In some cases, it’s easier for me to relate to students as they come up. And also it gives them an extra person to run their ideas by, and work on menu development. It’s super exciting. … Our first class of CROP students, we like to think of ourselves as heirloom seeds, helping other people grow. It’s kind of like a butterfly effect.”
CommunexCROP opens Saturday, Aug. 15, at 759 Granby St., Norfolk, 757- 9622992, communeva.com. Takeout and curbside only to start, 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. Tuesday to Sunday.