In honor of the Spanish bacon dinner I enjoyed earlier tonight, and to make up for yesterday’s poorly written guts chronicle, I will tell the true story of a Mas evening two summers ago, witnessed pre-blog.
In summer, we sit on the patio at Mas, the trendy Spanish tapas restaurant two neighborhoods down. Everyone who first hears of Mas Tapas says, “Topless? It’s a topless bar?” It was only funny when I said it.
The restaurant was built on a run-down corner in the up-and-coming section of Charlottesville. Belmont was where the poor folks used to live before their neighborhood was gentrified. It was almost like rich folks started moving in so they could use the big city word “gentrified” without having to live in Brooklyn. Charlottesville struggles with a creative exodus to the five burroughs, but Belmont remains our haven of neighborhood stroller chic – an integrated six block radius within walking distance of downtown. Belmont is where houses climbed in worth by an average of $200,000 in two years, and where you still don’t want to get caught alone, sans pepper spray, in the middle of the night on certain streets. But Belmont is also where natives won’t bother you for hosting a keg party in the front yard of your renovated Victorian mansion.
So this Spanish tapas restaurant landed in the middle of Belmont and it was immediately hard to get a table on most weeknights. We arrived after 10 pm in the waning summer heat. The university was out on break, therefore we didn’t see the rich kids from the dormitories who had been turned onto Mas by a review in their school paper. When we arrived at the restaurant to meet our friends, recently engaged, we found out that we were celebrating the fiance’s birthday. They had already been sitting on the Mas patio for two hours, drinking sangria and eating bacon-wrapped dates.
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