The simple joys of the tavern down the street

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I had no idea that the Michelin Guide was related to the Michelin tire company until this week. I was eating dinner with my son, trying to think of something interesting to tell him about my day, and I mentioned Laura McTaggart’s hilarious essay about her first Michelin-star meal. I thought my 18-year-old, who, like Laura, loves the 25-cent ramen that comes packaged as a dehydrated brick, would find it funny. “It’s wild that the Michelins created that guide to sell tires,” he replied.

Excuse me?

The next morning I did a little research, and it’s true. In 1900, when there were only a few thousand cars on the roads of France, Édouard Michelin and his brother André published a guide for French motorists that explained everything from how to change a tire to where to buy gas. The idea was to encourage automobile travel, and therefore increase the demand for tires. In 1922, they added restaurants to the guide, and by 1926, they’d introduced the three-star scale: One star is “worth a stop,” two stars is “worth a detour” and three stars is “worth a special journey.” I can feel my tire tread thinning as I type.

In my mind, very few meals are worth a special journey. Maybe that’s because — like Laura — I once had a bad experience with gold dust at a posh place. But I think there’s more to it than that.

My tastes run simple; if plating the dish requires tweezers, I’m not interested. I love nothing more than a good burger (smashed, American cheese, no tomato) and a beer (a hazy IPA). In a perfect world, I’m enjoying both outside, in the sun, and I didn’t have to get in a car to do it.

Luckily, this is very doable for me. In our 85-block neighborhood of Victorian row houses in Richmond, Virginia, there are more than 80 restaurants. When my husband and I were raising little kids on a tight budget, we dutifully cooked and ate almost every meal at home. Now that we’re about to push our last bird out of our much more comfortable nest, we eat out almost every Friday and Saturday night.

We can walk out our front door and be seated for Mexican, Italian or American pub food within four minutes. There’s an oyster bar practically in our backyard. Walk a few more blocks and we’re likely to land at Helen’s, a spot named for the woman who inherited her family’s restaurant on her 21st birthday in 1935 after growing up in the apartment above it. On snow days, it’s our family’s tradition to walk 0.2 miles down our silent street to Joe’s, where the menu hasn’t changed in more than a decade, but the beer list keeps growing (24 taps and counting).

And then there’s the Cask Cafe.

The brick-walled restaurant isn’t much to look at, but it’s one of our favorites. The owner added folding tables and tailgate tents to the crumbling parking lot during the COVID-19 pandemic, and five years on, they’re still there. Inside, the floors are sticky with too much polyurethane and I’d bet my life that no one has ever dusted the hundreds of beer bottles that sit on the picture molding running around the dining room. But we love it.

At Cask, we order a board of house-made sausages, cheese and local bread, or a BLT if we’re feeling fancy. The only veggies on our plates are the pickled gherkins. The beer list changes daily, and they’ve got one of those glass garage doors that they roll up when the weather is nice.

It’s where we first met the parents of our kid’s significant other. In 2019, we talked the owner into changing the channel from soccer (which is always on) to lacrosse, so we could watch our beloved Virginia Cavaliers come back to beat Maryland in the national quarterfinals. Our oldest son had his first legal beer there. And we’ll probably go there for dinner the day our last kid graduates from high school at the end of this month.

Maybe we love it because it’s unassuming. Maybe it reminds me of the Heurigen tradition of Austria, where I studied in my teens. But I think it’s more than all that. I think, as “Cheers” taught us, there’s something special about a place where everybody knows your name. And you know theirs. A place where your kids are comfortable enough to grab a bag of chips from behind the bar when the servers are too busy to help. A place where they save the last few French Lyon sausages when they see you walk in the door. I have a feeling Laura would agree with me on this one: That kind of place is worth a special journey.

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