If It Tastes Good, It's in Charlottesville

The long menu is divided into tapas (for two) and raciones (for four). The wines and cheeses are all Spanish, but the ingredients are, as you might expect, mostly local. Without trying too hard, you'll find something made in Mas's brick oven. Rahal bakes delicious country bread (it's made with a four-year-old starter of local grapes) that's available plain or, as I had it, transformed into a grown-up grilled cheese sandwich: brushed with wild chestnut honey and toasted in a cast-iron pan in the oven with Bica, a mild, buttery Portuguese cheese.

Many of the main dishes are made in the oven, too; as it cools, Rahal roasts suckling pigs or baby Vidalia onions that he tops with garlicky romesco sauce.

Dishes grilled "a la plancha" also impress. I tasted the gambas alla parilla, enormous and flavorful wild Gulf Coast shrimp that are grilled in the shell to keep them juicy, then sprinkled with gray sea salt and served with a smooth, piquant aioli. The broccolini, a regular fixture on the changing menu, goes into a very hot pan with sherry, garlic and olive oil, a combination that brings out the sweetness.

Back downtown on East Main, the town's pedestrian mall, I visited Ten, a tony sushi bar with soaring, mirrored ceilings and a poured concrete bar with fiber optics looped through so that it sparkles.

Even if it didn't look this good, Ten would be worth a visit. Chef Bryan Emperor, who will represent the United States at the international Sushi Awards competition in London this October, goes beyond the usual tuna and salmon. He offers more-intriguing selections such as escolar, Japanese snapper, ankimo (monkfish liver) and three kinds of shrimp.

I'm such a sucker for sushi that I rarely stray beyond it, but Ten makes cooked Japanese entrees worth a detour. Emperor's signature tempura is the calamari, for good reason: crisp batter outside, chewy inside, drizzled with a spicy sauce that danced across the back of the throat. The kushiyaki, or skewered items, were delightful, and the one bargain on the menu. The chicken, just $4, was not only juicy (sadly, too rare in grilled skewers) but also exciting, thanks to the earthy sour plum sauce and grassy-flavored micro-shiso.

Almost right across the street is Hamiltons' at First & Main, long a standard for its simple American food and attentive service. The menu offers nothing terribly surprising, but the generous portions are fresh and expertly prepared. The shrimp and grits are a standard, as is the vegetarian "blue plate special" that offers the best of whatever the chef can get her hands on, such as a poblano pepper stuffed with wild rice and zucchini and topped with fontina sauce.

Around the corner is Bang, an Asian tapas and martini bar. Not everything here is stellar, but boy, do these guys know how to fry. The rock shrimp tempura is stunning with its cool ginger slaw and is big enough to share. So are the Asian doughnuts. The three golf-ball-size creations arrive piping hot alongside homemade coconut ice cream and on their own are worth the drive to central Virginia.

Not everything in Charlottesville is upscale, and that's part of the charm. There are authentically retro diners, the Twisted Branch Tea Bazaar (a hippie-esque tea salon) and, my favorite, Timberlake's Drug Store, whose lunch counter seems to have been frozen in time circa 1940. Besides Revolutionary Soup, the best casual food I tried was a few minutes' drive from downtown, in the Barracks Road Shopping Center.

Aromas is a bright Moroccan-inspired cafe that opened here in February after eight years in an old cafeteria close to the university. The space, with its warm red walls and bright watercolors of Marrakech, is much improved, by all accounts, but the food remains as always: fast, fresh and undeniably good. Owner Hassan Kaisoum offers a range of salads and sandwiches, but don't leave without tasting the falafel and the shawarma. The juicy pieces of dark-meat chicken in the shawarma are lively, with a hint of cinnamon and other spices that Kaisoum would not disclose. The falafel is crisp outside, fluffy inside and wrapped in hot pita bread with crunchy romaine lettuce and tahini.

If you need to stock up for the journey home, head across the parking lot to HotCakes. This longtime ladies-who-lunch stop has a shockingly good selection of elegant salads, sandwiches and pastries.

Shocking until you discover that the chef is José De Brito, a talented if notoriously hotheaded guy who previously ran the Ciboulette gourmet shop and cafe in the Main Street Market. At one point, he canceled lunch service by posting a note on the door explaining that he was tired of "getting tuna sent back because a lot of you like to eat it in a stage of a hockey puck." Ouch. De Brito says he was trying to push the envelope, cooking as chefs do in Paris and New York. And he stands by his decision not to serve well-done steaks, even if that is what the customer wanted.

Almost everything at HotCakes is homemade. I tasted tender wine-braised octopus (no easy feat) with olives, cranberry beans and watercress; and a Sicilian cauliflower salad, with salty capers and sweet dried cherries, cranberries and golden raisins in a mild anchovy dressing. The Portuguese cod cake was one of the best I've eaten, an ideal balance of chunky salt cod and potatoes. (The only flaw was the aioli, a yellow ball with the consistency of Play-Doh. Maybe he was testing me.) The pastries, too, were expertly prepared: The croissant was crisp and flaky; the fruit tart's crust was tender and topped with sweet berries.

Those eateries are just the beginning. Across the board, Charlottesville's food scene is inventive, diverse and brimming with talent. It's enough to give Monticello a run for its money.