Come On, You

A day late and a dollar short.

Or, more accurately, six years late and not short at all.

I lived at Floyd and Belmont for thirteen years and as much as I loved the neighborhood back then, it didn't have a restaurant I was devoted to (this was pre-2006).

And although I'd never leave my beloved Jackson Ward for another go at the Museum District, they have just such an addition to the neighborhood now in the Belmont Food Shop.

I'd had lunch there over a year ago, here, and lost my heart to a big, beautiful wooden walk-in Frigidaire.

This week, they finally opened for dinner, so we stopped by to eat more than lunch.

It's a quaint and cozy space, with mahogany-stained tables made from old floor boards and door jambs.

Colorful vases of pink and green flowers sat on each table.

Sunlight streamed in the big front window and colorful art made from wine foils covered the wall behind the bar.

Handsome wooden swinging doors into the kitchen allowed for a peek at my favorite walk-in.

Best of all, the music perfectly suited the vintage vibe.

1920s-era music warbled from behind the bar, immediately setting a tone.

A woman walked in and took a nearby table, agreeing with us about the casual elegance of the place.

From a simple wine list written on brown paper, we chose two glasses of Cava, which arrived in vintage-sized champagne coupes.

They're exactly what we'd have been drinking bubbles from during the period the music was evoking.

An amuse bouche was actually two, one of shrimp and pickled vegetables and the other a warm cheese puff.

Flour-dusted rustic bread arrived with a unique dipping sauce of zucchini and apple.

They made it easy with no menus, just a chalkboard divided into $8 items and $20 entrees.

From that, we began with chilled corn soup with roasted red pepper and tarragon, figuring corn season isn't going to last forever.

The soup was creamy and corny with the red pepper adding just the right accent flavor.

Poached seafood was delivered in what looked like a tall, hand-thrown pottery flowerpot, a deep container holding scallops, shrimp, calamari, frisee and cherry tomatoes.

It was a well-conceived melange of fresh flavors and varying textures.

We finished with a mound of crab and avocado, as perfect a pairing as a seafood lover could hope for, over a red pepper sauce.

With somewhere to be, we had to order dessert as soon as the crab arrived.

Cinnamon/brown sugar panna cotta arrived with plum halves in a balsamic reduction and we were just finishing that when our server decided to send us into overdrive.

A pomegranate jelly and a chocolate-dusted truffle arrived to provide dessert for our dessert.

I've had both Belmont's jellies and truffles before and they have both down to an art form, so we polished them off, too.

Sorry to have to eat and run, we left knowing that we need to go back when we can linger at the inviting bar for another meal.

I'm trying not to be bitter about such a satisfying little restaurant now located spitting distance from my old house, but it's challenging.

The reason I needed to make tracks was for this week's installment of the VCU Cinematheque series.

"Elena," a Russian film from 2011, opened with a series of slow pans, so slow apparently as to elicit a loud sigh from a student sitting near me.

Paying attention when nothing is happening is so haaaard, it seemed to whine

Surely a film student wouldn't be expecting a noir-ish Russian film to move quickly.

And it didn't, but it didn't need to.

When the wife Elena comes into her husband's room, she opens floor-length curtains with the same sound every morning.

At breakfast, her husband tells her, "The porridge is perfect," a statement most of us will never in our lives utter.

After a discussion of giving her no-account son money, she is obviously upset, but her husband jollies her out of it by taking her hand and saying, "Come on, you" toward the bedroom and she laughingly obliges.

Good wife.

It turns out she's only been his wife for two years after having nursed him back to health ten years ago.

And speaking of nurses, in Russia, apparently nurses still wear nurses' caps.

The husband has a heart attack, decides to change his will to leave all his money to his hedonist daughter  and suddenly the movie is even darker than a tenement situated next to a nuclear power plant, which was, coincidentally, also in the movie.

Elena gives her recovering husband Viagra and soon he's dead in his bed.

Moral: never take Viagra after a heart attack.

The soundtrack used Philip Glass to excellent advantage, creating tension throughout the movie with it.

It's always during the post-film discussion that I get insight into the minds of students, a subject I find fascinating.

If I thought that a film commenting on life in modern day Russia would elude them, I was mistaken.

Apparently they can grasp moral ambiguity.

And more. Or maybe less.

One kid liked the way that after Elena killed her husband with Viagra, she watched a TV show comparing kinds of sausage.

I agree; that's dark comedy at its best.

A guy saw it as simply as, "Younger people keep moving forward and older people hang onto old ideals."

Now there's a blanket generalization for you, son.

Another saw the subtitled translations of the TV commercials playing throughout the movie as a commentary on life.

I'd agree but I wonder if he sees the commercials in his own life that way.

As a non-TV watcher, I bet I would see the same correlation in his life and the commercials he's exposed to daily

"I kept waiting for something to happen," one kid complained.

Actually, a lot was happening, it just didn't involve car chases or things blowing up.

One insightful girl saw the story line as a metaphor for communism and its inevitable failure.

"I'm not a communist," she qualified, "But I did start a communist club in high school, so I know about this."

There's another statement most of us will never be able to make.

My personal favorite came from a very earnest-sounding young man.

Describing the hedonistic daughter character, he opined, "She seemed to me like a true nihilist. I mean, which I like. It's very sexy."

No one knows just how little meaning and purpose life has like a nineteen-year old.

But don't get me wrong. Part of the reason I love the Cinematheque series is to hear how students interpret the world.

Sure, a lot of the time it sounds grossly simplistic, tragically pessimistic or hilariously illogical.

But how can I not draw conclusions about them when their opinions seem to be of a piece?

As the character Vladamir said in the movie tonight, "Shit must be tasty. A million flies can't be wrong."

I know, right?