A Saturday night in Downtown Staunton: You don’t have to search high and low for something fun to do

I’m sitting in Shenandoah Pizza with a group of friends on a Saturday night. We’re there to hear a friend’s band play a gig, and after their first set we got antsy to see what else might be going on in Downtown Staunton.

I was appointed tour guide, and set out to see what was going on at Baja Bean up Beverley Street, what was playing at The Visulite around the corner and then doubled back to The Dixie to check out the playbill there.

Our options also included Byers Street Bistro and Blue Mountain Coffee down in The Wharf, Downtown at The Clocktower up from The Wharf back on Beverley Street. 

It was too late for showtime at the American Shakespeare Center, incidentally, but Shakespeare is a staple on the Queen City calendar.

It’s a far cry from what life was like downtown 10 years ago.

“It was pretty crazy because people clearly wanted to be out, and there were only a couple of places to choose from. When we opened our doors, it was just gangbusters, crazy all the time,” said Sarah Lynch, the manager at Baja Bean who helped open the local hotspot back in 1998.

“When we first got down here, we were all sort of holding on to our own,” said Lynch, describing downtown as “dog-eat-dog,” a sharp contrast to the downtown of today, where my meanderings in search of something to do following dinner and music at Shenandoah Pizza are welcomed because “everyone’s definitely trying to help each other out down here,” said John Huggins at Shenandoah Pizza.

Music nights at the gourmet pizza place are done on a Playing for Pizza basis, as Huggins refers to it. “I didn’t get into this to start a music thing, but it’s sort of come along,” said Huggins, who pays acts in food and drink and does well to attract some of the area’s better-known acts that way, like my friend and colleague Richard Adams of Boogie Kings fame, who I saw out at Shenandoah Pizza playing a set on a recent Friday night.

Byers Street Bistro manager Giovanni Cannata points to the entertainment scene that the Bistro has been able to create for itself since its 1999 opening as being the foundation of the restaurant’s sustained success. “The entertainment is something we were founded on,” said Cannata, who schedules a mix of local talents with acts from Charlottesville, Richmond, Washington, D.C., and New York City on weeknights and weekends.

“It’s grown to the level where we’ve actually started to market our entertainment. We’re to a point where it feels more like we’re a venue some nights,” Cannata said.

The dinner-and-a-show thing is a key component of the Downtown Staunton appeal. The music, the live theater and the movies at The Visulite and the Dixie are all big draws.

“The more people that are downtown patronizing any of the businesses is good for us,” said Adam Greenbaum, the point man at The Visulite and The Dixie, whose marketing approach helps bring together businesses into Dinner and a Movie nights and ropes in the BookWorks bookstore downtown to highlight the availability of books that are the subject of movies running in the theaters.

“You need to try to reach that level of vibrancy, I think. In general, anytime you can increase the volume of people coming downtown and increase the amount of time they’re spending here, so they think of it as a go-to place, as opposed to a strip mall, then so much the better for all of us,” Greenbaum said.

An interesting thought, that one. Imagine me meandering through a strip-mall parking lot after dinner at a chain restaurant trying to find something fun to do.

- Story by Chris Graham