The Enemy coming to the Downtown Mall
A new restaurant adopts an unusual name.
It’s an odd name for a restaurant. But the owners of Cumbre Bakery, who are planning to open The Enemy in April in York Place on the Downtown Mall, say it stems from a simple idea.
“Often, our greatest enemy isn’t outside, but within ourselves,” says Augusto Rodriguez Araoz, who, with his partner Juan Brandan, transformed a barber shop on East Jefferson Street into an Argentine bakery and cafe in 2023, then opened a second location in the Dairy Market. “Fear, doubt, and the limits we sometimes set for ourselves. We wanted the restaurant to have a strong identity and a name with meaning.”
Cumbre, too, served as a metaphor, meaning in Spanish the highest point of something, like the summit of a mountain, or the greatness of something.
“The idea is to create a place that feels special, warm, and memorable from start to finish,” says Araoz.
As for the food, Araoz says it will be European-inspired cuisine “with a personal twist and a strong focus on flavor, atmosphere, and the overall experience.”
Cumbre has also partnered with another metaphor-laden new place in the Glass Building downtown called The Bardo -- which borrows a Tibetan term meaning the state of being after death and before birth -- a cafe-gallery concept that showcases the work of local artist Beatrix Ost and offers Cumbre’s coffee and baked goods.
“Time does not exist in this space - there are no seconds in the bardo, only reflections of the heart,” reads the Bardo’s website.
A rather overwrought post on Charlottesville Reddit went even further, exclaiming, “Everyone who walks through the door is in awe and filled with wonder. It simultaneously makes people fall silent in contemplation and also exclaim aloud with joy and enthusiasm. It is everything and more than you could hope art does for people.”
As the DTM previously reported on social media, Syris King-Klem, who is named as Ost’s collaborator on the project, was a former Albemarle County High School grad named Spencer Clem, who appears to have been a friend of Ost’s son, Fabian Kutter, when they were teenagers.
“I used to be a friend of his, more so when we were in Firefighter Academy and he was 16,” wrote Kuttner on the DTM’s Facebook page, “ NOT ANY LONGER!”
According to Kuttner, his mother asked him, his wife, and their kids to leave her property -- they leased an apartment on her estate and cared for her, said Kuttner -- and now Syris King-Klem “lives there and drives her car.”
In another plot twist, Syris King-Clem is currently facing a lawsuit in California for allegedly defrauding a woman out of her life savings. Stay tuned!