Earlier this year, the C&O Restaurant posted on Instagram: “On March 22, 1976, Philip Stafford and Sandy McAdams opened the C&O Restaurant. Fifty years later, everyone in this town has a C&O story.”
The restaurant’s greatest story, though, belongs to the people who shaped it. It begins with the audacious determination to open a French country restaurant that could compete with the finest establishments in New York and Washington, D.C., and continues through generations of chefs, servers, sommeliers, and loyal patrons whose shared sense of purpose has secured the C&O a unique, beloved place in Charlottesville’s restaurant pantheon.
In the beginning was the word
By all accounts, Daedalus Bookshop was, in the words of C&O’s first employee, Kent Miller, “a huge part of the C&O story.” Sandy McAdams had come from New York City in 1974 and set up shop at Fourth and Market streets with his legendary “boxcar full of books,” and quickly attracted “creatives”—artists, writers, academics, people who’d visited or lived in (or maybe just read about) destinations far from Charlottesville, Virginia…