Lauded Norfolk restaurant Codex moving to new home, with cocktails and fresh-air dining

High school graduations haven’t been quite right since 2019. But this year, one of the finer restaurants in Norfolk will be graduating in style — into its own downtown restaurant space.

For nearly three years, Codex has been serving an excellent and well-considered array of farm-to-table dining each evening from the back of a butcher shop, at Pendulum Fine Meats in Ghent, mixing upscale food and a resolutely casual vibe.

This menu included a splendid house-made fettuccine topped with an egg whose yolk spills onto the noodles, locally raised meat and seasonal veggies accented with light hints of Mediterranean or Middle Eastern spice, or a trademark chicken liver tart that looks like pumpkin pie but tastes like a French chef got lost in the American South.

But after weathering the pandemic last year, kicking out lasagna trays and chicken tinga takeout meals during its worst depths, chef Ian Hock needed a bit of a break from “barely getting by.” And so he shut down his butcher-shop restaurant in January for fine-tuning, while still running his more casual Codex sidebar inside nearby The Veil Brewing.

“It was really just to take a breath, recoup, and revitalize,” Hock said. “I had every intention of opening back up in Pendulum.”

Instead, he came across digital agency Grow’s CEO Drew Ungvarsky in a chance meeting. They got to talking about Ungvarsky’s event space Enjoy at 429 Granby St., which had also once been home to much-mourned restaurant Field Guide, which closed in 2017. Since the pandemic began, the space has been mostly fallow.

By August or so, Hock hopes, it’ll be home to a new stage of life for Codex.

Dinner hours and prep time had always been limited for his little butcher-shop restaurant, because he could only open after Dylan and Dana Wakefield shut down their sandwich shop and meat counter for the day.

In the new Codex space, which offers similar seating capacity to Pendulum, Hock will be able to add lunch service, and an extra hour or two of dinnertime — which lets him serve twice the number of people each night.

Lunch will be casual, he said, designed to serve the neighborhood when the office workers and lawyers return to downtown. The daytime menu, of course, will include the buttermilk fried chicken sandwich and luscious Berbere-pickle double-stacked burger he serves in the evening at The Veil.

“We’ll keep that pretty small and curated,” Hock said. “You can sit, but there’ll be no table service during lunch: You can grab it to go or seat yourself and enjoy it inside.”

As at Codex 1.0, dinner will include a small but rotating menu that will hew even tighter to what’s freshly available each season — renewing a focus on the meats and produce of Virginia while keeping classic items such as the Arab-spiced cauliflower wedge and the “fett,” a deeply personal dish that was the last meal Hock cooked for his father.

The latter dish, we wrote in our 2018 review of Codex, was “a classic Parmesan-sprinkled carbonara adjusted to please a finicky vegetarian dad. Hock subbed in Virginia’s local bounty of savory oyster mushrooms for the usual bacon, using peas and radish slices and a dappling of chive or cilantro to add farm notes to a dish often known for salt and fat. Nestled atop is a delicate sous-vide egg that breaks at the gentlest touch of the fork to spill rich yolk into the noodles, pulling together each bright and savory flavor. It’s enough to make you a little sentimental.”

Patio dining will be part of second phase of construction after they build a new bar and get the restaurant up and running, Hock said. But in warm weather, they plan to open the location’s sidewalk-facing garage door for fresh-air dining.

Hock will continue serving the rare and hard-to-find beers and wines that Codex had become known for, though with a tighter curation on his list than when his tables sat next to Pendulum’s grab-and-go beer cases. But he’ll be able to add something he couldn’t do before: cocktails.

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“We’ll offer six to eight classic cocktails, plus other stuff we can do with the liquors on hand,” Hock said. “A fairly small wine program of 8 to 15 bottles, two beers on tap and some fun stuff behind the counter. When you have a small list, you can really showcase the stars, take out the cream of the crop.”

Hours are up in the air, depending on how the downtown dining scene develops, but Hock tentatively plans on lunch on the weekdays, and dinner five nights a week from Tuesday to Saturday — with special dinners reserved for Sundays.

“We’ll kind of have to play it by ear,” he said.

For Pendulum Fine Meats, it’ll be the second time that a high-profile restaurant has gotten its start serving in the evenings at the butcher shop before moving on to its own space; the first was Ghent ramen shop Alkaline. Hock says he was grateful for the chance to incubate his restaurant there.

“I’m forever thankful to (Pendulum’s) Dylan and Dana,” Hock said. “It would have been our three-year anniversary in January while we rode this storm out. But it was time to get out on our own. We’ve outgrown it, and so we’re flying the coop.”

Codex hopes to re-open in summer 2021 at 429 Granby St., Norfolk, codexva.com. Follow the restaurant’s progress at instagram.com/codex_va. The casual Codex location remains open inside The Veil Brewing Co. at 2314 Colonial Ave, Norfolk, theveilbrewing.com.

Matthew Korfhage, 757-446-2318, matthew.korfhage@pilotonline.com