Plan a Pottery Party at Enchanted Studios in Virginia Beach

“Bring the littles, bring your friends, bring your boo, bring your bff.”

So it says on the website of new WINDSday Partner Enchanted Pottery Studios in the Brenneman Farm Shopping Center in Virginia Beach. We get the “littles, friends and bff.” But you will have to ask owner Tersha Lambert, who gave up a 20-year career doing estimating for a homebuilding company to start this highly interactive small business a year ago April.

“My grandmother had a pottery studio back in Iowa where I grew up,” she says. “That’s where I learned the craft.” Today the wheels are spinning at EPS. You can “throw a lamp” or other creation during classes for young and old, schedule a birthday party, enroll your teen in a “summer clay club” or just paint for an hour yourself.

“I love the sense of community we have developed here,” says Tersha. Learn more at www.enchantedpotterystudios.com or call (757) 971-9601. Tell her you’re coming with your boo.

The Saadys are the First Family of Mediterranean Meals

You might look at the very modest building on Prescott Avenue off Bonney Road in Virginia Beach and say, “there is no way a restaurant can succeed in this place.”

Well you would be wrong because for going on three decades, Azar’s Mediterranean Cuisine (www.azarfoods.com), has been the gold standard for middle east fare, and not just for the kebabs, gyros, tawooks, shawarma, moussaka, lentil soup, baklava and other affordably priced treats and entrees that the lively native Lebanese owners, Lina and Tony Saady, purvey in both this restaurant and their second location at Hilltop.

Lunch and dinner diners in the Pembroke store may not know it, but there is an industrial kitchen off the main floor, where staff churns out gallons and gallons of hummus, stuffed grape leaves and other delicacies that are sold (through Sysco) to other stores and restaurants, here and outside the region.

“I was an Azar,” says Lina, whose father George, who died in 2004, partnered with the Saady clan to start the business in 1988, at first peddling pita bread. “We lived in Boston and got tired of the cold weather,” she recalls. “Dad decided to drive the VW to Florida but only got as far as Virginia Beach when the car died. He never left.”

Lucky for us. We get first crack at the spanakopita, tabouli, falafel, tzatziki, Baba Ghanouj, the first in the area olive bar, and Greek salad, whether for pickup or at the two restaurants, which now have WINDSday stickers, thanks to Tony and Lina Saady, married for 33 years both to each other and Hampton Roads.

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Savino Agency Monica Savino

RIDESHARE

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