The River.

Overview

Walk down North Wayne Avenue in downtown Waynesboro and you'll find The River Burger Bar, a spot whose whole pitch is right there in the greeting on its front page: "The River is OPEN and the water is warm. Jump on in." It is a burger place, first and plainly, but one run by someone who thinks hard about who gets left out when the only thing on the menu is a burger.

That someone is Mandi Smack, the sole owner. She comes to the counter with a long resume in the region's craft beverage world: she's a co-owner of Blue Mountain Brewery, Blue Mountain Barrel House, and South Street Brewery, and by her own account she has worn nearly every hat a brewpub can hand out, from CFO and general manager to marketing director, plus stints running a food truck, catering, and an inn. That background shows up in the way The River is put together. This is not someone learning the restaurant business on the fly.

What's on the menu

Burgers are the anchor, and the kitchen makes a point of not stopping there. Smack is a vegetarian herself, and she has children with severe food allergies, which she says taught her firsthand how it feels to go out and find nothing you can safely order. So The River builds around that: alongside the burgers, the menu carries options for vegetarians, vegans, and gluten-free diets, and the kitchen states it stays conscious of food allergies. One concrete promise they put in writing is that they use no peanut oil and no nuts in their recipes.

The full current menu lives in a downloadable PDF on the site, and it changes over time, so it's worth pulling up before you go if you're ordering around a restriction. For a limited stretch they've also offered select beers and cocktails made to-go, which tracks with the owner's beverage background.

Ordering and hours

The River runs online ordering through Toast, so you can place a pickup order from the restaurant's website rather than calling it in. Gift cards are available the same way, either sent to someone else or bought for your own later use.

You'll find them at 137 N Wayne Ave, Waynesboro, VA 22980, and the phone is (540) 943-3339. The kitchen keeps steady daytime-into-evening hours: Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Sunday from 11 AM to 8 PM, and Friday and Saturday from 11 AM to 10 PM for the later crowd. They're closed on Wednesdays, so plan around that midweek gap.

For folks out in the Crozet direction, The River sits an easy run over the mountain in downtown Waynesboro, close enough to fold into a day on that side of the ridge. It's a straightforward proposition: a burger bar with a genuinely wide net, run by an owner who knows both the food and the reasons some people can't eat most of it. Say hi to Mandi if she's in.

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