Editor’s note: This story is sponsored by Richmond City Dentistry. We appreciate the support. Hope you enjoy.
Every good story should probably start with a donkey. This one does, anyway.
Chico belongs to a man named Jad, who helps run Richmond City Dentistry with his brother, Dr. Babik. Jad reached out about supporting the magazine, maybe getting a few new patients in the chair, maybe just seeing what kind of people we are.
Here is that email. I had never met him at this point.
Their office is just down the street from our studio on Lombardy and Broad. So I walked over, because sometimes you learn more in a handshake than a dozen emails.
Jad met me in the atrium and led me back. A moment later, I met Dr. Babik, tall, composed, the kind of man who’s clearly seen a lot and still manages to smile about it. He shook my hand, warm and direct, before heading off to work on a patient. Jad and I ducked into his small office to talk shop: advertising, audience, whatever else might pass for strategy in this line of work.
After a while, we took a walk through the clinic.
We turned the corner, and something funny happened. A patient sat in the chair, bib on, face half-numb, while Dr. Babik leaned in with the tools. The man spotted Jad, grinned, and before anyone could stop him, got up and gave Jad a hug. Mid-procedure. Bib flapping. It was absurd and hilarious.
Jad later told me the man was a distinguished gentleman who’d immigrated years ago and had been a patient forever, his whole family, too. Their connection went back decades.
After that scene, Jad introduced me to his friend David, who was doing some contracting work on the building next door. David was an older gentleman with a kind face and easy way about him. His son, as it turns out, was behind the push to rename the Boulevard to Arthur Ashe Boulevard, a tribute to their close family friend and Richmond’s own tennis legend.
We took a photo together. That’s me on the right.
Then Jad showed me around the building he’s been trying to bring back to life. We walked through rooms half-renovated and full of promise. When we finally parted ways, we agreed to pick up the conversation soon.
A few days later, Jad calls and mentions that Chico needs carrots. “Who’s Chico?” I ask.
Cut to me standing in a Glen Allen mini-market, buying an armful of carrots the size of my forearm. Ten minutes later, I’m riding shotgun in a golf cart bouncing over a small farm dotted with wolf-sized dogs and one pretty goat who believes the grapes are all hers. We find Chico, the donkey, who receives his tribute by gnawing the foot-long carrot right out of my hand.
In the garage sits a half-restored Cadillac named Rosie; upstairs, an unfinished game room and bar, projects that will get done when time allows, which might be never. Jad’s busy. Between running the dental office, managing his other businesses, and caring for his ailing mother, there aren’t enough hours in the day. He tells me about his old Russian beekeeper and the other immigrants who help out on the farm. His life is full of characters with personality all real, all weathered.
He’s worldly, but the kind of man who’s lived enough to know that joy and fatigue often travel together. Still, there’s something deeply grounded about him. He’s built a life from connection and care, the kind that doesn’t need explaining.
Jad and his brother come from a family of fourteen children, most of whom made their way to the States and became doctors, engineers, or scientists. A whole diaspora of determination. These two stayed close, caring for their mother every day, carrying forward a sense of duty that feels almost out of place in today’s busy world.
Jad is from the old world, Beirut, in fact, a place that sounds like myth when you say it out loud. And in true old-world fashion, before any talk of business, there’s bread to be broken. You sit, you talk, you feed the donkey, you eat a few grapes from the garden. You earn trust the way it’s supposed to be earned, slowly.
His little farm in Glen Allen feels like another country altogether. Maybe that’s the point. In a world of contracts and metrics, there’s something honest about sealing a small deal, like a dentist’s ad in a local magazine over a conversation and few snacks under a Virginia mid-afternoon sun.
Enter Dr. Scott
Eventually, it’s decided we’ll do some business together, the kind that involves photos, interviews, and eventually this story. That’s how I met Dr. Scott, who I’ll introduce now.
He’s originally from Oklahoma, young and quick to smile, with the calm energy of someone who’s already survived a couple of plot twists. Fresh out of dental school, he and his wife, also a dentist, were dropped in Richmond by what he called “an algorithmic act of fate.” “We didn’t pick it,” he told me. “We got placed here.” So they packed up, drove cross-country, and landed in a city just starting to wake up after COVID.
He hand-wrote forty letters to practices around Richmond. Only two replied. One of them was Dr. Babik. “It just felt right,” he said. “They took a flyer on me, a brand-new dentist with zero experience, and gave me room to grow.”
That trust turned into a partnership. “They treat me like an equal,” he said. “We work as a team. There are things I don’t do that I refer to Dr. Babik, and we share cases. He’s the wizard, and I get to learn from him.”
Many of their patients are first-generation immigrants or students new to the city. “Trust is everything,” Scott told me. “Especially for people coming from other countries. Once they find someone who really cares for them, they’re with you for life.”
That trust runs deep. “Jad’s the connector,” he said. “He builds relationships, Kuwaiti, Saudi, Lebanese, and once those communities know Dr. Babik will take care of them, they spread the word. It’s built entirely on trust.”
The practice has also become a hub for VCU students and athletes. “We see everyone from field-hockey players to faculty,” he said. “We’re right in the middle of campus, it feels like we’re part of the university.”
He grinned when I asked if that made him feel like it was his own shop. “Ultimately, I know whose shop it is,” he said. “But they treat me like it’s mine. And that makes it a lot more fun to show up every day.”
Dr. Babik, The Old-World Craftsman
When I sat down with Dr. Babik, he told me twenty-three years in dentistry, and he’s still pushing to learn more. “After five or six years of practice, I did another residency,” he told me. “Focused on tissue grafting, bone grafting, sinus lifts, the heavy stuff.”
He’s the kind of dentist who can take a patient from start to finish, extraction, implant, restoration, all in one chair. “People used to have to go to three different offices,” he said. “We can do it all here. Same day, less pain, faster healing.”
He spoke about the changes in his field with quiet pride. “The basics are the same,” he said. “But technology’s made it more efficient, easier on the patient. We’ve got CT scans now, they give you a third eye. You can see things we never could before.”
Still, for Babik, technology is secondary to connection. “I’ve had patients since 2006 who still come see me,” he said. “They know my family, I know theirs. That doesn’t exist in those big corporate places. You can’t fake that.”
When I asked if that kind of care was an old-world thing, he smiled. “Maybe,” he said. “But it’s the only world I know. You take your time, you do it right, and you care about the person in front of you.”
Now here’s the part where I give you the link for more information. Book your appointment with Richmond City Dentistry, that can be found HERE.
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