Charlottesville Food by Casey Ireland Read Free Book Online Page A

Virginia-produced ingredients make a chef like Keevil a prime advocate and partner for farmers both small and large. Keevil easily rattles off producers, farms and individuals with whom Brookville has a direct relationship. There’s beef, chicken, pork and eggs from Timbercreek Organic and produce from a variety of farms all over the area. There’s lamb from Ottawa Farms and seafood from Sam Rust Seafood, a family-owned business in Virginia Beach, so Keevil can rest assured that “any of the fish [Brookville gets] in has been Virginia-landed on Virginia boats by Virginia fishermen.”
    To Keevil and his wife, Jennifer, who co-owns the restaurant and manages the front of the house, farmers are both business associates and friends. “We pick up the phone ten, twenty times a day talking to individual people, saying, ‘How are you, how’s the family?’ and then we get down to business because we have a personal relationship with them, not just a business relationship with them,” Keevil states. In his mind, the occupations of the farmer and the restaurateurs are intermingled, if not mutually dependent. Regardless of friendships, the future of Brookville depends on the growth of Virginia agriculture. To Keevil, “The business relationship definitely leads [Brookville] into being loyal and wanting them to succeed just as much as we are because if they don’t succeed, we can’t succeed.”
    It’s worth examining the fact that Charlottesville’s most local restaurant is also among the city’s more expensive dining options. Most dinner entrées clock in at over eighteen dollars per plate, with its decadent burger costing twenty-two dollars. Brunch items and lunch options are not exorbitantly priced yet cost a diner significantly more than a Bodo’s bagel or donut from Spudnuts. Though Keevil and his wife practice what they preach and maintain an accessible, non-pretentious atmosphere, the average customer at Brookville is not the average American diner. The prices at Brookville, quite simply, are a reflection and continuation of the prices of local, sustainably raised ingredients, which, in turn, reflect the costs and labors of farmers invested in alternative agriculture. In order to provide the most local, freshest and most vibrant ingredients from nearby farms and producers, the food costs and thus food prices at Brookville are often above average.
    Regardless of price, all these dumplings, sweet potatoes and pork bellies make a diner question whether Virginia-local equates southern heritage foods of the Elvis Presley persuasion. The state’s natural growing season, historically grown food crops and particularly multifaceted cooking heritage all contribute to a popular conception that food harvested and produced from a southern area is best made into southern food. Yet while a chicken may be from a nearby farm, if it’s marinated in buttermilk, dredged in flour and cayenne and fried in its own fat, the taste of local can get confused with the taste of a greasy spoon. Chefs such as Dean Maupin at the C&O Restaurant finesse popular local ingredients into haute cuisine . His particular brand of French-American cuisine is almost a direct throwback to Jefferson’s culinary preferences, or at least an era when good taste and good food was synonymous with European flair.
    E UROPEAN T RADITIONS IN F INE D INING
    The C&O is arguably one of Charlottesville’s most exceptional and beautiful restaurants, as well as one of its most well known. Part gallery space, part restaurant, the C&O is pieced together from several floors, units and terraces of a former railway station to create a space of elegant rusticity. A huge, handmade hardwood bar stretches across a first-floor room, trimmed with pine plank walls and an orderly beverage display. The warmth and intimacy of the downstairs bar continues onto the second-floor dining area, while the top floor’s nook of