Charlottesville Food (14 page)

The map of local products at Revolutionary Soup.
Photo by Kevin Haney
.

Chefs like Will Richey, both powerfully individualistic thinkers and savvy businessmen, understand the ideological and financial benefits of working local ingredients into existing food systems. Yet there also exist alongside these practical restaurateurs iconoclasts who would rather rid society of current methods of food production and distribution than recuperate them. If local food is a spectrum, with one end being a fast-food burger joint and the other being a snack of sun-ripened berries eaten in one's own garden, Brookville Restaurant rests closer to the latter side of the scale. Harrison Keevil, chef and co-owner, understands and anticipates the desires of serious locavores interested in tracing the heritage and history of their meals.

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Born and bred in Virginia, Keevil proudly asserts himself as a “Virginia boy” shaped through travels in England and San Francisco.
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“In London and San Francisco, the local food movement just got driven into my head,” Keevil says. “I knew that there was a local food movement in Virginia because I worked on one of the first certified organic working farms in Virginia called Brookview Farm out in Goochland,” Keevil notes. “I was familiar with the practices of sustainably raised meats and eggs and produce, and it was already kind of ingrained in me, even though I didn't quite know it yet.” The realization of Keevil's farm-to-table dreams is an inviting space on the upstairs floor of a downtown space, with stretching timber beams and a welcoming atmosphere. “We just want people to feel comfortable, as if they were in their own kitchen because that's when you get the best conversations,” Keevil says of Brookville's ambiance. “There's no VIPs here. It's like fine dining in your home.”

And the dining is fine, indeed. Brookville's menu changes daily, though local ingredients—and lots of pork products—are always a guarantee. Crisp bacon, tender rabbit, handmade pasta and surprising vegetable combinations are hallmarks of Keevil's cooking. The food is both imaginative and familiar, with comfort foods such as burgers, fried chicken and BLTs redone for even more flavor and sensation. Warm chocolate chip cookies are studded with bacon bits for a pleasing savoriness; beef chili gets a dusting of cinnamon for additional depth. Seasonality is a given, as Keevil sources 95 percent of his products from Virginia. Seasonings like salt, pepper, sugar and spices, as well as oils and citruses, are imported by necessity; otherwise, Keevil likes to keep it strictly local. As a general rule, Keevil refuses to buy products not from the state. “I won't bring in salmon because someone wants a piece of salmon,” Keevil attests. “If it doesn't grow in our soil, graze on our grass or swim in the Chesapeake Bay or in our rivers, we don't use it.”

A look at the pork-heavy Brookville menu shows that Keevil is not shy about using meat in his dishes. Carnivorous dishes like bacon-wrapped foot-long hot dogs, Surry sausage sandwiches and egg and bacon sliders are available for feasting—and these are only appetizers. However, diners can expect more than rib-eyes or pork tenderloins from Keevil when dining at his restaurant. “We do focus a lot on nose to tail, the other bits,” he states. At Brookville, “other bits” can mean anything from pork belly to whole chickens. His attitude toward meat and toward food in general is almost New Age in its consideration of each ingredient's and animal's significance. “It's our belief that these animals died for us to be nourished and fed, so it's my job to respect that animal and use as much of the animal as I can,” Keevil attests. “They were treated amazingly well when they were alive, and it was their job to become food for us, so it's my job to make them shine on the plate and show they did not live a meaningless life.” With items like three-quarter-pound burgers served with bacon marmalade at Brookville, it's hard to imagine an animal feeling anything less than content with its lot as dinner.

His insistence on local sourcing and commitment to finding new ways to present 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.

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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 a dining room is more formal, with views looking out over downtown Charlottesville. A knowledgeable waitstaff, bartenders-cum-DJs and a creative kitchen make C&O both a dependable local watering hole and a fine dining destination.

On first impression, Dean Maupin could be a bassist in a New Wave band instead of a chef trained by French imports in ski resort kitchens. A native of Crozet, Maupin cut his teeth in the apprenticeship program at the Greenbrier Hotel in West Virginia. Rotations on breakfast shifts, sauce shifts and multiple other departments allowed for intensive training in various aspects of cooking for fine dining. Stints at Albemarle Baking Company and the Boar's Head Inn preceded Maupin's tenure at the C&O, an originally French restaurant opened in 1976.

A father of three, Maupin's ownership of the C&O is informed by his family life and vice versa, like many other food producers and chefs in the area. Maupin views restaurant work as the means to stay outside the mainstream nine-to-five work culture but insists on making his job work for his family. “The beauty of independent restaurants is that we close on holidays, but it's counterculture in that sense where you're going to work when everyone is getting off,” Maupin says.
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Having other cooks in the household doesn't hurt, either. “My wife was a chef, and she did this for ten years, working her way into good kitchens,” he notes. “She understands the time commitment and dedication it takes.” Maupin's twenty-year career at C&O has certainly demanded dedication on his part; like any successful individual, however, Maupin has managed to balance work and family in a way that has made both intrinsic to his daily life.

The C&O's current mix of French and American cuisines, liberally peppered with local ingredients and seasonal flavors, was not always so. According to Maupin, C&O in its original format was as old school and traditional as some of Thomas Jefferson's classic French recipes. Maupin states, “It wasn't until the very early 2000s when the C&O stopped doing the French menu upstairs.” The more formal dining room on the second floor was almost a separate restaurant from the first floor, referred to as “the Bistro.” “One menu upstairs was French food, handwritten in French, with different plates than the Bistro but the same systems,” Maupin relates. “It needed to become a convivial, simplified menu.” And simplify Maupin has. C&O classics such as the steak
chinoise
, butter lettuce salad with Pommery mustard vinaigrette and the delectable
coupe maison
remain on the menu but in updated forms with new accompaniments. The classic salad now comes with grated Gruyère; the
coupe
is now topped with whipped white chocolate, with strawberries added to the decadent sundae.

When asked what makes Maupin's restaurant distinct from other fine dining options in the area, he notes that individuality and experience are key. “We're all pulling from the same pool of vendors and farmers so that what makes you different is not so much the product that you're using but the experience you're offering,” Maupin says. “I think there's great-quality food all over Charlottesville, which is truly a unique thing, this town being as saturated as it is with talented people and people who want to eat that way.” According to the chef, the only distinguishing factor between himself and other chefs are his “personal experiences as a chef and their personal experiences as a chef, how I look at it, how I write a menu, the relationships that I have with my line cooks.” Maupin sees running a restaurant as a collaborative experience, viewing himself as equally important as the line cooks and servers who implement his culinary designs. Another integral part of the collaborative effort is the products of local food providers.

To Maupin, seasonal agriculture and local produces affects both his “psyche as a chef” and the business itself. He admits that while “it's not like we go dormant in those months that the local economy is not producing the abundance for us,” C&O does “try to get creative with it.” Buying local produce does increase food costs for the restaurant. Maupin has found that “it's not cheaper than the stuff we ship from California or Florida,” yet he continues to average at about 60–70 percent local ingredients year-round because of its ideological importance to Maupin. “I've learned to flow with the seasons,” he says. “I know what's available now. I spend a lot more money now because I try to pull in as much as I can from the Food Hub or whoever is calling up.”

The C&O has particular loyalties to certain local producers, such as trout from Rag Mountain. “Do I feel like every week when Ellen calls, I should get sixty or seventy? Yeah, because the place has been doing it for twenty-five years,” Maupin says. He has bought produce from Manakintowne Specialty Growers every week since becoming a chef in Charlottesville, though he has been increasingly using the Local Food Hub's. “Caromont's cheese is a staple,” Maupin states, as are mushrooms from Sharondale Farm and the foraging efforts of locals. Maupin lists with ease his various meat providers—Retreat Farm for lamb, Best of What's Around for beef, Polyface for pork and chickens. “Those places have thrived for many years around here,” he notes, “but we certainly have a lot of relationships with a lot of local businesses.”

Maupin's transformation of the C&O from fancy French dining to a local mainstay and Charlottesville gem is a lesson on adaptation and resourcefulness. While his kitchen may use many of the same products and ingredients as the Whiskey Jar and Brookville, Maupin's particular blend of locavore sensibility with a European culinary heritage makes his restaurant one-of-a-kind. Its varying levels of formality, intimate setting and inventive use of ubiquitous-seeming local fare all demonstrate the license that a creative chef can take with the best food products around.

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