Charlottesville Food

by Casey Ireland

  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.99 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.

  FROM PORK TACOS TO PASTRIES: HUMBLE FOOD THAT’S LOCAL

  Despite the successes of places like the C&O or Will Richey’s food empire, not every chicken from Polyface Farms or scrap of pork from the Rock Barn goes to fine dining or even locavore dining. Local can be as easy as a fresh taco al pastor eaten out of a family-owned Mexican food truck or as simple as a still-warm donut. Matt Rohdie, a kind-spoken East Coast native who views Charlottesville as his unofficial hometown, has created a veritable food empire with his truck turned shop Carpe Donut. Rohdie’s business is an example of a successful micro-enterprise, a shop that started small and ended up in Whole Foods. “Our dream was to make magically good donuts and sell them across the counter,” Rohdie relates.100 “We learned the donuts froze and rewarmed beautifully, which opened up tons of opportunities. One of the event planners whom I had worked with asked for a donut cart at a wedding, which gave us a financial base and whole new market.” Rohdie views Carpe Donut first as “a catering company, then a shop, then a street vendor.”

  What exactly makes Carpe Donut, initially a single-product business, so tasty and so successful? Rohdie defines his clove-scented cider donut as “organic comfort food, the kinds of food people grew up eating and wanted to eat.” His desire to provide a fun product that nourishes its eater stems from his attachment to his family. “I want to make food for Charlottesville the way I make food for my kids,” Rohdie says. Like local homesteaders and family farmers, Rohdie and his wife began their business as a way to stay closer to home and children. After reading Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie books to his daughter, Rohdie realized that the family in the story “spent all day together. It was only 140 years ago,” he muses. “How did we lose that?” His current occupation makes it easy for his family to understand his job, which is simply that “Daddy makes donuts.”

  An apple cider donut from Carpe Donut. Photo by Casey Ireland.

  If the quality of food items bought at Carpe Donut is any indication of the way the Rohdie family eats, one only wishes they could take a seat at that dinner table. Bracing kombucha from Barefoot Bucha, spiced apple cider and a mouth-coating Italian hot chocolate so thick that it resembles ganache are beverages available to customers who buy a single or several dozen donuts. The fried dough rings themselves are surprisingly flavorful and dense, filled with spice and just eggy enough. The donuts are magical to eat, easily savored until the last taste of cinnamon-sugar coating gets licked off of fingertips. The donut cart’s location in the UVA amphitheater in 2012 brightened up January afternoons for many students who sat in old libraries, scooping remnants of hot chocolate out of small paper cups and dusting crumbs off of books and laps.

  Like Will Richey of Revolutionary Soup and the Whiskey Jar, Rohdie’s shop is “a secret advocate for organic and sustainable food.” With glee, he relates how a mother, upon reading the shop’s list of ingredients, will tell her child, “Okay, you can have one donut.” According to Rohdie, a diner can taste the difference in local, organic and sustainably raised ingredients when only five are used in the entire product. Donuts at Carpe Donut are surprisingly seasonal. The main impact on the shop c
omes from cider and eggs. Carpe Donut gets its cider from Pennsylvania when the local cider production stops. The local supply from nearby orchards constitutes four months’ worth of cider, though Rohdie freezes up to three more months’ worth before going regional. In the past couple years, the pastured egg supply has been essentially constant. The shop is always on the lookout for more local ingredients, particularly flour. “The localness of food can get exquisite,” Rohdie notes. “I’ve expanded my definition to include local production of food.” Carpe Donut is returning to frying the donuts in organic palm fruit oil, which is, as a non-GMO product, six times more expensive than soybean oil.

  Donut shops and small businesses are not the only ways in which locavore interests have been made less fancy. If local food started as an upper-class movement, one specific to the highly educated or those with disposable incomes, its success has not gone unnoticed by the corporate and the everyday. “Greenwashing” has become as commonplace in restaurants as it has in grocery stores, with seemingly everyone in the business trying to get their thumbs in the locavore pie. Chipotle Mexican Grill, a popular chain of southwestern restaurants, claims to serve “food with integrity.” Integrity, for Chipotle, involves incorporating local products into its menu along with antibiotic-free meats and recycled napkins. Its actual practice of sourcing local food, however, can be somewhat more opaque.

  On its website, Chipotle declares its interest in and support of local foods, noting that “there are many ways to define” what makes an ingredient local, subscribing to a 350-mile radius when sourcing local produce. The very fact that a company as large as Chipotle, with over 1,500 locations in North America and Europe, includes local foods as a business mission is decidedly new and forward thinking. However, the amount of local foods that make up the menu at any given Chipotle is neither disclosed by the business nor easily accessible to curious diners. Adriana Hill, manager of the Charlottesville Chipotle on Emmett Street, says that “the only local ingredient that [Chipotle uses] is the carnitas…from Polyface,” noting that the company tells employees to “not answer any questions, no surveys, no interviews, unless it’s coming from within Chipotle Corporate.”101 Additionally, Louisa Nickel, a customer service consultant for Chipotle, says that the company “currently [does] not have any local suppliers for produce in the Charlottesville area.”102 While Chipotle may offer customers reasonably priced fast food in an inventive setting, Charlottesville diners expecting local food consistently from the chain would be wiser to choose Chipotle’s food for other reasons.

  Fast-food chains are not the only players in the corporate food industry to stake out territory in the locavore scene. Will Richey of Revolutionary Soup and the Whiskey Jar tells a story of a trip to Washington, D.C., that ended up with a visit to a D.C./Maryland franchise offering a farm-to-table dining experience. Richey relates his excitement in finding local food in a corporatized setting, only to be disappointed with a lack of information. “I asked, ‘Where is your chicken from?’ and the server couldn’t tell me,” Richey says. “I said, ‘How do you get your greens?’ and no one knew.” The big claims and unclear background of places like this franchise have led Richey not to advertise his restaurants as locavore-friendly. To Richey, it’s “become a little ridiculous to try and tout it now as ‘I’m more local, no, I’m more local!’ I count on my customers to do the talking.”

  THE FUTURE OF LOCAVORE DINING

  To many chefs, the survival of local food as an entrenched concept rather than a trend depends on its increased affordability. Will Richey sees the movement failing “if it’s a gourmet-only option,” acknowledging that local food is always “going to be more expensive.” Richey still receives negative feedback about prices being too high at Revolutionary Soup and the Whiskey Jar; however, his businesses “get a lot of people who are like, ‘How can you do it for that cheap?’” Richey states that his businesses “take a hit on our margin to make it in volume, and that’s our secret. I’d rather do fifty people at half the price.” Between the under-ten-dollar offerings of Revolutionary Soup and the accessible price points of chicken-and-dumplings or big breakfasts at the Whiskey Jar, Richey has certainly made a name for himself doing local for less.

  Other cooks think that prices aren’t the only variables that can change for more customers to buy local. Matt Rohdie believes that customers should expand their definition of local from the “exquisitely” minute to include local food production. To Rohdie, a large company using one product from the area isn’t enough to make that company a viable support to the community. “At Chipotle, a tiny fraction of my money stays local; most goes back to Chipotle Corporate National,” Rohdie attests. “Little localities should be able to reject the corporate forces that drive up prices and don’t put money back into the community.” With a laugh, Rohdie says that the lettuce on a Philly cheesesteak doesn’t matter—it’s the authenticity of the sandwich that counts. “I consider that cheesesteak [from Lou’s] as local as a container of lettuce from Planet Earth Diversified,” Rohdie insists.

  Local food, however, can be greatly impacted by the beverage with which it’s served. A pairing of Riesling with a flank steak, or a Syrah with flounder, can negatively alter one’s perception of a meal’s greatness. Just as a bottled Coke naturally suits a burger from Riverside Lunch, a bottle of local wine, when matched skillfully to a particular dish, elevates a meal to another level of perfection. With both the wine and beer industries in Virginia growing, the decision to drink local as well as eat local has become an increasingly popular and prevalent option for locavore diners who would rather not drink an imported white with their Timbercreek chicken.

  Chapter 5

  Virginia Vinoculture and Breweries

  THE BEGINNINGS OF VIRGINIA WINEMAKING

  A good chef understands the concept of “what grows together goes together.” The decision to pair animals and vegetables that grew on the same soil on the same plate often results in a resonating, complex meal of regional refinement. The same principle can be applied to the pairing of local foods with local wines. The meatball special at Tavola, made of pork and beef from Timbercreek Organics, tastes even better with a bottle of Gabriele Rausse’s Rosso; a mountain trout served with brown butter shines with a glass of mineral-rich Barboursville Riesling. Thanks to both good fortune as well as a historically motivated effort to establish an industry, central Virginia has developed a reputation for first-class wine and craft beers capable of matching the commonwealth’s culinary excellence.

  The story of Virginia wine is an old one, one that begins with European grapevines nurtured on Monticello soil. The numerous national awards given to Virginia wines, their success in state dinners and foreign markets and the surprising depth and variety of local offerings would have made Thomas Jefferson, Virginia’s original oenophile, drunk with pride. Jefferson’s love of the gourmet extended beyond French dinners and imported cheeses. In 1816, Jefferson acknowledged, “Habit [has] rendered the light and high flavored wines a necessary of life with me.”103 Having eschewed the heavily alcoholic and traditionally British ports and Madeiras, Jefferson looked to the French and Italians for inspiring his palate and his plans for a vineyard.

  A taste for French and Italian wines was not the only oenological trend that Jefferson started in the United States. In the years prior to the War of 1812, Jefferson expressed an interest in promoting American wine as an alternate to European imports, largely due to a desire for political and cultural autonomy from Great Britain. Not only was foreign wine “among the earliest luxuries” in which colonial Americans “indulge[d],” Jefferson found it “desirable it should be made here.”104 The ideological allure of homegrown grapes and homegrown wines was matched by the seemingly practical reality of American climates and terroir. “We have every soil, aspect, & clime of the best wine countries,”Jefferson attested, “and I have myself drank wines made in this state and in Maryland, of the quality of the best Burgundy.”105

  Modern oenophiles woul
d argue that American wines need no comparisons to Old World bottles, but Jefferson’s interest in staking a claim for New World vines proved a necessary first step for the evolution of Virginia wine. Jefferson himself planted two vineyards at Monticello, whose lack of success is indicated in the number of times Jefferson had to replant.106 Vitis vinifera, the classic winemaking grape species in Europe, fared poorly against American enemies such as black rot and phyloxera.107 Clever wildlife made meals out of the tender grapes, their juices providing easy nourishment instead of alcoholic pleasure.

  Long sea journeys in the dark and rolling hold of a ship also proved fatal for many of the vine cuttings Jefferson sought to plant in his own vineyards. According to Gabriele Rausse, both a Monticello affiliate and a premier winemaker in the area, the import process provided one of the most elemental reasons for vineyard failure at the estate. Jefferson’s vines were coming from Europe; given that there was no way to refrigerate them or to properly protect the vines, their unique vascular systems were often too damaged to be planted successfully upon arrival. Though perhaps more tenderness and careful study could have resurrected these broken vines, Jefferson’s busy schedule and jack-of-all-trades variety of interests may have proved the final nail in the coffin for these early attempts at Virginia winemaking. In Rausse’s opinion, Jefferson’s vineyards failed mainly because “there was too much going on, there were other priorities.” Ultimately, the juiciness of a pinot noir or the buttery richness of a Chardonnay were to be had with difficulty, if at all, at the vineyards of Jefferson’s Monticello.

  Native species of grapes offered more potential in terms of industrial production, yet the inferior quality of their wine made large-scale production undesirable. Jefferson had earlier praised the qualities of the southern muscadine Vitis rotundifo in the form of a North Carolinian scuppernog wine yet seemed reluctant to commit to using this grape or Vitis labrusca, the fox grape, as foundational vines for his fledgling vineyard.108 The twenty-four grape varietals that made up the 1807 planting at Jefferson’s estate were an amalgamation of popular choices and table grapes, representing “the vineyard of a plant collector, an experimenter rather than a serious wine maker.”109 The story of wine at Monticello is one of trial and error, an experiment by one of the premier epicureans of early America whose winemaking dreams—and mistakes—had set the stage for future successes.