New restaurants in SW Va. celebrate Appalachian cuisine

Travis Milton (Photo by Kindler Studios)

A popular chef has returned to his coal-country home in Southwest Virginia to open restaurants showcasing traditional Central Appalachian food, Eric Wallace reports for Atlas Obscura. And those are just the beginning of his plans.

Travis Milton was born about 20 miles from his restaurants in Castlewood, pop. 2,000. His grandparents and great-grandparents babysat him most of the time, so he spent a lot of time at one family's diner and the other family's cattle farm. Both kept orchards and home gardens. That gave Milton a solid foundation with gardening and cooking Appalachian food, and he went on to become a successful chef who incorporated regional ingredients at a hip restaurant in Richmond, Va., Wallace reports.

In 2015, a new boutique hotelier in Southwest Virginia asked Milton to develop two restaurants that featured Appalachian cuisine. "The collaboration led to an eponymous restaurant in the hip and offbeat Western Front Hotel in the 1,000-person town of St. Paul, which was devastated by the near-total loss of regional coal jobs in the early 2000s," Wallace reports. "Situated deep in the Blue Ridge Mountains on the Clinch River, the hotel and eatery is at the center of the town’s effort to overhaul its economy around outdoor tourism."

Milton recently partnered with Kevin Nicewonder (whose family owned Nicewonder Coal Group) to finance two new restaurants. Milton says it's fitting that money from the coal industry is financing his efforts to celebrate Appalachian food, because the industry's arrival in the region helped quash Appalachian foodways. "Men took jobs in coal mines, moving with their families to mining camps and towns," Wallace reports. "Though their families kept home gardens to avoid overpriced goods from commissaries, it was a big step away from subsistence. Over time, higher wages combined with better roads made buying from grocers more attractive. The gardens began to vanish."

In the two new restaurants—a "brews-and-bistro" pub called Taste, which is already open, and a fine dining restaurant called Hickory slated to open this summer— Milton serves up regional varieties of fruits and vegetables once common in coal country, like red Bloody Butcher corn and Candy Roaster squash, Wallace reports. Those aren't available in the supermarket, so Milton collected seeds from Appalachian old-timers and grows some of the food for his restaurants in a garden right next door.

Traditional varieties are worth bringing back, Milton said. "Appalachian gardens were laboratories dedicated to creating new tastes and useful characteristics, like later-maturing squash that grew sweeter with time and kept into the winter. With limited access to sugar, specialty corns were bred to be sweet enough to make delicious cornmeal," Wallace reports.

Google map, adapted

Milton believes the eateries will help the local economy. "Restaurants hire and train workers and, if they source local, support area farmers and food artisans," Milton told Wallace. And, more restaurant traffic brings more revenue to local businesses, Wallace notes: "Visitors bring dollars that drive tourism-related businesses—including pick-your-own berry farms, ATV tour companies, fly-fishing and canoe outfitters, farmer’s markets, breweries, cideries, distilleries, and additional restaurants."

Milton and Nicewonder hope to "redefine a region known for poverty, branded as hick, and defined by its dying coal industry as a thriving culinary destination," Wallace reports.

"We want to build a beacon that tells people that left the region, or those that’re thinking about leaving: 'Things are changing. You can put your talents to work here,'" Milton told Wallace.