Roadtrip: Locavore

The first meal on our roadtrip out to Wichita and back was at the delightful Staunton Grocery just before getting on the Blue Ridge Parkway. Staunton is a charming little town with, it turns out, a Shakespeare theater.

The restaurant has an open kitchen and we sat at the bar where Chef Ian Boden happened to be prepping dinner as we ordered from the brunch/lunch menu. Boden worked at New York restaurants for a decade before returning to Virginia about five years ago when his parents retired to Staunton. He has built his restaurant on connections to local producers, who are listed on his menu on the Web site. It alerted us to a phenomenon we saw throughout our trip -- the locavore movement has made great inroads on America's eating habits.

The "pre-fixe" brunch menu (hope he's kidding) was a bargain at $15. I started with Surryano Ham, a pun on Serrano for a cured ham made locally. It was out of this world, sliced fresh and wafer thin with that creamy, melt in your mouth salty flavor of great ham and served with baguette, mustard and cornichons. It stole the show and was the best advertisement for local sourcing you could ask for.

We also got the fried chicken, which Boden said came from a local producer who fed her chicks goat's milk. The breast, small like God intended for chickens to have, was moist, ever so flavorful and perfectly sealed in a batter fried just right. My main course, Boden's take on "hon poss," was less to my liking, partly because I misunderstood what the menu meant when it explained that it included a "confit" of pork and guineau fowl -- me thinking of the French confit, as in confit d'oie or confit de canard, a bird cooked and preserved in its own fat. Instead, this was ground meat that was spiced somewhat oddly and needed to be served much hotter than what I got.

That said, we loved the place and can't wait to go back. Boden and his sous chef filleted whole salmon and halibut while we sat, ate and chatted with him. He is clearly passionate about food and about what he's doing with his restaurant. He pointed out the charms of Staunton -- the theater, antique stores, B&Bs -- and suggested coming back for a weekend and eating dinner at the restaurant. Happy to do it first chance we get.

Probably the best meal we had on the trip was at the Capitol Grille in the Hermitage Hotel in Nashville (pictured above). The restaurant, as the staff repeated mantra-like, is not related to the chain and is the city's top-rated restaurant. The Hermitage is a fabulous hotel and was voted the country's No. 1 pet-friendly hotel the very week we arrived with our dog, Ziggy.

Chef Tyler Brown also cultivates local producers and, as our waiter explained, much of the produce is grown at a farm outside Nashville operated by the restaurant under pre-modern conditions -- no artificial fertlizer, etc. The summer salad with sassafras vinaigrette was bursting with flavor; you could feel the energy of the sun still in the fresh lettuce and vegetables, no doubt enhanced by the mysterious properties of sassafras.

For main courses we had the smoked Berkshire pork chop with fried grits, Swiss chard and local peach jam -- very nice, though the portion was small -- and braised Painted Hills beef short ribs -- a good portion and very tasty. The wine by the glass choices were great -- we started out with a Chandon Classic Brut from Napa Valley and moved on to an Erath Pinot Noir from Oregon with the short ribs and an Artessa Merlot from Sonoma with the pork. The short dessert menu held little appeal.

Locavore of course doesn not guarantee a good meal. In fact, a sure sign that the farm-to-table movement has really arrived is the abuse by pretentious restaurants that use it as an excuse to overprice their offerings. This was the case with Annie Gunn's in Chesterfield, Mo., a St. Louis suburb where we stayed overnight on the return trip. In fact, a Tripadvisor comment described it as "overpriced and pretentious" but we went anyway because it was the only non-chain restaurant in the vicinity. We should have listened. We weren't too venturesome, but it was noticeable that the "locally grown" tomato served with minuscule dabs of burrata was almost completely tasteless.