Harvest Table chef Philip Newton holds a plate of steaming roasted pork and apples.
By CAITLIN SULLIVAN/Staff
Sherman Lamie walked into The Harvest Table, opened the menu and saw his name.
He’s not the only local farmer with his name there. There are a handful of others.
About 15 years ago, Lamie found three cushaw squashes growing in his back garden. Though he didn’t know how they got there, he saved the seeds, and every year raised a new generation of the squash to make pies. His cushaw/butternut pie became a family favorite. This year, however, you don’t have to be a family member to get a taste. Anyone eating at The Harvest Table, which opened last month in Meadowview Square, can enjoy it. At least for as long as squash is in season.
Lamie grows 12-15 varieties of squash on 8/10ths of an acre on his Rich Valley farm.
Small farmers like Lamie aren’t necessarily the type of food providers restaurants seek out. This, however, isn’t your normal restaurant. For starters, The Harvest Table serves only locally grown food, for the most part, and relies on farmers like Lamie to keep a steady supply of it. At least eight farmers from around the region provide fresh product.
“A lot of restaurants start with chicken breasts, we start with the chicken,” said Steven Hopp of the Meadowview Farmers Guild, the organization behind the new restaurant and general store on the Meadowview Square.
“We source things as locally as we can with the goal to bring outsiders into Meadowview, to bring money in through tourism,” Hopp said. “It’s the reverse flow of money. It’s the key to a viable future for our region.”
Hopp said the idea started as a response to a proposed truck stop in Meadowview and chain restaurants he thought would follow.
“Your money is staying here instead of being sent to a corporate office in Chicago,” Hopp said. “This (restaurant) is designed not to do that. It’s a food network designed to incorporate as many people who want to be involved.”
If the kitchen runs out of squash, chef Philip Newton simply calls up a farmer and meets him in Abingdon to restock, as he did just the other day. Or maybe, as happened last week, Hopp will drive to a farm and help cut chard for the restaurant.
It takes that kind of dedication, along with a willingness to adapt and wear several different hats to make the restaurant work.
Sometimes, Newton said, a half hour before opening he and his fellow chef Richard Houser are still assessing that day’s food supply, bouncing around supper ideas for that night’s menu.
“We’ve been open eight nights and have had five different menus,” Newton said. “It’s more difficult than being able to call up a food supplier, but the end product is so fresh.”
Newton’s sure it will get easier though.
“Next year we’ll have people growing and producing things just for us,” he said. “Farmers will grow extra rows of potatoes and onions and garlic, things we use a lot.”
Most of the produce, like the squash, comes from Washington County. Hopps said the dried beans come from the Carolinas. A farm in Roanoke provides the free-range chickens. The beef comes from just over the county line in Smyth County. The trout comes from the mountains of North Carolina. The crab and rice come from the coastal area of that state. Some of the shitake mushrooms, Hopp said, are from Mendota.
However, the food wasn’t the only part of the restaurant that was carefully researched and chosen, how the old general store was renovated was just as important.
American chestnut was salvaged from an old barn for the wood siding in the dining room, old tobacco sticks are now used as part of the banister, the building’s old chimney was used to build the brick gas-fired oven.
Even the green color of the dining room was a detail carefully chosen. Hopp said he decided on the green to contrast the orange and red that fast food restaurants usually use to stimulate appetite.
“Green,” he said, “is a color people eat slightly less.”
But there’s also been some compromise. The chairs and light-fixtures weren’t made locally – about the only things that weren’t. And the cleaning products and olive oil just can’t be produced locally.
Hopp described the restaurant’s atmosphere as upscale with prices ranging from $5 for a small supper to $22 for a filet mignon.
“I don’t think we’re any more expensive than Red Lobster at Exit 7 but if they’re getting a burger here, it’s raised and grown here. They know for sure that their dollar stays here,” Hopp said. “If people are resistant to coming in, it’s probably because they don’t understand it.”’
The choice to go local, very local, came at a cost. Hopp said it would be at least a decade before the Farmers Guild begins to get back what it has invested. But it has, after all, invested in local people.
“The Farmers Guild has been a big benefit,” Lamie said. “It’s buying local products.”
He said taking truckloads of squash to the Guild reminds him of when his mom was a kid and her dad would go to Saltville and peddle produce out of a wagon.
Lamie ate at the restaurant last week. He said though it seemed there were mostly people from Abingdon, not too many of his neighbors, he didn’t mind.
“I walked in with my holey jeans and plopped down and ate with them, I mean, my name’s on the menu.”
To contact Caitlin Sullivan e-mail or call (276) 628-7101.
Wow, our book club in Orange County, VA is reading Barbara Kingsolver’s book, and it looks like you are living it. Great website, and such an answer to connecting to the earth and each other. You are inspiring, and I will pass on the word to our town to see what we can do.
Willow in Gordonsville
Thanks for covering topics like this. We look forward to dining at the Harvest Table. Can you provide directions and their hours?
Thanks!
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