New restaurants in rural Va. celebrate Appalachian cuisine - Entrepreneur Generations

A classically trained chef has returned to his coal country home in southwestern Virginia to open a pair of restaurants that showcases traditional Central Appalachian food, Eric Wallace reports for Atlas Obscura.

Travis Milton was born about 20 miles from his new 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 side of the family's diner and the other side of the family's cattle farm. Both sides 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, Wallace reports.

In 2015, a new boutique hotelier in the small town of St. Paul 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. 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."

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from The Rural Blog https://ift.tt/2tZWwpW New restaurants in rural Va. celebrate Appalachian cuisine - Entrepreneur Generations

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