By John. T. Edge | Dec 09/Jan 10 | Due South

Eating Out, Way Out

The adventurous cuisine of Chilhowie, Virginia’s Town House restaurant  

Town House’s owners are Kyra and Tom Bishop, locals who made their money in junkyards, scrap metal, and concrete. In conversation, they prove as excited about their newly acquired car shredder as they are about the confit of rabbit leg and loin, nestled among morels and salsify. John Shields is the young chef who cooked that confit. Before he took a job with the Bishops, he earned his chops at Alinea in Chicago, Grant Achatz’s temple of molecular gastronomy. Karen Urie, his wife, is the pastry chef.

She’s a veteran of Charlie Trotter’s restaurant empire who quit Chicago to hone a repertoire that ranges from candied rhubarb knots to ingots of cold-smoked chocolate, perfumed with coriander and fenugreek.
I mention the pedigrees of these nascent restaurateurs not because they require such puffery, but because that has become the accustomed method by which restaurant writers communicate the import of chefs. You, dear reader, deserve better. What you deserve, instead, is a bite-by-bite retelling of the meal I recently ate, the wines I recently drank.

Such a telling would include an accounting of the muffled shouts of appreciation that followed a cantaloupe soup, served alongside a puree of caramelized eggplant and grilled mango. And the genuine puzzlement that accompanied a roasted lamb kidney, sliced so that the resulting bonbon of offal resembled a jewel-tone strawberry. And the swoon that followed Charlie when he removed a china cloche from that aforementioned confit of rabbit as a puff of pine-needle smoke spiraled ceilingward. What you deserve is the name of a nearby wine shop that stocks the Albariño Charlie poured for me, a fat and luxuriant wine that gained its heft by way of a bit of time on the lees.

What you will get, instead, is a charge to book a table at Town House and a suggestion to begin your nine-course trip down the rabbit hole with John’s take on minestrone, a chilled vegetable soup poured, tableside, over cigarettes of peeled carrot, cucumber, kohlrabi, and beet. After you’ve extinguished those cigarettes, the Bishops will direct you to a guesthouse they recently refurbished for culinary pilgrims who, after such a pleasant Chilhowie idyll, don’t dare to brave the rush and screech of the interstate.