Tag: chef

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Knife & Fork Magazines

All about that bass: Chef Harrison Keevil gets a dream gift (a guitar, not a fish)

Chef Keevil and his beloved Höfner bass at his Belmont shop, Keevil & Keevil. Photo: John Robinson

Sometimes, when you hear the name of a well-known local chef, you think of him only for his culinary exploits. You may recognize Harrison Keevil for his corner store in Belmont, Keevil & Keevil, where he offers great sandwiches, salads, and desserts, and prepares meals for home delivery. If you’re into the Charlottesville restaurant scene, you might also know that Keevil once ran his own place, Brookville, on the Downtown Mall, and recently helped to create the concept of “modern Virginia cuisine” that informs the menu—and serves as the tagline—at Commonwealth Restaurant & Skybar.

All of these things are impressive, and Keevil certainly cuts a figure in the local food landscape. But he also plays a mean bass guitar. We discovered this in July, when Keevil posted a photograph of a black Höfner 500 four-string—the signature instrument of Paul McCartney—on his Instagram feed. We knew right away that Keevil is more than a casual bassist, otherwise the photo wouldn’t have also shown a daisy chain of effects pedals on the floor.

“I have wanted this bass for over 30 years (since my mom and dad introduced me to the Beatles), and @jpkeevil made it happen on my 37th bday,” he wrote. “So awesome!”

The awesomeness was a gift from his wife, Jennifer (@jpkeevil). It struck a profound chord for the chef, whose aunt, a Long Islander, was present at the 1965 Beatles concert at Shea Stadium that solidified the British Invasion. Keevil’s mom was the younger sister, not old enough to attend the show. But back in rural Goochland County, she and her husband made sure that young Harrison (after his grandfather’s surname, not George Harrison) got an earful of the Fab Four from an early age.

“The first album I got was Revolver,” Keevil says. “That one definitely opened the door.”

His next move was to get the Beatles songbook and learn to play their songs on his Dean bass. (Mind you, the kid was still in grade school at the time.) That was what he calls his “cheap and cheerful” bass—nothing compared to the Hofner that Jennifer bought for him.

Keevil went on to perform in a band in high school, and in another group in college. Neither was established enough even to have a name, but they scratched the itch that Keevil first felt when he heard Revolver. Come to think of it, the fact that that album marked the beginning of the Beatles’ psychedelic phase may partly explain why Keevil’s college group was a trippy jam band and not a pop band.

Not long after college, Keevil found his way to the French Culinary Institute, in Manhattan, which propelled him into his career as a chef. But the Beatles—and especially, McCartney—remained an inspiration to him, even after the ex-Beatle started Wings. “I was really into James Bond at one point, so I loved Paul’s music, you know, ‘Live and Let Die.’”

Today, Keevil plays his bass daily, just noodling around or perhaps playing a song or two. He’s practicing for the Party Like a Rock Star event October 18 at the Music Resource Center. Jennifer is on the MRC committee organizing the event, and Keevil will play a favorite song, the Foo Fighters’ “My Hero.”

Playing the Hofner is the equivalent of working with just the right knife in the kitchen. It feels good in your hands and is easy to use.

“The Hofner makes a big difference for me,” he says. “I love the bass and its association with McCartney, but there’s also something great about the fretboard. You can play it more like a guitar, you know, multiple notes at once as opposed to just one at a time.

We get it. Why be “just” a chef when you can be a bass player, too.

“Playing the Hofner is the equivalent of working with just the right knife in the kitchen,” he “It feels good in your hands and is easy to use.”

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Living

Chef exits: Ian Redshaw departs Lampo, Prime 109

Redshaw split with partner chefs Loren Mendosa and Mitchell Bereens—C-VILLE Weekly’s Best Chef winners in 2015 and 2019, respectively—reportedly to spend more time with his family (he and his wife, Allie, have two children) and launch a private supper club. Photo: Amy and Jackson Smith

Renowned local chef Ian Redshaw has left the building—or rather, buildings, plural. Redshaw parted ways earlier this month with his fellow partners of two high-profile restaurants he helped put on the map: Lampo, the Neapolitan pizzeria in Belmont, and Prime 109, the upscale steakhouse on the Downtown Mall. Voted Best Chef in 2018 by C-VILLE Weekly readers, Redshaw also received major national recognition as a semifinalist for the 2019 James Beard Awards Best Rising Star Chef of the Year. The Charlottesville 29 food blog reported on Monday that Redshaw split with chefs Loren Mendosa and Mitchell Bereens—C-VILLE’s Best Chef winners in 2015 and 2019, respectively—to spend more time with his family (he and his wife, Allie, also a chef, have two children) and launch a private supper club.

Can craze

On the heels of the successful launch of Charlottesville’s Waterbird Spirits canned cocktails, which sold out hours after a shipment of 42 cases hit the shelves at Kroger, Richmond’s Belle Isle Moonshine announced September 24 that it would introduce a line of sparkling pop-top drinks. Flavors including grapefruit and blood orange will be spiked with Belle Isle’s moonshine.

Nibbles

Charlottesville’s famed Sandwich Lab, which started in Hamiltons’ at First & Main on the Downtown Mall, is making a comeback on Thursday, September 25, at Peloton Station, the new home of former Hamiltons’ chef Curtis Shaver. • Early Mountain Vineyards introduced chef Tim Moore last week at a tasting-menu dinner at the Madison winery. A seven-year veteran of The Inn at Little Washington, a three Michelin star restaurant, Moore will head up Early Mountain’s fine-dining program. • Grit Coffee is officially open in its new Pantops location, in the Riverside Village development on Stony Point Road. • Bonefish Grill in Hollymead Town Center is celebrating National Seafood Month with a three-course lobster meal for $19.99 every Thursday in October. • Over in Staunton, Blu Point Seafood Co., a venture by the fine folks behind Zynodoa restaurant, jumps into the deep end with a grand opening Friday, October 4. “The Chesapeake Bay meets the New England shore,” is Blu Point’s motto. We’re buying it! blupointseafoodco.com

Categories
Abode

Hyperlocal: At Pippin Hill, the produce is just outside the kitchen door

Over the past three years, the chef's garden has grown from a few herb beds into a small farm that provides a diverse bounty. Photo: Eric Kelly

Chef Ian Rynecki and gardener Diane Burns modestly refer to their creation at Pippin Hill Farm & Vineyards as a kitchen garden, but the result of their collaboration is nothing less than the ideal template for farm-to-table cooking.

Before making his way to Albemarle County in 2017, Rynecki had climbed a ladder with a basket on his back to harvest from a rooftop garden in New York City, cruised the abundant farmers’ markets of San Francisco (where he worked at two Michelin-starred restaurants), and plucked fresh ingredients from the beds outside Connecticut’s Farm Restaurant, where he was chef de cuisine. The vegetable and herb gardens at Pippin Hill, managed by Burns since 2016, were a big draw for his move to the winery.

Over the past three years, Burns has expanded Pippin Hill’s collection of herb beds into a micro-farm. Vegetable and fruit plots embrace the tasting room and spill down the hill to a deer-proofed garden of raised beds. This year, she has added cut flowers to the mix, and has been managing a flock of chickens and overseeing a pollenator meadow to support the winery’s first beehives.

Rynecki and Burns plan the menu and the garden together each January. Recent additions include Niseko, a small white turnip with exceptional greens, red and white Kiogi beet, and dwarf gray sugar peas for shoots and flowers, all of which can be sown in spring and fall. Burns also grows one of her favorite combinations of ornamental and edible flowers, African blue basil and Little Gem marigolds.

In its abundant immediate array of edibles—from flowers to fruits, vegetables to honey, eggs to herbs—and in its serendipitous collaboration between chef and gardener, Pippin Hill offers fresh local cuisine and gives us all a garden to dream of.

Gardener Diane Burns tends to one of the many beds that produce ingredients for chef Ian Rynecki’s menu items. Photo: Eric Kelly

Diane’s harvesting tips

• Snip basil from branches in the center of the plant to encourage regrowth and a bushy habit.

• When harvesting parsley, loose-leaf lettuce, kale, and other greens, remove the big outer leaves first. Leave one to two inches of growth at the base so the plants
will regenerate.

• Head lettuces will usually grow another head after harvest when one to two inches of stem are left.

• Thin carrot, turnip, and beet seedlings to two to three inches apart when the tops are four inches tall. These baby root crops are great for salad toppings, and those left in the ground will have room to grow.

• Grow peas just for the shoots and flowers, which have a concentrated pea flavor. Cut the shoots/tendrils to the first set of leaves when the plant is about eight inches tall. This will also encourage branching out and the growth of more shoots.

• With summer squash, harvest some of the male flowers for stuffing in the kitchen. You can easily distinguish the male flower because it does not have the small fruit growing at the base.

Other area chef’s gardens

Barboursville Vineyards: Horticulturalist Robert Sacilotto works full time to provide herbs, vegetables, and edible flowers for the winery’s fine dining restaurant, Palladio.

Boar’s Head Resort: At the recently renovated Mill Room and other property restaurants, executive chef Dale Ford uses greens harvested from a hydroponic greenhouse.

Farm Table at Monticello: The newly named cafe uses a bounty of fruit, vegetables, and herbs from gardens originally planted and tended by enslaved workers at Thomas Jefferson’s estate.

Categories
Living

Raising the steaks: Downtown steakhouse is primed for launch

Prime 109, the Downtown Mall steakhouse that’s the brainchild of the team behind Lampo Neapolitan Pizzeria, is slated to open later this month. Image: Signe Clayton

Prime 109, the much-anticipated local-farm-centered steakhouse located in the former Bank of America building on the Downtown Mall, opens this month after nearly two years of planning and design.

The restaurant is the brainchild of the Lampo Neapolitan Pizzeria team of Ian Redshaw, Loren Mendosa, Andrew Cole, Shelly Robb, and Mitchell Beerens, and it will showcase the cooking of Bill Scatena, formerly of Pippin Hill Farm & Vineyards, as chef de cuisine.

What’s the number?

Prime 109 takes its name from steakhouse slang for prime rib. When a steakhouse orders “prime 109” from a butcher, the butcher knows to send over roast-ready prime rib of beef. Ian Redshaw, executive chef at Prime 109, is especially excited for the restaurant’s namesake item, a Virginia-raised, 109-day dry-aged 109 steak.

Sharing center stage with Prime 109’s locally grown and produced food will be the interior Beaux-Arts décor of its 100-year-old neoclassical building, an architectural gem from a bygone era.

Redshaw, Prime 109’s executive chef, says the intent behind the restaurant is to feature the bounty of central Virginia’s food while operating in the most sustainable way possible.

“Creating a sustainable cooking community is really hard in Charlottesville because a lot of people outsource everything,” says Redshaw. “We’re trying to keep everything local as much as possible, from our beef all the way down the line, so it’s really to walk the walk of a local restaurant. With Virginia being such a great place to [raise] livestock, it fits hand in hand. Through the community we can vertically integrate everything we have. It creates a language everyone understands—we can tell a farmer ‘I need to talk to you about a cow we need 24 months from now’—and they like that!”

Redshaw adds that we here in Charlottesville are fortunate to have such amazing food grown and sold right in our proverbial (and sometimes literal) backyards.

“We’re trying to feature the bounty of the Shenandoah Valley. It’s such a big bread basket that people forget about it—but it’s some of the best vegetables and livestock around.”

Redshaw reassures Lampo fans currently fretting about the team redirecting its focus to this much larger venture: “Because of our management structure, it’ll just run as Lampo has run; you’ll see the familiar faces, Mitch and Loren will be there. A lot of the partners are pulling double duty to make sure it’s the same experience for our customers.” Cole will be Prime 109’s wine director and Beerens its pastry chef.

Prime 109’s options run the gamut from, well, steak, naturally, to a meatless Bolognese that Redshaw says is particularly delicious.

And, of course, there’s the steak so exciting, they named the entire restaurant after it, the prime 109, which Redshaw says is local pastured beef meticulously dry-aged and cooked to the customer’s liking.

He says they have a dry-aging facility at Seven Hills Food Co. in Lynchburg, a wholesaler of premium pastured Virginia family-farm-raised beef, whose mission is to connect local meat producers with local meat consumers.

“We have a lot of stuff going on in-house, but they do the majority of the processing there [at Seven Hills]—we’re bringing the beef in to them, and we teamed up with them as the livestock producer to help us out in this way.”

Sharing center stage with the locally grown and produced food will be the interior Beaux-Arts décor of the 100-year-old neoclassical building, an architectural gem from a bygone era. Two rows of Corinthian columns, which repeat the design and grandeur of the columns that front the building’s façade, grace the cavernous open space inside of the building, and support gilded coffered ceilings that invite your gaze. Banquettes flanking either side of the restaurant—decorated by local design company Jaid—are showcased by burnished maple floors reclaimed from a mid-19th-century building.

Just past the main dining area on the left is a butchering area and the main production part of the kitchen, where diners can sit at the chef’s table in front of the custom-built, wood-fired grill created by Corry Blanc of Blanc Creatives. Directly across from this is the bar, which will be headed up by Abraham Hawkins, formerly of the C&O.

The polished Carrara white tile flooring leads to a marble staircase that ascends to the mezzanine-level private dining space, which seats 40, overlooks the restaurant below, and lends an up-close look at the space’s gorgeous architectural flourishes.

Redshaw is thrilled to see the Prime 109 team’s dream of a truly local restaurant come to fruition.

“It’s been a huge undertaking with local artisans to bring everything in—from beef producers to blacksmiths to all of our plates are handmade in North Carolina. This collaboration with all local and regional artisans lets us show off what Virginia and the region has to offer.”