Old Mill Room – C-VILLE Weekly

Café and community: A taste of Little Havana comes to Cville

Proper Cuban food has been in short supply in the Charlottesville area, but that’s about to change when Guajiros Miami Eatery opens its doors in the next few weeks.

The restaurant is the brainchild of Miami transplant Harvey Mayorga, who, with his brother, Danilo, plans to bring a bit of Little Havana to the city, on Seminole Trail in the Woodbrook Shopping Center.

Mayorga said he and his wife, who came here to work at UVA about a year and a half ago, quickly noticed the paucity of Latin American food other than tacos or pupusas.

“We saw that there was a need for something different,” he says. After seeing the available space, Mayorga reached out to his brother, a restaurateur in Miami.

Mayorga says they’ll be serving their favorite Cuban food, with a bit of Miami/Cuban flair.

“There is a culture of ‘cafecito’ in Miami, where everyone on their commute stops at a ventana, or window, gets a Cuban toast, a croquette, and some café con leche before heading to work,” he says. “It’s a social event, even if it is for five or 10 minutes. We want to offer that.”

The brothers plan to start with breakfast and lunch service. Menu features will include breakfast sandwiches on Cuban bread, medialunas (crescent rolls), and a Cuban sandwich, as well as espresso, lattes, and café con leche. Mayorga said he hopes to introduce the Cuban colada (a multi-shot cup of sweet Cuban coffee) here as well. While they don’t yet have a liquor license, the plan is to eventually feature classic rum-based and Cuban cocktails with all-natural ingredients, including mojitos, daiquiris, el presidente cocktails, and rum old fashioneds.

What’s old is new again

Renovations are moving forward at the Boar’s Head’s Old Mill Room, which will reopen in January as the Mill Room.

“Walking in [to the new restaurant] will be very visually different,” says Joe Hanning, marketing and communications manager for the Boar’s Head. “It will still have the historic wooden beams and the same ambiance, but we’re opening it up to bring natural light in. All three seating areas will be combined as one and will be all brand new.”

And with the changes to the restaurant come some innovations that will put a 21st-century twist on the historic Trout House building behind the Mill Room.

“This was an historic shelter where long ago people would pick the trout they wanted for dinner—literally farm to table,” Hanning says. “We’re redesigning that to put in a hydroponic garden from Babylon Farms. We’ll be the only ones in North America to have self-sustained hydroponic gardens, where we’ll be producing our own leafy greens for the Mill Room.”

Executive chef Dale Ford is working on a new menu for the four-diamond restaurant, and conjuring up expansive plans for the hydroponic garden, all while tending to 20,000 honey bees up the hill from the Trout House. You can be sure that hyperlocal honey will be harvested and incorporated into the new menu.

Mourning a food community leader

A longtime philanthropic mainstay in the Charlottesville food community passed away suddenly last week.

Lisa Reeder, food and farm access coordinator for the Local Food HUB, had devoted nearly 20 years to working with and around food in central Virginia, the organization said. The Local Food HUB is a nonprofit organization that partners with Virginia farmers to increase community access to area food, and provides support services, infrastructure, and market opportunities that connect people with food grown close to home. The organization said Reeder had spearheaded its Fresh Farmacy program and oversaw a number of other community programs and partnerships.

In a statement, the Food HUB said Reeder was “passionate about all things food and agriculture, and found many ways to channel that passion into action.”

“She understood the challenges of farming, and worked to bring needed resources to our partner farms,” the statement continued. “She made a mean BLT sandwich, and her contributions to staff potluck meals were unmatched. Even in the face of challenging health issues, her upbeat spirit and dedication to her friends, family, and work never wavered. Lisa will be greatly, greatly missed, but we will carry her example and her legacy with us with every step we take toward a healthier, more equitable food system.”

Feast! co-owner Kate Collier says Reeder’s loss will be felt far and wide.

“She’s always so strong, positive, and in the moment, helping others, putting friends first, feeding those who need it most, and spreading her beauty and light all around,” Collier says. “She was one of this community’s great women in food.”

Old Mill Room gets modern makeover

By Erin O’Hare and Sam Padgett

After a special dinner service on Wednesday, January 31, the Old Mill Room at the Boar’s Head Inn will close for a major renovation, the first since the restaurant opened in 1965.

The old wooden beams and hardwood floors will remain, says Boar’s Head Resort marketing and communications manager Joe Hanning, but the rest of the space will undergo a redesign, complete with new seating and a modern atmosphere inspired by the existing Old Mill Room, says Hanning. New design elements will include a glass-backed bar between the current restaurant and bistro spaces.

Renovations will begin February 1 and should wrap up in September of this year, says Hanning, but guests at the inn won’t be without an on-site restaurant: There are two other recently renovated places to eat, Racquet’s Restaurant inside the fitness club, and the Birdwood Grill near the golf course. And while the new restaurant will look a bit different, the revised menu “won’t be too far-fetched from what it is now,” Hanning says—it’ll still be fine dining.

Executive chef Dale Ford, who has been with the Boar’s Head Inn since December 2016, has planned a special farewell dinner, Feast of Five Forks, for January 31 (tickets are $95 and can be purchased online). The Old Mill Room has been “the grand dame of dining rooms in Charlottesville” for decades, says Ford, and with this prix-fixe dinner, he wanted to pay homage to the restaurant’s history. Ford and other resort staff gathered old Old Mill Room menus, including the very first menu from 1965, and researched how various dishes would have been served at the time. Ford, who grew up on the Florida/Georgia coast, says he’s especially excited about cooking a stuffed prawn dish that was a menu staple for almost a decade.

Big changes at Bang!

Travis Burgess is the new head chef at Bang!, but he’s no stranger to the Asian tapas restaurant: He started working there 10 years ago, when he was 14, washing dishes.

And if his last name sounds familiar, that’s because Travis is the son of Bang! co-owner Tim Burgess.

Travis took over the kitchen at Bang! earlier this month, and he’s changed about half the menu, which is still Asian tapas, still priced between $4 and $14 per small plate, and still heavy on the veggies. He’s kept longtime Bang! favorites like the kale tortellini and the goat cheese dumplings, and replaced some less-ordered dishes with new ones, including carrots cooked in a cast-iron pan and topped with cashew cream sauce and nori seasoning and an egg noodle and charred eggplant plate. There’s also a dish that Tim thought up: a vegan pastrami-style sandwich made with beets and turmeric sauerkraut.

Travis, who cooked at Trummer’s On Main in Clifton before moving to Charleston, South Carolina, to cook at upscale bistro-style Southern food restaurant Fig, most recently worked as a bread baker at Butcher & Bee in Charleston. And in his quest to incorporate bread into an Asian menu, he’s introduced three kinds of steam buns to Bang!: fried chicken, beef shoulder and king oyster mushroom with broccoli kimchi.

Eater’s digest

Tilman’s, the wine-and-cheese specialty shop on the Downtown Mall, will begin a series of weekly tasting events that will run through March. The first in the series, a wine-and-cheese pairing, costs $30 (paid in advance), and will take place at the shop at 6:30pm on Wednesday, January 24. Tilman’s co-owner Derek Mansfield says future tastings will include a wine-and-chocolate and cider-and-cheese pairing, among others.

According to a note posted on the door of The Nook, the diner is closed until February. And windows are brown-papered up, so we can’t see what’s going on in there.

On Tuesday, January 30, wine journalist, critic and teacher Steven Spurrier, who helped legitimize the California wine scene in the 1970s, will host a five-course wine dinner at Veritas Vineyard & Winery in Afton. Each course will be paired with a Spurrier-selected wine, and he plans to share plenty of stories from his 50 years in the industry. Tickets for the dinner are $165, and can be purchased at the Virginia Wine Academy’s website.