Photo courtesy of John Blackburn

Charlottesville travels.

It is not just the profusion of ski racks indefinitely fixed to Subarus on our roads that suggests that a day trip is never far off. Charlottesville, the Charlottesville I know, is a city that craves and celebrates culture– and isn’t bothered by getting in the car to find it.

John Blackburn is opening a gastropub in Lexington, Virginia. It’s just over an hour’s drive– west on 64 and south on 81 at Staunton, both for about 30 miles. Rich in history and also in taste, Lexington is home to Washington & Lee University and the Virginia Military Institute, as well as the Natural Bridge, the Stonewall Jackson house, and a slew of mountain wineries and orchards. “Given the churn that I’ve seen in the restaurant business in Charlottesville and here in Lexington, where I now live, I’m defying my better judgment to get into this, but I can’t help myself at this point,” John wrote to me in an e-mail last week. But John is coming at this from an interesting vantage– one I’d like to think I can appreciate. In the 1990s, he wrote features and reviewed restaurants for C-VILLE. He cooked at the Blue Moon Diner in the late 1980s while a student at U.Va. If you love eating at restaurants, and you know restaurants, at some point, you may want to do it yourself.

The British gastropub was introduced to us last year with the opening of Zinc and Horse & Hound on West Main Street, and the concept is well worth importing. “Young chefs fled the big 5-star kitchens to take up pub leases out in the hinterlands and cook simple, local food in a really comfortable atmosphere. I’ve wanted to start one for years, mainly because it is the kind of place where I want to eat,” John wrote. But there’s more to the decision than that. “From a business perspective, it has lots of advantages because of its low space, staffing, and inventory requirements. From an economic and societal perspective, it appeals to me that we can begin to revive our local agricultural economy in the Shenandoah Valley.”

John purchased a former chapel in downtown Lexington that is guessed to have been built by the local Episcopal church in the 1850s. “There is a rumor that has circulated for years that this was a chapel where Stonewall Jackson famously taught Bible study classes for African-American slaves,” he continued. “I’m intrigued and eager to do more research into the building’s history.” It will be called the Red Hen.

I wrote John after seeing his ad– he is looking for a chef and partner to make the Red Hen his or her own. I was curious to know why one would look on this side of the mountains, and excited to learn that his reasoning is nothing if not a Romantic vision for our regional cuisine. “I’m thinking of all those great young British chefs who fled the big kitchens of London and Paris to set up shop in the English countryside to reinvent English cuisine.” I couldn’t help but romanticize with him. Thomas Keller mastered offal at La Rive in Catskill, NY. Mario Batali made his professional pilgrimage to Borgo Capanne, Italy, estimated population of 200. Gordon Ramsay, my personal favorite, left France to cook on a private yacht in Bermuda. Lexington is a significantly less obscure destination than any of these examples, but I have a point. Great chefs travel for great culinary experiences.

And so, too, does Charlottesville.

If you’d like to e-mail John about the position or to learn more about the Red Hen, please contact him at blackburn630@gmail.com. I can be reached at cvillainlilith@gmail.com.

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