Paste: Speaking of which, talk to me a little bit about Appalachian cuisine. You’ve come to be a sort of champion of it.
Deal: It all comes down to utilizing the vegetables and things that can be grown in the area. You see these small mills that are milling corn meal and flour that existed way before I ever thought about becoming a chef… that have been around before I was born. Appalachian culture encompasses not only food, but music, how people build houses, etc. At the restaurant, we’ve been able to fold that culture into our food through research. We’re reading up on the techniques people used to preserve their food and serve it; how they cooked it; equipment they used; all of these things come into play when you think about how it could apply to a restaurant. We look at those things and then ask, “How does this apply to us today?”
Paste: What has been a go-to resource for you along the way?
Deal: You know, my father had this book, The Foxfire Book. You heard of it?
Paste: Never.
Deal: You should check it out. It started as a magazine series that explored everything that was Appalachian, from wood-working and cooking to writing… anything you could imagine that embodied what this culture was, and they catalogued it and sent these magazines out. Since then, they’ve come out with these books, one of which is this condensed version, The Foxfire Book. It talks about lots of different things you wouldn’t expect. A lot of it’s interesting, a lot of it’s not practical anymore because you’re not having to build a log cabin, but it’s really cool because you get an idea of what these people had to work with and how they survived off of what was available. I remember seeing this book early in my childhood and hearing my father talk about it.
Paste: That’s cool you found your way back to it. Ingredient wise, what have you dug up around Roanoke? I know you’re committed to using hyper-local ingredients and techniques.
Deal: Obviously you can get anything you want nowadays. But, as far as being able to go out to the forest and being introduced to someone who has some land and knows where ramps grow [which are in-season now in Roanoke]… that’s pretty cool. You end up going out and foraging those and being able to research how they were cooked and talk to someone in the area about how they’ve been cooking them for 20 years. Another thing I’ve discovered is the paw paw. Have you eaten a paw paw?
Paste: [I’m picturing a muskrat or a similarly slimy rodent.] No.
Deal: I like to refer to it as the “passion fruit of the South.” It’s such a distinctive, interesting tree fruit. It has a tropical almost passion fruit taste to it and they grow here. There are a lot of things here you wouldn’t expect. Quince grows locally. I had my first experience using quince juice here. It’s really bitter, acidic. You would consider it inedible, but then when you turn it into a curd, it comes out fabulous. It’s really cool to be able to do that kind of thing and to utilize the food that surrounds you.
Paste: After all, your goal was to create a Virginia restaurant…
Deal: Yeah, it was kind of one of those things where our goal was to make sure that this restaurant didn’t exist if it wasn’t in Virginia; that we couldn’t transport it to San Francisco or somewhere like that. We rely solely on products grown and raised in the area.
Paste: Do you do any hunting or fishing?
Deal: I love fly fishing. One of the partners in the restaurant is a good friend of mine. He has property outside of Roanoke, so we’ve gone fly fishing a couple of times. It’s so relaxing. It’s one of those things that manages to get your mind off of everything else… except for catching that fish.