This Is What the Mountains Taste Like
There are foods you recognize before you ever take the first bite. Brown beans and cornbread. Country ham. Collard greens. Fried green tomatoes. Blackberries picked when summer is at its heaviest. A pork chop big enough to require both a knife and a little commitment. Cobbler still warm when it reaches the table. Around here, those aren't food trends. They're memories.
At Wayfarer Appalachia, we don't believe Appalachian food needs to be reinvented to make it interesting. We think you start with what was already good, respect where it came from, and then see where you can take it. That's what is happening in our kitchen on Main Street in Tazewell.
Appalachian Food Has Never Been One Thing
The food of these mountains was shaped by what people had, what they could grow, what they could preserve, and what could feed a table full of people. It was practical food. Seasonal food. Food that didn't need a paragraph of explanation before you ate it. But practical never meant boring.
Country ham is salty, rich, and unmistakable. Blackberries can move from breakfast to supper to dessert without anybody questioning it. Cornbread can sit beside a bowl of beans or become part of something entirely new. A properly cooked mess of collard greens doesn't need to pretend to be anything else.
Those ingredients give us a language to work with. And at Wayfarer, we're having some fun with it.
Start With the Blackberry
You can learn a lot about our menu from one ingredient. Blackberries have grown along Appalachian fence rows, roadsides, and hillsides for generations. They're familiar enough that many of us remember picking them long before we thought about them as an ingredient on a restaurant menu.
At Wayfarer, that familiar flavor shows up in unexpected places. Our Blackberry Ridge Pork Chop starts with a 14-ounce bone-in pork chop and finishes it with a house-made blackberry-port wine sauce. Our Hide-A-Way Salmon takes fresh pan-seared salmon and gives it a distinctly Appalachian turn with a blackberry reduction.
You'll even find blackberry vinaigrette bringing together greens, goat cheese, roasted pecans, and fresh ingredients in our country bowls. And when the berries are destined for dessert, we're perfectly happy to stop getting clever and make cobbler. That's the idea. Tradition doesn't have to sit still.
Local Beef. Two Hands. No Apology.
Then there's the burger. The Wayfarer Smash Burger isn't trying to be delicate. It starts with a half-pound of local beef, double-smashed on the grill, topped with white American cheese, lettuce, tomato, and onion, finished with our Crooked Garden Remoulade, and stacked onto a toasted brioche bun. It requires two hands.
That's part of the experience. For the Sunny Side Burger, we take that local beef in another direction with a fried green tomato, sunny-side egg, pimento cheese and Crooked Garden Remoulade.
Fried green tomato and pimento cheese on a smash burger? Absolutely. That's the kind of collision we like.
Some Things Don't Need Fixing
Not every dish needs a modern interpretation. Sometimes you need brown beans. Our Coal Miner's Comfort is exactly what its name promises: slow-simmered brown beans, cornbread and tender collard greens. There is history on that plate.
Generations of Appalachian families made meals from humble ingredients because those ingredients were available, affordable and filling. They became part of the mountain food culture because people knew how to make simple things taste good. We aren't interested in dressing that history up until nobody recognizes it.
Sometimes honoring Appalachian food means leaving enough of it alone.
Then Again, We Do Like to Play With Our Food
Our Appalachian Trio starts with another mountain and Southern favorite: fried green tomatoes. We serve them three ways with pimento cheese, Fog Hollow aioli and Hollar Heat over gouda grits.
Sweet Revival Pork Belly pairs slow-roasted and grilled pork belly with pimento cheese, Hollar Heat and Fog Hollow aioli.
Our Midnight Train Shrimp & Grits brings sautéed shrimp together with creamy gouda grits, smoky country ham, a little heat and a rich pan sauce.
And River Hymn Rainbow Trout takes fresh trout, pan-sears it until golden and serves it over gouda grits. These aren't dishes created because someone decided Appalachian food needed to become fancy. They're what happens when a kitchen understands its ingredients well enough to play with them.
Scratch Cooking Still Matters
There is another idea behind the Wayfarer kitchen that's considerably less glamorous. Make things. Our dressings are made in-house. Our hummus is made in-house. Our sauces and reductions are built in the kitchen. You'll find real butter in dishes like our Roaming Garden pasta. Our Backroad Fries are cooked in beef tallow. We use local beef and bring seasonal ingredients into the menu where they make sense.
Scratch cooking takes more work. That's precisely why it matters. When everything arrives pre-made, restaurants eventually begin to taste like everywhere else. The little differences disappear.
We'd rather keep the differences.
Save Room. We're Serious.
Appalachian hospitality has never been particularly interested in sending somebody home hungry. Neither are we. The skillet brownie arrives warm with vanilla ice cream. Our cobbler is made in-house with peach or a mixture of blueberries, blackberries, and strawberries. Handcrafted milkshakes keep things wonderfully uncomplicated.
And then there's our Dessert du Jour. Chef's choice. Because sometimes you shouldn't know everything that's going to happen before you sit down.
Food Worth Taking the Backroad For
Wayfarer is a live music venue. It's a bar. It's a gathering place. On the right night, there may be a songwriter in the Velvet Room telling you where a song came from while dinner is still sitting in front of you. We love that. But the food isn't something we serve simply because people need dinner before the show.
The food is part of the reason to come. We want someone traveling through Southwest Virginia to taste something that makes sense here. We want someone who grew up in these mountains to recognize an ingredient and then discover it used in a way they hadn't considered. And we want a table full of friends to pass something around and say, "You've got to try this."
Because that's how good food has always worked in Appalachia. It gets passed around. So come hungry.
Order the brown beans because your grandmother made them. Try the pork chop because you never imagined blackberry and port wine on one. Split the fried green tomatoes. Steal a few Backroad Fries from somebody else's plate. Stay for the cobbler. There are plenty of ways to experience Appalachia. We think tasting it is a pretty good place to start.
Wayfarer Appalachia
386 Main Street
Tazewell, Virginia
Come for the mountains. Stay for supper.
