Wake up, wine country
Wake up, wine country
A review of Hickory, Travis Milton's new restaurant
I first saw chef Travis Milton at the Discount Tobacco in Bristol, Tennessee.
Not the living-and-breathing version of the former food festival circuit rider, but a billboard rendition of Milton, who in the 2010s became such a media darling that after he was named executive chef of Hickory—a new restaurant at the Inn at Nicewonder Farm & Vineyards, just over the state line in Bristol, Virginia—Food & Wine previewed the place.
Milton rose to prominence as chef de cuisine of Comfort Restaurant in Richmond, where he became an outspoken advocate for his native southwestern Virginia, working with various nonprofits to celebrate Appalachia’s culinary heritage. He also picked up a slew of stereotypical mountainisms, such as growing a brushable beard and hollering for whiskey at parties. Back then, you could conceivably have seen him buying chaw at Discount Tobacco.
Both the platform and stylings were irresistible to food writers, most of whom have been conditioned to see rough edges as evidence of authenticity. Hickory was supposed to represent a maturing of Milton’s philosophy and brand, which meant commingling global influences with high country ingredients on the plate and overhauling his image.
That much was apparent from the Hickory billboard looming over the Discount Tobacco parking lot, picturing a serious-looking Milton with his beard trimmed short. The massive ad, clearly a bid by the hotel to make the most of its celebrity chef hire, urges viewers to learn more about the restaurant’s “elevated Appalachian dining” by logging into Instagram.
The message feels wildly out of place in an area where one in four people live in poverty. Worse, Hickory doesn’t make good on its claim that Appalachian food needs further elevation. On a recent visit, I found the estimable regional cuisine didn’t respond at all well to the restaurant’s arbitrary fancifying, which sometimes threatens to make the source material seem silly.
But when the restaurant lets Appalachia be, as one of Milton’s old t-shirts might have put it, there are glimmers of what this grape-growing district could contribute to U.S. wine culture. A plain homespun biscuit is a better accompaniment to viognier exploration than you might guess.
Nicewonder Farm & Vineyards is a family-owned 450-acre plot which Travel + Leisure described as home to “some of the most beautiful scenery in the state.” The scenery might be free, but the butter chicken and grits will cost you $40. On both of my review visits to Hickory, I was the only customer in the dining room for most of my meal.
Obviously, Nicewonder is counting on tourists to fill the restaurant seats in its hotel, which appears to have taken its fairy-tale design cues from the similarly palatial Inn on Biltmore Estate in Asheville. That means it falls to Milton and his crew to interpret one of the country’s most consistently misunderstood regions for eaters unfamiliar with it. Heck, plenty of Americans don’t even know how to pronounce “Appalachia” correctly. (The third syllable rhymes with what you put on the door to keep out profiteers.)
Unfortunately, despite thought-out references to homegrown food culture—at Hickory, the steak shines with ramp butter and the croutons are made from cornbread—the translation is hard to follow.
Perhaps that’s because while Milton is a permanent presence at Discount Tobacco, he wasn’t at the restaurant when I went. I repeatedly got the sense that team members were doing their best to keep up with an absent expert’s instructions like teenaged babysitters struggling to decipher scribbled notes about bedtime rituals. The fun of an apple stack cake-for-one starts to fray when the tower of six silver dollar pancakes is served cooler-cold.
Hickory is built on The French Laundry model, insofar as it presumes people seeking elegance in their glasses would like to find the same on their plates. Its dinner menu is inexplicably decorated with cryptic East Asian exports, but the structure is held up by continental columns, with all the traditional totems of western luxury firmly in place. A nineteenth-century coal baron might scoff at furikake on roasted carrots, but he would no doubt recognize the lobster, pork chops, and oysters.
Those oysters are offered two ways: On the half shell with yuzu mignonette, and lightly grilled with ‘nduja butter, a preparation that caught on at Tavola in Charlottesville under Dylan Allwood’s direction. At Hickory, the panko is made from crushed Funyuns, but the oniony cast of snack rings and sliced chives got overshadowed by the disconcerting temperature of the dish, which was roughly room.
Another appetizer which didn’t quite live up to the antics embedded in its description was the tartare, named for the Sudden Service convenience store chain. The saucy raw meat is mounded atop what taste like misremembered tater tots, and strewn with tattered bits of white bread, a combination that surely makes more sense at 2 a.m. And while I’m certain the $16 whipped Spam served with fried Saltines was developed with love, it feels a little too close to an elitist joke for these inflationary times.
What else can I tell you? The thick pancake lodged under a joint of Peking duck sullied by uncaramelized sugars was undercooked. The servers seemed dubious of Nicewonder’s own wines, suggesting that the output might improve in a few years.
But when I went back for breakfast, the restaurant was so brilliant that it dawned on me that Hickory’s smartest play might be to shape the future of wine country dining in the South by emphasizing the first meal of the day.
Guests itching to get on the road for their wine-tastings would be well advised to set aside enough time to savor Hickory’s tender, salt-glanced biscuits, which offer a one-bite defense of American pastry’s sophistication. If they’re really smart, they’ll ask for them sluiced with white gravy, made rich and smoky by Allan Benton’s acclaimed bacon.
There isn’t a famous name attached to the accompanying “crispy potatoes,” but that skillet-fried side was truer to Appalachia than anything else I tried at Hickory. Perhaps I’m overly defensive about how outsiders see mountaineers, having spent years running political campaigns in western North Carolina, but I wish every visitor could experience the tradition and hard work bound up in those greased potatoes, alluringly salty, crusty, and tender within.
In fact, that’s my bold proposal for wine tourism around these parts.
Wine is an agricultural product, as the broke-down tobacco growers here who turned to it can tell you. Why not acknowledge the primacy of farm labor in the mountains and foothills by making breakfast the most important meal of an oenophile’s day? Based on the freshness of the apple cider-dressed greens in my dinner salad, and how lovingly they were handled, I suspect Hickory’s kitchen is already on board with putting produce—and the people responsible for it—first.
After all, a hearty meal before hours of wine tasting sounds almost practical. Milton, who has greasy beans tattooed on his forearms, might agree that there’s little more Appalachian than that.
Hanna, that's a hell of a good read.
Good to see Alan Benton mentioned anywhere!