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Staunton The Dining Room at
Frederick House The folks from the Frederick House took over an adjacent building in 2003 and opened a long-planned fine-dining restaurant in concert with their inn. They went first-class all the way, creating a sleek, contemporary dining room with 36 seats. Well-spaced tables are dressed in black cloths over white and the brick walls are hung with stunning art. Chef Mike Goff, who took over the restaurant in 2004 with his wife, offers Staunton’s most innovative, contemporary fare. Dinner entrées range from bouillabaisse and salmon stuffed with crab and boursin to coffee-pepper-crusted strip steak with cabernet au jus and veal rib chop with shiitake mushroom demi-glace. Cajun shrimp and grits with andouille sausage and tasso gravy was a hearty autumn dish. We’d gladly make a meal of the appetizers.
Candidates would be Some of the evening appetizers are featured on the lunch menu, which also offers a grilled seafood salad and a mahi mahi club sandwich. (540)
213-0606. Entrées, $19 to $26. Lunch, Monday-Friday 11 to 2. Dinner,
Tuesday-Saturday 5 to 10. Mill Street Grill If this restaurant in the first Wharf Historic District building to be restored looks a bit like a gallery, thank the former owner whose wife also used to own the interesting art gallery upstairs (now the White Star Tavern, open for lunch only from 11 to 2:30). Six panels of stained glass are a focal point of the decor of the old White Star Mills flour mill. Done by a local couple, they depict the journey of wheat from the harvesting to the baking of bread. There’s much to look at on several levels with exposed beams and thick fieldstone walls: paintings and collages, old light fixtures, etched glass and copper rails. Tablecloths and candlelight are the setting for dinner. The specialty here is ribs, slow-cooked baby back, St. Louis pork and beef ribs in the Midwest style, glazed with a homemade barbecue sauce. A combination platter yields samples of all three. One well-traveled innkeeper calls them the best ribs she’s ever had. The rest of the food has zip as well, and the wine list is surprisingly extensive for a place where the drink of choice seemed to be iced tea, at least the Mother’s Day evening we dined here. The extensive menu ranges widely from grilled mahi mahi and charbroiled yellowfin tuna to raspberry chicken and curried pork tenderloin. It even offers vegetarian and vegan dishes, including an herbed black bean burger that owner Terry Holmes says is the second most popular sandwich after the regular burger. Meals start distinctively with Parker House-style rolls baked individually in small clay crock pots that looked rather like bowls of french onion soup to tired eyes. They are served with a flavored butter of the day – strawberry, in our case. Good house salads with hot honey-mustard-bacon dressing – one of ten homemade offerings – followed. Main courses were filet mignon with an excellent peppercorn cream sauce (one of four sauces offered with filet and sirloin steaks) and a man-size slab of juicy prime rib, each accompanied by a starch and green beans al dente. Peppermint ice cream arrived as a palate cleanser at the end of the meal, making redundant such desserts such as key lime pie, banana-chocolate chip cake and tiramisu. (540) 886-0656. Entrées, $11.95 to $21.75.
Dinner nightly,
Highly regarded is this branch of the well-established L’Italia Restaurant of Harrisonburg, which took over the site of the late, great 23 Beverley restaurant. Owner Emilio Amato retained the elegant decor and even the china, and filled the recessed niches in the walls with paintings by art students from James Madison University. The extensive dinner menu, more Sicilian than northern Italian, may suffer from the breadth of more than four dozen choices. They include sixteen pastas (from manicotti to fettuccine alfredo with shrimp). As Neapolitan love songs played during the dinner hour, we enjoyed the shrimp scampi with honey-mustard glaze over angel-hair pasta and a house salad with red wine vinaigrette. Less satisfactory was the veal saltimbocca, billed as a house specialty. The appetizers are predictable, although the low prices may not be. How about antipasto salad for two for $9.50? Ditto for desserts, from spumoni and cannoli to grasshopper pie and tiramisu. A few Virginia wines are on the mostly Italian wine list, priced primarily in the teens. Many of the same dishes turn up at lunchtime, when you can order anything from an Italian hoagie to veal parmigiana. (540) 885-0102. www.litalia.info. Entrées,
$11.95 to $20.95. Lunch, Tuesday-Saturday 11 to 3:30. Dinner,
Tuesday-Saturday from 3:30 to 10 or 11, Sunday 11 to 8:30.
Immensely popular is this steak and seafood house opened in part of the old C&O facility, called Staunton Station. It’s one of the few complete train complexes in the country and lately rejuvenated by developer Victor Meinert. By complete we mean an operating passenger terminal with a couple of new eateries. Also a stunning curved outdoor concourse that’s the scene of a series of free outdoor Shakin’ at the Station concerts in summer. Plus a free-standing signal tower, a freight depot, and three cabooses and three baggage cars that have been turned into antiques shops and boutiques. The old terminal houses the Whistlestop Soda Shop, with an extraordinary 1880s ice-cream parlor and pharmacy interior for which Vic Meinert outbid the Smithsonian. Ice-cream treats are featured beneath four massive bronze and stained-glass chandeliers salvaged from the old Milwaukee train station. Occupying part of the station concourse is the Pullman Restaurant, where we admired the ornate bar with swinging doors as we lunched on a crab cake sandwich and the offerings from a help-yourself salad bar that was more interesting than most. A chef from Duner’s in Charlottesville instilled a great New Orleans flair. The depot restaurant contains a 50-foot-long,
19th-century oak bar obtained from an old upstate The all-day menu appeals to all tastes, and the seafood and nightly specials come highly recommended. We hear good things about the backfin crab cakes, the mesquite-grilled chicken, the slow-roasted prime rib and the grilled shrimp and feta pasta. The prices certainly are right, and salad and a choice of two sides (fries, applesauce, coleslaw, steamed vegetables, rice or new potatoes) come with. Heath Bar crunch and pecan pies are favorite desserts. (540) 885-7332. www.depotgrille.com. Entrées,
$11.95 to $17.95. Open daily, 11 to 10:30.
Occupying the front portion of the main floor of this inn are three elegant Victorian dining rooms plus a veranda and a garden terrace, as well as an art deco bistro for lighter dining and entertainment. We dined in front of a fireplace amidst tables
dressed in white and pink with blue china and glassware and an
assortment of family keepsakes and heirlooms. Tables are well spaced and
some seating is on couches. The short, contemporary menu might list such
entrées as pan-seared salmon with sweet pepper and lobster cream sauce,
baked chicken breast with figs and pancetta, walnut and mustard-crusted
rack of lamb, and Chincoteague crab cakes with puree of sweet red pepper
and herb mayonnaise, a seasonal treat that we enjoyed here. Tasty
appetizers included a shiitake mushroom and “Fun dining” is offered in the airy Garden Room bistro, billed as Staunton’s only indoor-outdoor café, with lots of glass. The short menu ranges from a grilled prime rib sandwich with garden salad to a chicken and cheese quesadilla with Mexican salad. (540) 886-5151 or (888) 541-5151. Entrées,
$14.95 to $17.95; bistro, $8.95 to $11.95. Breakfast daily, Material excerpted from Inn Spots & Special Places / Mid-Atlantic, by Nancy and Richard Woodworth. Copyright 2003. Wood Pond Press E-mail feedback to: Home
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