Tables for 3: New restaurants offer extended dining options
By Casey Gillis on Apr. 14, 2010
Geralds, 112 Tradewynd Drive
Homey is the first word that comes to mind when touring Wyndhurst’s newest eatery, Geralds, which opened Tuesday.
A lounge at the back of the restaurant, available for private parties, is home to several TVs and black leather couches.
A small gourmet shop and deli case, where owner Michelle Hamrick will sell wine, sandwiches and gourmet cupcakes, among other items, shares the front waiting area with bookshelves, stacked with cookbooks from her own collection, and a big, comfy red couch that faces the kitchen.
“It’s the first one I ever bought that I picked out and bought brand new,” Hamrick says. “This is, literally, almost what my house would look like.
“I made it my own.”
That goes for her menu, too, which pulls from a diverse background cooking everything from Mexican and Italian to German and Irish food.
“There’s a lot of what I call gourmet comfort food, like corned beef and cabbage, shepherd’s pie. A lot of family recipes,” says Hamrick, who spent four years as head chef for another Wyndhurst-based business, At Home Gourmet, and was most recently executive chef at the Holiday Inn’s Lunchbag on Main restaurant.
Lunch at Geralds — which she named after her father — will be a casual affair, with lots of sandwiches and smoked sausages.
Then, “at dinnertime,” she says, “the tablecloths will go down and the lamps will come out. It’s a little more upscale.”
Entrees, many of which will be offered in small and large plates, include shrimp and grits, chicken curry, lobster ravioli, steaks, gourmet burgers, pastas, egg rolls and pierogies, with sides like five-cheese mac and cheese, fried potato salad and German potatoes (her mother’s recipe).
Other unique dishes include her Goats & Grapes salad (mixed greens with carrots, walnuts, candied grapes and toasted goat cheese in a sherry maple vinaigrette); a Smoked Sausage and Bacon Roll (she actually weaves bacon together, tops it with Italian sausage, barbecue sauce and pepper jack cheese, wraps it up and cooks it in a smoker); the Funky Monkey (a honey wheat wrap filled with chunky peanut butter, bananas and granola) and Gimme S’more (layers of graham crackers, chocolate ganache and marshmallow).
Hamrick has already started networking with her neighbors. Montana Plains Bakery, which just opened a second location down the street, will bake all of her dinner rolls, and Mountain Frost Creamery will make her Merlot ice cream.
“We’re all kind of working together, and we’re all different enough,” she says.
“I think my menu will suit this community. It has a neighborhood kind of feel.”
Hours: 11 a.m. to 10 p.m. daily. Dinner starts at 5 p.m.
Phone: (434) 582-1414
Price range: $8 (small plate dinner of corned beef and cabbage) to $20 (a large plate cocoa cinnamon filet) for entrees. Lunch special includes a hoagie, drink and side for $10. All items on the kids’ menu are $5.
Drug Store Grill, 105 Main St. in Brookneal
Owners Ricky and Robin Pritt opened the Brookneal restaurant/bar based on what Robin calls her history-buff husband’s “wild hair.”
Says Ricky: “I knew a lot about the history of the building. It was an opportunity to open up something that Brookneal didn’t have, and that it would support.”
The couple has previously owned a general store and a convenience store, but Drug Store Grill, which opened in February, is their first foray into the restaurant business.
Built in 1913, the building was originally a drug store downstairs and a dentist’s office, with 14 rooms, upstairs.
The Pritts began renovating the space about two years ago, transforming the downstairs into a sit-down restaurant — complete with a fully restored tin ceiling and greenstone floor — and the upstairs into a sports bar, where they’ll host live music and karaoke on weekends.
Head chef Paul Anctil, a friend of the Pritt’s son, Josh, got involved after moving back to the area from Florida, where he ran his own restaurant. He says their vision is to have an American-style grill, with a little bit of everything, at affordable prices.
The menu includes salads, soups, sandwiches and steaks, as well as seasonal entrees like fish tacos, shrimp and grits, scallops with a mushroom risotto and salsa verde chicken (chicken topped with green chili salsa and served with black beans and rice).
They recently did a wine tasting with food pairings, and Pritt says they’d like to do one every few months.
Pritt, a Brookneal native, says he hopes people will make the drive to check out what they have to offer.
“You have to make an effort to come here,” he says. “When people go out and ride around on a Sunday, we want them to include us.”
Hours: 11:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. Monday and Tuesday; 11 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. and 5 to 10 p.m. Wednesday and Thursday; 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. and 5 to 1 a.m. Friday; 11 a.m. to 1 a.m. Saturday and 11:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. Sunday
Phone: (434) 376-2116
Price range: $12 to $18.50 (for a 6 oz. Filet) for entrees. Burgers and sandwiches go for between $7 and $9.
Hash House, 1125 Main St.
When Bernadette Irr set out to open a new restaurant downtown, she listened to the people.
“I heard they really wanted a place open all night,” says the Boston native, who has lived in Lynchburg for more than 20 years. “I wanted to do something unique.”
Going with a breakfast-heavy menu at the Hash House, which opened in February, only made sense.
“Late at night,” she says, “people crave (it).”
The menu includes French toast, griddle cakes and a variety of hashes and scrambles — all served up in cast-iron skillets — that incorporate a range of ingredients, from your standard eggs, ham and bacon to steak tips (featured in the Continental Congress) and country fried chicken (the Longhandle).
There are also sandwiches and salads, many of which are named after musicians.
The Bob Marley, for instance, is a salad topped with grilled chicken, cashews, feta cheese and ranch or Vidalia dressing, and the Mama Cass is your basic Caesar salad, topped with crab cakes.
Then there’s the Bangover, what the menu describes as a “hair of the dog” dish: two eggs, four strips of bacon and a glass of Rogue Dead Guy Ale.
“I’m very artistic with my recipes,” says Irr, a cookbook collector who has been cooking for 25 years. “I’m just drawn to cookbooks. I thumb through them and try recipes.”
Irr also owns Tutto Bene, a coffee shop/deli in the Bank of the James building.
The Hash House is a much larger venture for her, and she likes it: “I just wanted to do more.”
She’s decorated the yellow-green walls with music posters and album covers.
“Music creates spirit, and I want a place that is very lively,” she says. “My dream is to add a lot of spirit to my city.”
Hours: 24/6 (closed on Mondays)
Phone: (434) 455-2882
Price range: $4.99 for griddle cakes and some sandwiches. Hashes and scrambles from $5.99 to $10.99.
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