Chef sets up restaurant in hometown of St. Paul

ST. PAUL, Va. (AP) — Travis Milton could still be cooking at a top-flight restaurant in Richmond. Instead, he's at the edge of the Virginia coalfields, just past his childhood home at Castlewood.

There, the acclaimed guru of Appalachian eats is slated on Feb. 12 to open Milton's, his long-awaited restaurant on the ground floor of a boutique hotel dubbed "Western Front" in St. Paul.

"Here is what I want to cook and when I want to cook it," said Milton, 37. "It can be something quirky and fun but still super good and different for everybody."

This hotel, 3025 4th Avenue, takes its name from St. Paul's wild and woolly past. Once, it's told, a string of saloons and gambling houses in town was as rough as the "Western Front" of World War I.

"Being something new and something different," Milton said, "I wanted to be sure it was something for everyone but not in the manner to please everybody all the time."

Come sample "chicken fried bacon" — a dish of slow-cooked bacon mixed with pickled onions and okra. "So you've got this beautiful, smoky, rich, sour, salty kind of thing going on, kind of hitting all the points on your palette," Milton said. "It's something that's super approachable but done in a manner not necessarily what you would expect from a place sitting in St. Paul, Virginia."

Milton's menu mixes pole beans and butter beans with squash casserole. He specializes in Conecuh sausage with kraut. And he serves hominy "in the exact manner that the Cherokee would have done."

The dark-haired chef revealed, "There are multiple facets to how I came to this menu conceptually. I'm trying to do things here that people are familiar with — but a little bit more modernist, a little bit different take on it."

Milton spent his teenage years in Castlewood, about two miles from the site of his new restaurant. But he moved to Richmond, Virginia, by the time he graduated high school in 1997.

"Being able to come back here and do something this cool in my hometown, pretty much, is amazing,"

Milton added.

Today, Milton views his self-titled restaurant in St. Paul as a sort of sequel to The Village, a well-known eatery operated by his great-grandparents, John and Pauline Richard, at Castlewood along U.S. Highway 58A.

"I grew up in there," Milton said. "I was there in the '80s. My mom worked in there. They would literally plop me in a high-chair when I was one or two, and I would peel potatoes with a dull, to-go knife."