If you look forward to the start of springtime farm-to-table dinners featuring locally grown produce – here’s some good news: now you don’t have to wait for spring. “Cellar To Table” is a brand new dinner series that’s about to kick off at some of the most iconic and naturally beautiful sites across the state. The first is on Saturday. For tickets and more information, visit the West Virginia State Parks website or follow WV Cooks on Facebook.
Maria Young caught up with Matt Welsch, the executive chef of West Virginia State Parks and one of the organizers of the new series.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Young: Tell me first of all how the idea for these dinners came about. It sounds like it was you, but also kind of a cooperative group of some other folks and a lot of just different avenues that you have your fingers in, right?
Welsch: Yeah, this was really the culmination of a lot of things that I’ve been working on over the years, bringing together with West Virginia cooks, a group of culinarians from across the state, my position with the executive chef as West with West Virginia state parks and supporting value added producers in West Virginia, in my role with the West Virginia Food and Farm Coalition, as well as my work with tourism. So we’re bringing all of those things together to celebrate value added products, things that we would keep in our root cellars back in the day and feature those in these multi course meals that will be led by different members of West Virginia cooks at different state parks. We work directly with a group called Mountain State Co Op, and they’ll be launching a brand called Appalachian seller to really help aggregate and promote a lot of these value added producers across the state, you know, but we have everything you would come to expect, like jams and jellies, but also alcohol infused sauces, honey, maple syrup, the freeze dried products, lots of different spice blends. I mean, it’s really great to see.
Young: Sure. So tell me a little bit about the, just the vision for this. Because, you know, you think about Appalachia, and you do think about people canning and turning one thing into a couple different things that they can use in a lot of different ways. Tell me about the concept for this series of dinners.
Welsch: Well, I think our farm-to-table dining events across the state have been really, really well received, and it gives everyone, not just our state parks, but all the people doing farm-to-table dinner events, it gives them a chance to really show off some of some really excellent cuisine and some of the great things that are being grown in the state of West Virginia. But we do, even with the addition of high tunnels and modern-day farming practices, we do still have a relatively short growing season, so that really cuts off our ability to do some of this stuff. So the farm-to-table, obviously, is more in the late summer and early fall. And I thought how great it would be to celebrate these products that we put up for the hard times. We put up at the end of the growing season, and we draw from throughout the colder and darker months. You know, our seller our root cellar goods, let’s really celebrate that tradition and do a dining series in the late winter and early spring, when there’s not a whole lot else going on. You know, maybe the snow is starting to get rotten, or it’s a little bit wet out, and we’re seeing a decline in traffic at our state parks. But hey, here’s something really special and unique and exciting, and you can come out and spend a few days exploring a park in a time you normally wouldn’t have been able to go there, or wouldn’t have thought to go there and participate in this really exciting series.
Young: Oh,interesting, yeah. So tell me about some of the different venues. And, you know, I’m just thinking visually. I mean, you’ve got — state parks are obviously known for their for their beauty. Tell me about some of the venues, and also just some of the settings for the dinners.
Welsch: So we’re going to be having dinners at Canaan Valley Resort, Stonewall Resort, Hawks Nest State Park, Chief Logan State Park, Tygart Lake, Pipestem Resort, Twin Falls Resort, North Bend State Park, Cacapon Resort and Holly River. And I have had the opportunity, in my position, to visit all of these places, and they are all jaw droppingly beautiful and all unique and different. It’s amazing to me how many different scenes and settings we have that still look very West Virginian, but in completely different ways. And we’re going to get to enjoy that. Like Hawks Nest will be at the event center that’s kind of up on the hill overlooking the river and the gorge, you know, and that’s a view during the summer, when the leaves are on the trees, you can’t really get to appreciate that as much as you can during winter, when the leaves are off the trees, and you can see straight down to the river. We’ll be at Lightburns at Stonewall Resort. It’s an absolutely beautiful, an absolutely beautiful restaurant. It was named one of the most picturesque places to eat a meal in the state. But, you know, every single one is going to have something. Holly River State Park, I feel like, is an underappreciated story book. It’s just so gorgeous when you get down into that park, you know, and just every single one, Tygartr Lake, the beautiful, beautiful lakeside views at Tygart. North Bend has this really wonderful rustic charm to it. I encourage everyone to make a chance to go to all of our state parks and really experience the beauty that the state has to offer.
Young: So I believe the series kicks off in early January. Tell me where it kicks off and what you know about the menu at that first event.
Welsch: Yeah, our inaugural event will be January 4 at Canaan Valley Resort. The West Virginia cook representative will be chef Marion Ohlinger from Morgantown. And Chef Marion likes to do some really interesting things, and I’m sure we’ll see some of that on the menu. He will sometimes subvert your expectations, turn things on their heads. So I think it’s going to be a really, really exciting meal. And then throughout January and March and April wile’l have the rest of the events. March is the big month, something going on every week in March. And each one of these West Virginia cooks are bringing their own unique vision to these menus. So they’re going to be rooted in the root cellar goods. But these roots are something that you’ve never seen before.