Hunter’s Head Tavern
9048 John Mosby Highway, Upperville ; 540-592-9020; www.huntersheadtavern.com
Average entree: $13 to $20 ($$); Open for lunch, Tuesday — Sunday, dinner daily, Sunday brunch

Turkey potpie arrives tableside in a handsome pewter pot / Photography by James Kim

The sleepy Upperville streets must seem light-years away from her previous life in Silicon Valley. Yet Cisco Systems co-founder Sandy Lerner continues to innovate in her own special way: this time, by breathing life back into rare livestock breeds via a carefully constructed dining circuit.

Today, Lerner sits atop a virtually self-sustaining food chain that includes: Ayrshire Farm (livestock), Hunter’s Head Tavern (restaurant) and the Home Farm Store (retail).

After spending 30-plus years as a vegetarian, Lerner said she decided to start Ayrshire Farm in an effort to preserve a handful of rare heritage breeds that seemed destined to otherwise disappear from the local ecosystem.

“By creating a dining environment that showcases the intense and varied flavor of these heritage breeds, it is a small but direct step in saving them,” she reasoned, warning that, “if there is no market for these beautiful animals, they will disappear.”

Granted, slaughtering animals in order to save them might seem hypocritical to some, but Lerner has the fiercely loyal clientele and thriving livestock to prove her seemingly counterintuitive plan is actually working.

She estimated that the farm is home to around 800 Highland/White Park beef cattle, around 20 to 40 rose veal calves—proudly pointing out that Ayrshire has been named the first certified humane veal farm in the country—400 Gloucester Old Spot hogs (orchard pigs), 2,000-plus chickens and perhaps 1,000 turkeys (in season). In any given month, she said they probably only slaughter around a dozen steers, lamb and veal calves.

Hunter’s Head’s organic meatloaf makes mouths happy / Photography by James Kim

Lerner stressed that they raise and slaughter all the poultry delivered to Hunter’s Head and the Farm Store right at Ayrshire. The farm also produces the brunt of the pork (save for the some bacon) and supplies the majority of the beef (some purchases outsourced to other local humane/rare breeds cattlemen), while lamb is purchased from neighboring Over the Grass Farm, and sustainable seafood is acquired as needed.

“We are able to quit buying from the commercial suppliers as the breed stock on the farm is now at a level that we can fulfill the majority of our needs,” Lerner said of the blossoming farm-to-fork project, her first hospitality venture ever.

Her commitment to humanely raised meats and heritage breeds means that if they run out of something, it’s simply pulled from the Hunter’s Head menu. Sure enough, stragglers who wander in toward the end of the dinner rush tend to be greeted by “Sold Out” warnings scrawled atop the daily list of featured items, whereas the kitchen crew tracks their own dwindling stocks by ticking off depleted specials on their “86 board of doom.”

The pub menu features most of their dining staples (a Welsh rarebit fashioned from swirled cheese, beer and onions; homemade burgers accompanied by an absolutely thrilling British mustard), while the “farm table” board chronicles seasonal offerings ranging from crab Florentine soup to asparagus, pimento and brie tarts to cinnamon-roll bread pudding.

Hunter’s Head keeps the food specials fresh, the decor rustic / Photography by James Kim

Lerner said their fish-and-chips plate remains their reigning champion (seven years and counting) in terms of total sales, with the Ayrshire burger logging in at second place (also seven years running). Other local favorites include: baked chicken, pot roast, Guinness beef stew and veal scaloppine.

“We have customers who come just for the organic beef liver and onions,” she said of one age-old standard long since dashed from most conventional menus.

Though certainly nostalgic, the menu does make room for fresh interpretations.

Baskets of crusty, sour dough-like pub bread (produced by an artisan baker in Maryland but “finished” in the Hunter’s Head ovens) flanked by tins of sweet cream butter prove hard to resist—even for veteran staff. “It reminds me every morning, when I try to put on my pants, how much I really like this bread,” one bartender sheepishly admitted while rubbing his round belly.

Organic meatloaf summons an impressive hunka meat bolstered by carrots, onions and a tantalizing medley of heritage meats unfettered by any extraneous filler.

Piping hot turkey potpie sports a flaky biscuit crown that is more air-puffed buttermilk than cornbread rich. Beneath the surface reside gorgeous hunks of white-meat turkey, as well as carrots, onions and asparagus (quite prominent) sloshing around in a soothing cream broth.

And though the town probably boasts more retirees than new arrivals, Lerner said she gets her share of food-savvy young families that seem to understand the importance of rearing their own children on humanely raised foods.

“The Gen-Xers will spend a little more upfront on better food, as opposed to spending more later in health care and environmental restoration,” she said of the progressive eaters she sees filing into the dining room on any given night.

All reviews from March’s Farm Fresh >>

(March 2009)