Olive Tree Café in South Charleston makes traditional Mediterranean food with no apologies. When traditional foods go mainstream, compromise usually follows. Pho gets a little less spicy. Meatballs balloon in size. Sometimes, intimidating dishes disappear altogether—you’d be hard-pressed to find shark fin soup at your local Chinese buffet. More chefs are refusing to conform to the status quo, however, and…
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Jackson County’s Safari Meats is bringing venison to a butcher shop near you. For almost two decades, Mark and Anita Cobb fought a battle with regulators to be able to sell their farm-raised venison within West Virginia’s borders. Now, more than a year after the Legislature passed a bill making such sales legal, their Ravenswood based Safari Meats LLC has…
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Mark Soukup of Monroe County has been handmaking furniture in the tradition of the finest cabinetmakers for three decades. For those of us who’ve heard of a Windsor chair but aren’t quite clear what it is, chairmaker Mark Soukup makes it plain: “It’s just something that has a solid wood seat with sticks coming out of the top and sticks coming…
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The founders of Spring Gap Mountain Creamery escaped city life to find a tasty gourmet niche. When Penelope Sagawa and Jurgen Schelzig began making raw milk cheese back in 2009, they had no idea “raw milk” would become a hot topic in West Virginia seven years later. They couldn’t know that raw milk, which some claim is healthier than pasteurized…
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The success of a tiny subterranean theater in Buckhannon has inspired another in Charleston. When potter Kate Harward moved to Belington 40 years ago from Washington, D.C., she missed being able to see hard-hitting independent, documentary, and international films. She began traveling to events such as the Toronto International Film Festival in order to indulge her habit. Then the Lascaux…
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