At the Intersection of Eat Local and Good Taste
Sustainability invigorates a historic small-town store in Virginia.

By David Hagedorn
Special to The Washington Post
Wednesday, October 8, 2008

MILLWOOD, Va. -- Before Juliet Mackay-Smith bought the Locke Modern Country Store six years ago, the owners' idea of "modern" was selling bait and hardware along with bologna sandwiches and dry goods.

Mackay-Smith interprets the word a little differently. Sure, she has turned the gathering spot 70 miles west of Washington into a combination coffee bar, wine shop, bakery, deli and grocery store. Sure, the freckle-faced, jeans-clad 46-year-old has become a rural version of Ina Garten or Martha Stewart. But more important: With the store as the backdrop, she is the linchpin of a hyper-local network of sustainable food production.

Just off Route 50 in this Clarke County village, Mackay-Smith is selling locally produced food; holding regular tastings of affordably priced wines (including many from Virginia); working on a cookbook; trying to produce a line of dressings, chutneys and sauces; and refurbishing the building next door so it can become a restaurant.

That's when she's not overseeing her 130-acre farm 10 miles away in White Post, where she tends her horses and, with her husband, raises two teenage daughters.

The town, like the store owner, is unassuming and charming. Among the few structures there other than Locke are an antiques store open "by chance or appointment" and a restored, water-wheel-powered grain mill that dates to George Washington's time.

Mismatched picnic furniture and pitchers of sweet tea someone hasn't brought in yet rest on the front porch of Mackay-Smith's neatly painted clapboard shop. When you walk into Locke, which occupies a site where a general store has operated since 1836, a door chime signals your arrival and someone looks over to offer a greeting without fail.

A look around the 1,800-square-foot space takes in good things to eat and drink in every nook and cranny: local honeys, apple juice and vinegar; coffee roasted in Rappahannock County; hot sauce made in homemade barrels; bloody mary mix; dairy products in glass bottles from an all-natural, certified organic creamery in Pennsylvania. Mackay-Smith's mother even gets into the act with a terrific tomato ginger marmalade and those pitchers of "Wizzie's" sweet tea. The store's cases and shelves speak of history.

Mindy Biddle, 46, handles most of the cooking duties, with a particularly deft hand at baked goods. Her tart and pastry crust is durable yet delicate, not an easy balance to strike. Double chocolate chip and snickerdoodle cookies and peppermint patty brownies never stick around there long. The apple cake and gingerbread cake are irresistibly moist.

And then there are the wines. Mackay-Smith handles the program, always making an effort to educate herself, always looking for value. A dry-erase board lists more than 70 bottles under $15.

"Juliet has a great eye for quality," says wine distributor Fran Kysela. "She has the ability to discern real value and seek out the interesting. If she were an art critic, she'd be a good one. Some people have that talent and some don't."

Mackay-Smith's talent showed itself at a young age. She remembers her love affair with food beginning at age 9, when she first inverted a cast-iron pan to reveal a glistening pineapple upside-down cake. "The moment of doing that will always be magical to me," she says.

Though her mother was, and is, a good cook, Mackay-Smith didn't refine her cooking skills until just after college in Boston; for a year and a half, she worked for high-end caterer Alison Healy of Creative Celebrations, taking to the business quickly.

Her commitment to sustainability began when she moved to Clarke County more than 20 years ago. Her father had grown up there, and she knew it would be a perfect place to raise a family and connect with the land. Mackay-Smith began growing her own produce and raising poultry and hogs. She and other community growers formed a farmers market that still operates.

During the formative years of daughters Isabel and Ellie (now 17 and 15, respectively), Mackay-Smith developed recipes for the chutneys, sauces, pickles and preserves she routinely put up. She also started a catering business that helped her amass a large local clientele, especially "over the mountain" in Winchester and Leesburg.

Her parties apparently were legendary. Store manager Peggy Simon remembers a game-themed bash for 375 people that Mackay-Smith threw for wine distributor Kysela.

"Rack of yak, squirrel, wild boar, kangaroo," Simon says. "You name it; we had it. I don't think she had even made any of those things before, but she pulled it off. It was theater."

Mackay-Smith dropped the off-site catered affairs about 18 months ago because they distracted from the rest of the business. But Locke offers a handsome assortment of takeout party foods for at-home entertaining, all made in the store's humming, cozy kitchen: terrines, dips, spreads, focaccia, savory tarts, sundry salads, sandwiches, boxed lunches, dinner/lunch/brunch entrees, vegetable and starch sides, baked goods, etc. The in-store deli and bakery cases hold soup, lunch and dinner features that change daily.

One key to making Locke work -- and keeping prices low -- has been Mackay-Smith's insistence on hiring others who are as committed to sustainability as she is. At last, she says, everything is coming together. "People are getting it, this thing about supporting local business and knowing where your food comes from. I have a really good mix of people who are passionate in their roles but understand that we need to be working toward an entire system."

Take Simon, 60, who has managed the store for five years. Before that she owned Stoneground, a natural-foods store in Middletown. "My whole life is either growing food, cooking it, selling it or talking about it," she says. "I'm obsessed."

That's why she doesn't mind stopping regularly at the orchards, berry farms and fruit stands along the 30-mile route from her home in Strasburg to the store in Millwood. It's Simon who finds most of the local foods on the store's shelves. But until a few years ago, she says, it was difficult figuring out how to get them without driving to the producers' houses. "Everyone is so into the sustainable now that we were starting to worry how we were going to make all this happen, but it's happening," she says.

Now producers deliver to them, but it has taken three decades for that piece of the eat-local puzzle to fall into place. Joel Salatin, the famous owner of Polyface Farm in Swoope, led the way when he started making deliveries to Front Royal, 18 miles away from Millwood.

These days, Dave Farinholt, who once worked with Salatin, uses the same methods as Salatin to raise 300 Cornish Cross meat chickens on 10 acres he leases on Mackay-Smith's farm.

Doug and Lois Aylestock, who own Blue Ridge Meats, a USDA processing facility in Front Royal, represent another piece in Mackay-Smith's farm-to-plate puzzle.

The Aylestocks have a working relationship with pig farmers and a beef farmer and raise their own lambs. They slaughter the animals, then cut them to Mackay-Smith's specifications, vacuum pack them and deliver weekly to Locke, where some of the cuts are sold from a freezer case out front and the rest are used in prepared foods. Chili is a big item at the store, and that is a good thing when you have 600 pounds of ground beef per steer to use up.

Simon has a soft spot for her growers, and Sally Bolton, a farmer in nearby Middleburg, is her favorite. "She was the first person to deliver to me," Simon says. "She has the most beautiful vegetables I've ever had. It's a joke around here that I wax poetic about little turnips. But I just think she has taken it to a real art form."

Bolton, who calls Simon and Mackay-Smith visionaries, says her first priority is her local clients, because they make it easier to fulfill her goal of only 10 to 12 hours from field to table.

"One silly thing I do: I determined a long time ago to sell to people who were on the daily travel routes of my employees so we didn't make a special trip," she says. "It eliminates a lot of transportation expense, a lot of carbon footprint problems, because you are not burning up fossil fuel to get the product to the customer."

As Mackay-Smith and company know, that's about as modern as you can get.

David Hagedorn, chef and former restaurateur, writes the Food section's Chef on Call column. He can be reached at food@washpost.com. Locke Modern Country Store, 2049 Millwood Rd., Millwood, Va., 540-837-1275, http://www.lockestore.com.