Eastville Manor

	Eastville Manor Eastville, VA on the Eastern Shore - Map Telephone: 757.678.7378 E-Mail: info@eastvillemanor.com Website: www.eastvillemanor.com Owners: William and Melody Scalley Hours: Wednesday through Saturday from 5:30 to 9 p.m. Lunch is served during Garden Week in April. Closed in January. (For lunch try Sting-rays, dubbed "Chez Exxon" because of its location in a gas station. It has a walk-up counter that offers fresh seafood and an $8 bottle of French chardonnay.) Price Range: Three-course dinner runs about $25-30 per person, plus wine, tax and tip. Liquor: Wine and beer. Children: No special menu, but there’s usually a pasta dish. Credit Cards: Master Card and Visa Dress: Casual. Smoking: No Handicap accessible: Yes Lodging: The Manor rents two large bedrooms, each with a double whirlpool bath, at $160 a night. About 10 minutes away, in Cape Charles, are several equally good and less expensive bed and breakfasts, such as the Cape Charles House and the Wilson-Lee House. Budget accommodations are available at non-chain motels along Rt. 13. Directions: From I-64 east to Norfolk, east on Northampton Boulevard (Rt. 13), cross the Bay Bridge-Tunnel ($10 toll) then 16 miles north on Rt. 13. Pass the first Eastville sign (pointing left) and turn right at second cross road, onto Willow Oak Road. A two and one-half hour drive from Richmond. Nearby sights: Start with the town of Eastville itself, the seat of Northampton County, whose courthouse contains the oldest continuous records in the U. S.; Oyster, an authentic, aptly-named fishing village where the Scalleys buy seafood; Eyre Hall, a 1735 house that has been in the same family for 14 generations, and whose gardens are open free year-round. Helpful Reading: "Off 13," $15 at Rayfields Pharmacy in Cape Charles.

When William and Melody Scalley opened Eastville Manor on Virginia’s Eastern Shore, they discovered that some mapmakers and television weather forecasters omit that part of the state, or show it as part of Maryland.

Now nearly four years later, however, Eastville Manor is solidly on the culinary map of the entire East Coast, thanks to Bill’s skill in the kitchen and Melody’s work in the garden.

They have converted Eastville Manor, a 135-year-old frame Victorian house in a Northampton County hamlet of 108 souls into arguably the best dining establishment on the Eastern Shore, and one of the best in the state.

Meals at Eastville Manor are served Wednesday through Saturday night in two or three rooms that feature curtained, floor-to-ceiling windows, refinished wood floors and wall sconces. The white linen tablecloths are set with blue-and-white china and fresh flowers. On a busy Saturday night, 50 people can be served; most nights the crowd is closer to 20 to 30 diners.

Despite the homey atmosphere, don’t expect to be served fried chicken, dark gravy and overcooked vegetables. Eastville Manor isn’t one of those quaint country inns that will remind you of your grandmother’s Sunday suppers, unless Grandma’s alma mater was Johnson and Wales.

This man Bill Scalley can cook. It’s a shame Eastville Manor isn’t open on Sunday, because it would make for a wonderful daytime drive. It’s about a two and one-half hour drive from Richmond. At first, Bill and Melody served Sunday dinners and weekday lunches, but they found that rigorous schedule left them exhausted at week’s end.

Entrees range from $16 to $22; soups and salads are about $6, and appetizers $5 to $8. The dishes you won’t forget include corn fritters with chili mayo, lump crab cakes in a lime scallion sauce, scallops and Smithfield ham in puff pastry, bacon-wrapped mahi mahi, and beef tenderloin in a blue cheese reduction sauce.

The menu changes about every six weeks, but what remains constant are the emphasis on locally grown or caught food and Bill’s artistry in the kitchen. Melody’s touch is evident also. In addition to patrolling the dining rooms, she cultivates herbs—"rosemary grows as tall as me," she said—and flowers. Beyond the 100-year-old boxwoods that rim the house, she has planted 10,000 bulbs and 2,000 perennials. The spacious vegetable garden has 10 varieties of tomatoes.

The New York Times has called Eastville Manor "a surprisingly sophisticated place to find in an out-of-the-way spot" and its apple pie "world-class."

Travel and Leisure Magazine said "the mansion’s flower-filled front lawn is lovely, but it’s what happens in the kitchen that counts. Guests rave, inn owners call to thank, and more than a few well-traveled city slickers admit that their dinner here was among the best they’ve had, anywhere."

Last August, the Scalleys took their show on the road for a night, when Bill was invited to cook at the James Beard House in Manhattan, an honor reserved for the nation’s finest chefs. With the help of several Eastville neighbors, Bill and Melody trooped north with two trucks bearing still squirming sea trout and softshell crabs caught by local watermen and herbs and flowers plucked from Melody’s garden.

Most chefs invited to cook at Beard’s brownstone in Greenwich Village arrive with their own sous and pastry chefs and assorted assistants. But Bill and Melody, who ordinarily serve diners with the help of two or three high school students, were accompanied by just three friends—a hairdresser from Baltimore, a neighbor from Eastville and an intern cook, plus help from a New York friend who is a dining executive with Marriott.

They labored in the tiny Beard kitchen for 15 hours, producing a five-course dinner with accompanying wine that won praise from the 73 diners, who had paid $95 a plate to benefit the James Beard Foundation.

You can come close to sampling the Beard dinner the third Thursday of every month, at a five-course wine tasting dinner that costs $55 a person.

Those evenings begin with a stand-up champagne party in one of the house’s three dining rooms. With an average dinner attracting 20 to 30 people, the event quickly takes on the atmosphere of a private party. After a couple glasses of champagne, and an assortment of passed appetizers, some of the guests wind up sharing tables.

The most recent wine dinner began with trays of dates in bacon, smoked salmon, miniature crab cakes and corn fritters, eased down by a Grand Laurent Brut Blanc de Blanc from France.

Once the guests were seated, the meal was kicked off with a crawfish bisque with leaks and corn in a tarragon cream sauce, accompanied by a 1997 Pinto Gris from the King Estate in Oregon.

A salad of a terrine of beets, turnips and flavored oils and mixed greens came with a 1996 Reserve Sauvignon Blanc from the Simi Sendal winery in the Sonoma Valley.

To prepare for the transition to the entrée, Scalley offered a gingered tangerine-mango sorbet that was as lovely to look at as it was to eat—served atop a hollowed out tangerine.

The entrée was Beef Wellington, a tenderloin encased in pastry and surrounded by pate, which was served with green beans, shiitake mushrooms, oven dried tomatoes and garlic-chive mashed potatoes in a Madeira sauce. The wine was a 1996 California Merlot from Clos Pegase.

Dessert was apple, pecan and raisin pie, with an oatmeal-brown sugar topping, and homemade praline ice cream and caramel sauce. The final libation was a Dom Brial 1996 Muscat de Rivesaltes from the south of France.

High praise for Bill’s cooking isn’t limited to professional food critics. Two patrons who signed a registry volunteered rave reviews when I phoned them.

"It’s incredible, fabulous," said Michael O’Neal, a Richmond art teacher who with his wife, Marlee, celebrated their first wedding anniversary there, and has returned for a second visit.

"The crab cakes were phenomenal, huge, and beautifully presented," O’Neal said. "There was nothing on the plate that wasn’t delicious. For the price, it’s definitely worth a trip across the tunnel."

Anne Urban, a Glen Allen resident who works in a dental office, seconded O’Neal’s view that the crab cakes are "superb."

Urban, whose daughter lives on the shore, calls Eastville Manor "my favorite place." She eats there half a dozen times a year, including an annual lunch during Garden Week.

"What he does with vegetables," Urban cooed, "And the duck breast, which is something I wouldn’t ordinarily order." Finally, she said, there is the crème brulee. "Oh my gosh, to die for."

Nearly everyone who has tasted Bill’s cooking agrees with Melody that "he’s a fabulous cook," yet her modest husband says "I still don’t know" if he can cook.

The tall, lanky Scalley’s love for restaurants began early. An uncle operated a restaurant in Washington, and his dad kept the books for him. So beginning at around age 10, young Bill, now 43, hung out there. His dad died when he was 15, and Bill, the second of five children, quit school and found a job as a dishwasher and busboy in downtown D. C. The next year, Bill moved up to waiting tables at a popular sidewalk café, where he gradually worked his way into the kitchen.

Then came six years at the Mayflower Hotel, where he assisted a French chef at banquets. He learned soups and sauces at the Four Seasons Hotel in Georgetown, and got his first shot as a head chef at Chardonnay in the Park Terrace Hotel in downtown D. C.

It was there that he met Melody, a native of New Orleans who got into the hotel business "because all I ever wanted to do was travel." She got her wish, with jobs in five-star hotels from Houston to Vail. But her travels ended when she landed at the front desk at the Park Terrace and saw Bill.

"Is the chef married?" she inquired her first day there. The question went unanswered for three months, until she hounded her boss to peek into his personnel file. Given the right answer, she marched into the kitchen and invited him to have a drink that night.

The shy chef and the outgoing hotelier were a natural match, and they married shortly thereafter.
Bill’s next stop was at City Café, an offshoot of the trendy Nora’s Restaurant. Next came six years of dividing his time between catering from his home and remodeling homes, a trade that came in handy when he moved to the shore.

After a while, the two city dwellers began to long for a slower pace in a quieter place. Melody, who sells real estate on the side, suggested the Eastern Shore, which to Washingtonians, and most non-Virginians, means Maryland and Delaware, even though the Delmarva Peninsula takes its name from three states.

But they were a generation late to be pioneers: Ocean City and the beach towns had their own traffic jams, and quaint Maryland villages such as St. Michael’s were out of their price range. Then a mortgage broker friend suggested they look on Virginia’s sparsely populated Eastern Shore.

The house in Eastville, flanked by 100-year-old boxwoods and dotted with gardenias and forsythia, was only the second one they looked at on the Virginia shore. They agreed it could be converted into a restaurant without harming its architectural integrity, which had been preserved for more than a century by its only two owners.

Melody stayed behind in Washington selling real estate, to pay the mortgage (they paid about $200,000 for the property and put another $175,000 into it), while Bill put his remodeling experience to work on the house, restoring the floors to their original luster, painting, plastering, wiring and fixing up two large bedrooms and baths for overnight guests.

After nine months of frantic work, they opened for business in April, 1996, on Melody’s birthday.

This review originally appeared in 64 magazine in January-February, 2000.