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The
Lords Proprietors' Inn
There’s a homey atmosphere at the Lords Proprietors’ Inn that belies a corporate philosophy that has made the inn, and its guests-only restaurant, a perfect overnight getaway for sophisticated travelers up and down the East Coast. Don’t get the wrong idea. The inn is not a corporate endeavor. It was begun and is operated with meticulous but personal care by Arch and Jane Edwards, an uptown couple who blend their worldly experience with small town, yet not down-home, friendliness that makes a visit to the inn, and to the picture-perfect town in which it is located, a surefire getaway success. The Edwardses had no intention of operating an inn, much less a gourmet restaurant, when they opted out of their jet-set existence 20 years ago in favor of life in Edenton, whose claim to be "the South’s prettiest town" is not a Chamber of Commerce exaggeration. Although there are several other attractive bed-and-breakfasts in Edenton, population 5,000, if you want to taste the by-reservation-only fare of chef Kevin Yokley--and that’s worth the nearly three-hour trip from Richmond—you must stay overnight in one of the 18 rooms at the Lords Proprietors’ Inn. An Edenton zoning ordinance prohibits the Edwardses from operating a restaurant on the premises, but it does permit a membership club. Thus, all guests are "members" of the club. Local residents can "join" by paying a $25 lifetime membership, and about 75 couples in the area have done so. The inn opened in 1982, and served lavish breakfasts from the beginning, but began serving dinner only after the town’s best restaurant closed in 1992. For the last seven years, the food has been prepared by Yokley, a shy, cherubic 34-year-old who after completing a two-year culinary program at a community college in Asheville, apprenticed at Fearrington House Inn, a regionally renowned resort near Chapel Hill that hired him after graduation. During his two years at Fearrington House, as an assistant to its French-trained chef, Yokley learned the foundation for the food he calls "Southern regional with a French foundation" that he dishes up five nights a week, Tuesday through Saturday. My wife, Nancy, and I ate Yokley’s cooking on two successive nights this spring, and both times it was superb. Most nights, diners have a choice of two entrees and two desserts, but no choice of appetizer or salad. Our introduction to Yokley’s genius came in the form of lightly sautéed scallops sitting atop a mound of risotto chunk full of lobster. Then came the inn’s special salad, consisting of mixed fresh greens, spiced pecans and goat cheese with a hazelnut thyme vinaigrette, a combination worth making notes about how to replicate at home. Another version features arugula, dried blueberries, feta cheese and walnuts. For entrees, my wife chose a perfectly sautéed rockfish, simmered in a smoked tomato cream, while I went with a seared yellow tuna, just rare enough, with a tomato-red onion compote.
The entrees were a grilled marinated salmon with apple cream and lamb chops with onion bread pudding and a sweet and sour glace. Dessert was a choice of strawberry shortcake and a chocolate extravaganza, the latter a French country dish of a half-baked cake, gooey in the center and topped with chocolate sauce and whipped cream. Again we picked one of each and shared. Now that summer has arrived, Yokley has expanded the menu to draw on local fruits, vegetables and fish. Seafood specialities include fried oysters in a black-eyed pea relish, swordfish sprinkled with artichoke catsup, in which artichokes are braised in vinegar, black and garlic and reduced with a thick chicken stock, and lightly fried crabcakes taken from the nearby Albemarle Sound are accompanied by fried onions. Meat dishes include smoked pork tenderloin with cranberry onion chutney or apricot and Jerusalem artichoke relish; veal with a red pepper sauce, lamb with mango curry or dried cherry sauces; venison with morel sauce, and beef with a sauce of chanterelle mushrooms. A couple of innovative appetizers feature what at first glance appear to an odd coupling, of watermelon and tomatoes. But they both work. One is a slice of watermelon topped with marinated tomatoes and pistachio nuts, and the other is a compote of watermelon or cantaloupe, served with a relish-like layer of fresh tomatoes, dried cucumbers and thinly sliced basil leaves, topped by goat cheese and balsamic vinegar. Yokley makes all the desserts, including a gingerbread waffle with lavender ice cream, frozen mocha pie, key lime pie with lingonberry ice cream, banana fritters with cinnamon ice cream, fresh peaches with peach ice cream, apple tart with vanilla ice cream, blueberry and pumpkin cheesecakes, fresh berries in almond lace cup with vanilla ice cream and pumpkin cream brule. An a la carte menu is available for those who don’t want the full four courses. But unless you intend to eat very little, the full-course meal is a bargain. On the a la carte menu, appetizers are $10, salads $8, entrees $25 and desserts $10.
The accommodations at the Lords Proprietors Inn are as sumptuous as the food. Brand new are two suites, opened in late May, that feature wet bars and Jacuzzis. But there is little "ordinary" about the 16 single rooms. Repeat visitors to the inn all seem to have their favorites—each room has a book in which occupants are invited to record their comments. We stayed in Room 21, and agreed with the rave reviews it had gotten from previous visitors. All the rooms have private baths, sofas or several armchairs, TV and VCR, telephones, period antiques and reproduction furniture by a local cabinetmaker. (Check the website for pictures of the room-of-the-week.) The inn also welcomes business meetings. Arch and Jane have known each other nearly all their lives. They grew up five blocks apart in Tulsa, Oklahoma, were kindergarten classmates and double dated, but not with each other, during high school. But when Arch went off to Princeton and Jane stayed close to home at the University of Oklahoma, they lost track of each other for a while. After college, Jane moved to Boston where, after attending the Katherine Gibbs finishing school, she and with a girlfriend took secretarial jobs at Harvard, where she ran into Arch, who was at the Harvard Business School. The old friends quickly saw each other in a new way, and on Dec. 29, 1962, they returned to Tulsa just long enough to be married. Arch had been hired by McKinsey & Company, Inc., an international management consulting firm that sent him and his bride off on a whirlwind world tour during which they shuttled among homes in New York City, Melbourne, Australia, London, where their oldest child was born, and Washington. By age 43, Arch he had been richly rewarded for brokering such deals as the merger of two oil companies that saved the consolidated firms $100 million. All of that financial success was fine, Jane told Arch one night in 1978 during a dinner discussion about whether they should enclose the back porch of their home in Washington, but what did they want to do when they grew up? That’s when Jane proposed that they "do something completely different. Why don’t we find the prettiest house in the South and restore it." (In 1975, they had bought and restored Little River Farm, a plantation in Louisa County, Virginia.) The idea appealed to Arch, whose ancestors had migrated from the South to Oklahoma, so they set out on a series of weekend excursions that two years later landed them in Edenton. A few miles outside of town, on a site surrounded on three sides by water, they discovered "Mount Auburn," a 1750 colonial mansion that had been reduced to a shell. Arch cashed in his ownership share of McKinsey, and the family moved South. In a fury of building and remodeling over the next nine months, the Edwardses doubled the size of Mount Auburn and then moved in, only to be confronted again with the question, what now? After a career of 18-hour days, Arch found that he could take only so much walking in the woods and boating on the sound, however beautiful. So he enticed two friends who also had bought property near Edenton--a Rhodes Scholar who Arch had hired at McKinsey out of Oxford, and a Harvard pal who had become a Washington real estate magnate—to join him and a couple of Edenton visionaries to brainstorm on how they would make their next millions. They came up with a handful of get-richer-quick schemes: They leased a couple thousand acres to grow peat, with an eye to marketing it as fuel, took an option on a port in Wilmington, N. C. to export coal to Europe , and manufactured fish food from sweet potatoes. But they couldn’t convert the peat into burnable pellets; the export coal market dried up and, in what Arch calls "the great debacle," convinced a pet shop owner to allow them to put their fish food into his fish tank, whereupon the fish quickly went belly up. It was about that time that Arch and Jane learned that one of the grand homes on Edenton’s main street, the White-Bond House, was for sale. They bought it, and not too long afterwards two adjoining houses, and found themselves in a business enterprise that resembled Arch’s old occupation only in hours a day it required. Arch chose the unusual name for the inn after taking a class in North Carolina history shortly after arriving in Edenton. The Lords Proprietors were eight men who were rewarded by King Charles II for their help in overthrowing the Cromwells and retoring the House of Stuart to the throne in 17th century England by being given the title of lords and granted the proprietorship, or legal ownership, of the territory that became North and South Carolina. The proprietors never came to America, however, and their representatives so abused their rights that the crown withdrew the deal before the American Revolution. Entrepreneurs that they are, the Edwards also rent their 1752 Louisa County plantation, which features an elegant Georgian home, guest cottage, outdoor pool and two acres of grounds. This review originally appeared in 64 magazine in June, 2000. |
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The
second night began with a breast of quail with potato confetti, named
for what Yokley calls a "splat of colors" that result from
garnishing the garlicky mashed potatoes with strips of red pepper, green
peas and bacon.
There
is a small wine list, three reds and three whites ranging from $25 to
$33 a bottle, but again, the bargain is a $10 per person charge for open
service (all the house wine you want). We rated both the red and white
more than acceptable.