At a new restaurant in Marshall, everybody knows your name.
Neal and Star Wavra with their daughters Ada, 6, and Fia, 3.
Photos by Ryan Haury
The bar at Field and Main.
The dining room at Field and Main.
Ember warmed oysters.
Trickling Springs mac and cheese.
Whiffletree Farm chickens cook in the wood-burning hearth at Field and Main.
To walk through the front door of the new restaurant Field & Main is to travel back in time, to an age when “all of the old roads used to run from the fields to Main Street,” says proprietor Neal Wavra, “bringing the bounty of the farms to town.”
Wavra opened his new restaurant last August in Marshall, an unincorporated rural community in Fauquier County, with his wife and business partner Star. He says they wanted to create “a casual atmosphere where the community can gather and meet with friends and neighbors and producers.”
The Wavras restored the nearly 200-year-old building with a blend of the historic and the modern. Multiple dining rooms upstairs and downstairs, and the bar—where a photo taken by Molly Peterson of Heritage Hollow Farms in Sperryville of her ram “Brian” covers the rear wall—create intimate spaces for dining and conversation. Decorated in subtle tones, the idea, says Wavra, “is to create a relatively subdued canvas where the food and guests can provide the color.”
Wavra became familiar with the area and the food community during a 4-year stint as innkeeper and sommelier at the nearby Ashby Inn. Today, he has leveraged his local farm relationships to create a simple yet elegant and sustainable menu. Chef Anthony Nelson—with whom Wavra studied at the Culinary Institute of America—oversees a custom built wood-burning hearth that enables multi-tiered cooking of chickens, roasts and local rockfish.
Field & Main sources its sustainably raised pork from a unique partnership with Middleburg Montessori School, where students raise the Duroc/Berkshire pigs, providing fresh meat every other week. Other nearby producers on the menu include Martin’s Farms in The Plains and Whiffletree Farm in nearby Warrenton. Early Mountain Vineyards in Madison provides wines by the glass to supplement a small but far-reaching and thoughtful wine list that includes selections from Virginia’s RdV, Boxwood, Veritas and Linden wineries, among others.
Starters include a sorghum berry risotto, an Anson Mills farro salad and a Buffalo-style crispy pig ear. Entrées are cooked over the hearth fire and range from a simple roasted half chicken to a more decadent ribeye steak with foie gras sauce (a delicata squash with roasted vegetables satisfies the no-meat set).
To support their “whole animal philosophy” the couple also opened a Chicago-style sandwich shop next door (a nod to Wavra’s years in the windy city working for the iconic Charlie Trotter), Riccordino’s, which uses the animal bits not served at Field & Main. Says Wavra, “Chops, loins and steaks stay here, and the rest goes next-door for meatballs, sausage and shaved beef sandwiches.” FieldAndMainRestaurant.com
