Top Italian dining in Virginia Horse Country

Beyond the tangle of the Northern Virginia suburbs, outside the sweeping horse farms of Middleburg, tucked away in the tiny hamlet of The Plains, is a rambling country restaurant whose interior features the sort of hewn heart pine you just can’t find anymore. Inside, Lydia gestures at a small pot of purple, pink, and white dahlias sitting inside the front entrance. 

“Mrs. Duvall brought those yesterday,” she says.

Mrs. Duvall would be Luciana Pedraza, the wife of celebrated actor Robert Duvall; the couple are local residents and regular customers. Lydia is Lydia Patierno, hostess of Girasole, the country restaurant that she and her husband, Chef Lou Patierno, have owned and operated together for 20 years. 

Girasole—Italian for sunflower—is an example of a vanishingly rare, and indeed vanishing, thing: a restaurant run by a husband and wife team that delivers the sort of masterfully crafted food and congenial hospitality you might hope to find in, say, a trattoria in a Tuscan village.

Which would be entirely fitting, because Girasole is a fully Italian affair, a consequence of Lou and Lydia’s heritage and his dozen years cooking at Tiberio, the legendary Washington, D.C., restaurant that put fine Italian dining on the capital’s map back when all the white tablecloths were spread in French dining rooms. Their Italian connections remain fresh: In addition to family visits, Lydia leads small groups of customers on trips to explore various regions of Italy.

This all got started when Lou, an indifferent student of English and history at Villanova, decided to spend a year abroad with an aunt in Ferrara, Italy. 

By day he studied the renowned Byzantine mosaics of nearby Ravenna. But he was also exposed to the food of the Emilia-Romagna region in Northern Italy—its distinctive Prosciutto di Parma, its famed Parmigiano-Reggiano cheeses. His aunt took him to small village restaurants and friends’ homes where they would cook all afternoon.

Lou recalls all this with a smile as he stands in Girasole’s dining room on a sunny autumn afternoon. He’s wearing chef’s whites, his name embroidered above the breast. He’s relaxed; he’s just finished preparing the strawberry pastry dessert in the downstairs kitchen, and the sous chef has the short rib filling for tonight’s ravioli under control.

When young Lou got back home, he wound up pivoting from one art to another, from mosaics to gastronomy. He enrolled in the Culinary Institute of America, the nation’s foremost training ground in cookery. There, he met Lydia.

Various adventures ensued. There was Lydia’s cooking job with a famed German chef, and Lou’s stint at the Rolling Rock Club, playground for the impossibly wealthy Mellon and Scaife families. After they came to Washington and Lou got hired at Tiberio, Lydia got a job at the Watergate Hotel, where she learned the hospitality end of the business. 

Later, she and Lou opened Panino, an Italian restaurant in Manassas, with Lou in the kitchen and Lydia out front.  

All that experience in hospitality accrues to the benefit of Girasole’s customers. Lydia exudes the combination of cheer, grace, and the ability to multitask that marks a master of the front of the house. She seems to know most guests by name, their preferred tables, their favorite drinks. 

“They start as customers,” she says, “but they become friends.” 

Of course, it’s easier to make friends when you serve the kind of food Lou cooks. He retains a dedication to homemade-from-scratch everything that is almost unheard of these days. He bakes his own bread. He makes all the desserts, including gelato. 

There are three cooks on the line for a restaurant that seats 150. One of those cooks is Lou, and the personal commitment pays off. 

First, that bread: The crust is crackly brown; chunks the size of postage stamps snap off onto the plate. The crumb inside is soft and tender. 

More crunch: carciofi alla giudìa, fried artichoke hearts, are light and crisp. A bruschetta appetizer features slices of caramelized Pennsylvania peach draped with Iberico lardo, a nearly sheer scrim of cured pork fat. It’s an amazement of crunchy, bright, sweet, unctuous, piggy goodness.  

The ravioli is filled with taleggio, a mild cow’s milk cheese from Lombardy, the kind of imported Italian speciality product that keeps the cuisine authentic. Alongside are some beautiful chanterelles, which had been sourced from Washington state but, I can report, are worth the carfare. 

I could go on, but will offer just one more dining observation. About the costolette di maiale gratinate, a breaded, locally raised pork cutlet served with a handful of morels and a brandy cream sauce, my wife said this: “That is the best single bite of food I have ever put in my mouth.”

Lou and Lydia have three children, ranging in age from 31–38. All have worked in the business. Apparently it’s a kind of obligatory internship if you want to matriculate through the Patierno family. While two have moved on, Gabriella, 34, has stuck with the program, engaging in every part of the operation that isn’t the kitchen. She’s a server and the beverage director; she helps develop the weekly specials menu and handles the website and marketing. 

When she was a student of art history and Italian at Duquesne University, Gabriella studied abroad in Rome—she took her dad to the city’s Jewish ghetto, where he learned about those fried artichokes. She was in Italy for two years, including three months at a Piedmont winery. It all prepared her to work on the specials menus and wine list. She sometimes nags her father to put a dish on the menu until he relents. 

I asked what she admired most about her mother.

“She has a way of charming people,” Gabriella says. “I have started calling her ‘the most interested woman.’ She is so wholeheartedly interested in what you have to say. She asks you questions because she genuinely wants to know the answer. It’s incredible.”

And her father? 

“He still loves his job. He is passionate about food. If he was tired, if it was the end of the night, and someone came in late, he would still never just throw something on the plate to be done and go home. No matter what, the food has to be right.” GirasoleVa.com

This article originally appeared in the February 2025 issue.