Meet the Virginia Chef Lifting Up Appalachian Cuisine

Elevated is a word executive chef David Rabin frequently uses to describe the Appalachian-inspired comfort cuisine he’s slinging at Caboose Tavern.

At the rugged farm-to-table pub in an industrial section of downtown Vienna, Virginia, Rabin serves up “wild game stuff,” such as braised wild boar with cheesy hominy corn, blistered heirloom cherry tomatoes, charred baby corn, fresh cilantro, and cilantro oil. His venison burger comes with Goot Essa cheddar, sliced romaine, barleywine onion jam, secret sauce and a dill pickle spear.    

He calls the cuisine “elevated” because, in his view, it’s a step up from what one would typically eat at a pub. Rabin, though, is also trying to counter negative stereotypes about people and food from the Appalachian region of the United States.

“They’re a resourceful, resilient people, and their food is something that if people took away their preconceived notions early on, they probably would have adopted a lot of the food culture that they have,” said Rabin, who has worked there for four years.

The rural Appalachian region stretches across 13 states and spans 206,000 square miles, from southern New York to northern Mississippi, according to the Appalachian Regional Commission, a federal economic development agency that serves the region. The region’s 25.7 million residents live in parts of Alabama, Georgia, Kentucky, Maryland, Mississippi, New York, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia, and in all of West Virginia. Eighty one percent of the people living there in 2019 were white, according to the commission.

After the Civil War, local media presented Appalachian people as quirky and quaint. But as industrialists started scouting the region for minerals, lumber and coal, the people living there were also seen as a potential threat to those economic plans, author Anthony Harkins says in the Hulu documentary Hillbilly.

“And so a new conception emerges of them as a dangerous and threatening people who might threaten civilisation itself,” Harkins says.

Local and national newspapers began spreading those dangerous stereotypes within their pages. Later on, cartoons, movies, television shows such as the Beverly Hillbillies, movies and the national news media jumped on the bandwagon. They pushed the narrative that people from this region were lazy, sexually promiscuous, savages — traits that have been historically attributed to people of colour living in the United States.

“This commitment to characterising a region as poor and illiterate helps to create this idea that the people there aren’t worth valuing,” Frank X. Walker, founder of a Black Appalachian poetry group called the Affrilachian Poets, says in the documentary. “And the space is not valuable, which means that coal companies come in and buy up everything and exploit the entire region.”

Which is exactly what happened.

Although important improvements have been made in crucial economic factors such as poverty, per capita income and high school graduation rates, the region, on average, still lags behind the rest of the United States in those areas.

Rabin isn’t from Appalachia. He’s from Rockville, a Maryland suburb of Washington, D.C. But his wife of four years, Kari, and her parents have ties to the Appalachian Mountains by way of Abingdon in southwest Virginia.

“That’s where I kind of fell in love with the Virginia side of Appalachia,” he said.

Rabin spent most of his career cooking New American cuisine.

His nearly 17 years of kitchen experience has taken him to several elite restaurants, including a year-long stint as chef de partie at San Francisco’s Michelin-starred Michael Mina restaurant. In Washington, D.C., Rabin worked at fine-dining establishments including Charlie Palmer Steak (as sous chef) and at Bourbon Steak inside the Four Seasons hotel (as chef de partie). Working at those spots helped Rabin hone his technique and develop a better understanding of ingredients.

“My philosophy on the whole fine-dining chasing was I wanted to learn how to do everything correctly and do it perfectly,” he said. “Just because I’m working at a brewery doesn’t mean I can’t use the same level of technique and care in my food. And also, usually people are surprised when we do it, because they don’t expect it.”

Rabin sees Appalachian food as “utilising what you can grow or forage in your area to sustain yourself.” A lot of it, he says, was dependent on extending the seasons through preservation methods.

“In some of those mountainous towns at the time, they didn’t have good highways, I mean they had the railroad, but they were just pass throughs or restock areas on coal or whatever to go to the major cities,” he says. “They were more disconnected from everything, so they had to be a little bit more resourceful.”

He’s seen people there cook small game, such as squirrel, possum and rabbit. And it wasn’t uncommon for families to get their eggs from a few of their chickens and kill one of the chickens every now and then for food.

Rabin selected wild boar for the tavern because all of the ingredients he prepares with it are indigenous to the region and the dish fits in with his efforts to elevate traditional dishes from Appalachia.

He launched the venison burger to capitalise on the popularity of the tavern’s venison steak.

“With the season changing, I wanted to do something with venison and then I thought about it and, technically, yes, venison hunting season is over, but if you were a hunter and you had venison, you would have already eaten all your prime cuts,” Rabin explained. “What you have left is sausages and ground meat — what you would probably eat if you ever hunted.”

Every so often, he’ll add what he calls a “wild card” dish to the mix. This season, it’s a braised pork belly appetiser. Rabin serves it with apple miso puree, pickled mustard seeds and charred kale.

“Miso’s not common in Appalachia, let’s be real,” Rabin says. “But apple butter is. Pickling things are. Braising things and curing things are. So add a little flair, elevate it.”

He studied sustainability at the now-closed New England Culinary Institute in Vermont, and learned first-hand from his wife and her family about Appalachian food culture — namely, that nothing goes to waste. He incorporates that knowledge at the tavern and sources 90 percent of its food from Virginia farms. Pickling and preserving also figures prominently at the tavern.

The outside world has taken notice. In 2019, the tavern earned a Snail Food’s Snail of Approval, a designation that recognises restaurants centred on ethical and local ingredients. Rabin puts more of a premium on the basics.

“Don’t get me wrong, I would love to get more awards and more notoriety and all that stuff,” he said. “But at the end of the day, if I can’t cook the food or get my staff and I to cook the food consistently and correctly and really have the vision that we share onto the plate and make it obvious to our guests, then it doesn’t matter how many awards you’ve got.”