Barboursville offers visitors a complete experience from wine to food to accommodations. Winemaker Luca Paschina is one of Virginia's leaders, specializing in Italian varietals. (The winery is owned by Zonin, an Italian wine family.) The property includes this excellent Italian restaurant, which serves lunch Wednesday through Sunday and dinner on Friday and Saturday. There's also a jewel box of an inn and the ruins of a building designed by Thomas Jefferson for James Barbour, governor of Virigina at the time and the person for whom the winery is named.
Downtown Grille is a surf-and-turf restaurant along the pedestrian mall in Charlottesville.
The Downtown Grille
201 W. Main St.
Charlottesville, VA 22902
Telephone: (434) 817-7080
Website: www.downtowngrille.com
Open: Dinner, Mon-Thu, 5-10; Fri-Sat, 5-11; Sun, 5-9
Cost: Entrées, $18 to $46
Located in the downtown mall, the Grille has the easy comfort you look for in a good steak house and bar, with a clubby atmosphere, private booths, and midwestern corn-fed beef sizzling in the open kitchen. It turns out the rest of what you'd expect in this genre: crisp wedges of iceberg topped with blue cheese, shrimp cocktail, fried calamari, chops and seafood. The wine list, with more than 180 bottlings, is stocked with reliables such as Silver Oak and Ridge. The restaurant also received a Wine Spectator Award of Excellence.
Guests dine at the Old Mill Room, which holds a Wine Spectator Award of Excellence.
The Old Mill Room at the Boar's Head Inn
200 Ednam Drive
Charlottesville, VA 22903
Telephone: (434) 972-2220
Website: www.boarsheadinn.com
Open: Breakfast, daily, 7-10:30; Lunch, Mon-Sat, 11:30-2; Dinner, Sun-Thu, 6-8:30; Fri-Sat, 6-9; Brunch, Sun, 11-2
Cost: Entrées, $27 to $36
Located in the Boar's Head Inn, this three-meals-a-day restaurant serves French-American fare and boasts a Wine Spectator Award of Excellence-winning wine list. It has more than 200 selections, focusing on wines from California, France and Virginia. The Old Mill Room dates to the 1830s, a historic structure that survived the burning rampages during the Civil War and continued to operate for 60 years after the war's end. For the past 22 years, it has been the epicurean center of the Boar's Head Inn.
For other Wine Spectator restaurant award winners in Virginia, including Charlottesville's C&O Restaurant, Silver Thatch Inn and The Melting Pot, see the Restaurant Search.
