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A South You Never Ate at Chatham Vineyards on Oct. 28 will celebrate the foodways of Virginia’s Eastern Shore along with the culture and stories behind them. This progressive dinner of all tapas includes an open bar with Eastern Shore beer and Chatham wine and a signature surprise cocktail. Eleven chefs have committed their time to crafting two dishes apiece for the small plates that will showcase some of the Shore’s most distinct ingredients.
This is another in our Meet the Chefs series that will introduce an all-star lineup of creative cooks who have committed their time to make this an unforgettable farm-to-table experience.
The scoop on Ross Riddle
His bio in a nutshell: “As a chef, I think of myself and my cooking as Virginia grown yet globally informed, starting with life abroad in places like Korea as a military kid. My cooking is ever evolving through collaborations, wanderlusts and culinary curiosity. With 25 years of experience in the kitchen, pulling from my love of Japanese, Italian, Latin American and our regional Tidewater foodways, I have cooked in many diverse settings, from a rustic format over roaring fires for sequestered dinners to the James Beard House in Greenwich Village and everything in between! For the last six years I have operated HASHi Chow, my once food truck (2014-17) turned pop-up and private food experience operation, in addition to my newly birthed raw fish centric pop-up ACID FISH.
What Ross loves about Eastern Shore food, culture: “Prior to working alongside Amy Brandt for one of her Amy B catering endeavors in Wachapreague, I did not have much of a picture of the Shore, save for a 1990 marine biology camp field trip to Cherrystone Aqua-Farms and Battery Winslow. I became acquainted with Jon and Mills when they launched Chatham and came into Todd Jurich’s Bistro for us to taste their wine sometime around 2005. Through the relationship with Amy and her rooted relationships (although she’ll humbly tell you, ‘I’m a come here, not a from here.’) with farmers, fishermen and food historians (formal and informal) like Bernie, I garnered a deep admiration for the ‘land of unknown potential’ across the water from my Virginia Beach outpost!
“Over the years, I have really enjoyed and loved the escape and clarity traveling to the shore gives me, leaving my usual life at one end of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel and picking up a newer version on the Eastern Shore of Virginia side. Through Amy, as well as Virginia Beach’s Old Beach Farmers Market, I formed relationships with Mattawoman Farms’ Rick and Janice, Shooting Point Oyster Company’s Tom and Annie Gallivan and Jenna and Casey Hunt of Seafield Farm (who were already friends of mine prior to their settling there). I’ve enjoyed having my food truck at Chatham (furthering relations with Jon and Mills) and countless catering gigs with Amy, two of which were collaborative menus that looked to evoke or inspire what specifically Shore cooking is, what it can be and how it can be expanded upon to include more in the community.”
His favorite Eastern Shore ingredients are … a rainbow of Chesapeake fish varietals, lesser known abroad “exotics” like puffer toads/sea squab, clams, oysters, Hog Island mutton, the vast variety of old fig trees, Hayman sweet potatoes and the long-standing historical culture of fruits and vegetable of the Chesapeake region as a whole.