| Aquaint new restaurant has opened about twenty minutes from town. While usually a new restaurant might not be a news-worthy event, Eggleston’s Palisdes’ location in veritable ghost town makes it notable.
Fifteen minutes west on 460 there is an easily missed curvy country road that leads down to the river, across a bridge probably seen as frequently by those touring by kayak, tube, and canoe as non-locals out for a drive in the country, there is an easily-missed railroad town once known as Eggleston’s Springs. At some point in history, there was a train station where passengers could catch a horse-drawn carriage up to the Mountain Lake resort five miles away. Nowadays, there is a vacant ice cream parlor that looks like it came out of a coffee table book on the Old West, a few empty storefronts, a couple homes, and the now re-occupied location of a classic glass-front brick general store. And this is the location where owner Shaena Muldoon has chosen to offer her gourmet vision of a locally-centered restaurant. Overlooking the river and immediately adjacent to the still functioning Norfolk Southern freight line, the restaurant has plenty of exterior ambiance. Inside, Muldoon has done a fantastic job of converting the old store into a homey, yet classy eating environment. The pressed tin ceilings have been repaired, the floors refinished, and the shelving on the walls has been cleaned and re-painted. There are some new lighting fixtures in the ceiling that stand out as a bit too modern in contrast to the antique cash-register and the vintage-styled carpentry throughout. And the bathrooms are truly an adventure: antique basin sinks are complimented by vaulted ceilings and a black bronze locking mechanism that is a bit more like a trap than a way to insure privacy. A trap? Every person at my table got temporarily stuck trying to figure out how to open the lock, which appears to be a simple slider, but requires an unusual outward motion to operate. The head cook, James, stopped by our table to relate the story of a young girl who got stuck in the bathroom on opening night and started screaming until someone came to instruct her on the proper operation of the door. When I visited on Tuesday, January 27, just three days after opening day, the menu was still fairly limited; however, some of the food available was delicious, to say the least. And given that I first heard of this restaurant from local organic farmer Bert Webster of Stonecrop Farms, who had been approached about supplying gourmet greens during the growing season, the future has a lot of culinary promise in Eggleston. |