After a broken water pipe washed out its New Year’s debut, The Local Cut opens this week in Purcellville.
The restaurant offers something for everyone—those on the go, people looking for a sit-down meal, diners who crave a taste of secret family recipes and anyone who just wants to support local business and food.
The Local Cut is the brainchild of longtime restaurateur Chris Deatherage, who brought those big ideas to his first project opening his own restaurant in his hometown of Purcellville, in the Maple Avenue Shops shopping center at the corner of Maple Avenue and East Main Street.
“I’ve lived in Purcellville for a while, and I always drove by it and saw it empty and saw the potential for the area, but at the time there wasn’t a whole bunch of commercial space available in Purcellville,” he said. But the new space happened to work out perfectly.
He’s taking over two spaces in the shopping center, which lent itself well to the idea of the two-sided restaurant, with to-go meals on one side and sit-down dining on the other. One of those was a former Pizza Hut, meaning half of his space was already set up for fast-casual restaurant. The other side, formerly a veterinary office, lent itself to a remodel into the sit-down restaurant space.
“When we were looking for places, I was all over. I looked in Springfield, I looked in Fairfax, places to potentially open a restaurant, but when I found this place, it just kind of clicked,” he said.
With other restaurants already in the shopping center, including a Subway at the other end of the building, Deatherage aims to be fast and competitively priced for people just swinging by to pick up something to-go. The restaurant will start with a single large menu available on both sides, evolving into a separate to-go menu with weekly or biweekly specials. And for people looking for a nicer sit-down experience, on the other side of the restaurant he plans a more upscale experience, with a cut-of-the-week sourced from local farms for dishes like pork chops and steaks.
Deatherage also leaned on his industry experience and local roots to bring the restaurant together. He got his start in restaurants 15 years ago, washing dishes at an IHOP.
“It was the overnight shift, the graveyard. Shifts get a little crazy there sometime around 2 a.m. when the bars close,” he recalled.
But from that start he worked his way up into management before moving on to other venues like managing Perch Putt, a mini golf course with a bar and food trucks on the roof of Capitol One Center in Tysons Corner, when it opened last summer. Along the way, he’s made a lot of friends who helped with setting up The Local Cut.
A friend of his, Brandon Wallace of design company Peter Darker, helped design the menu, a mix of classics like burgers, steaks and seafood, and international themes like Korean spices and ramen bowls.
Deatherage’s co-owner is Gaston Richmond, the son of Charlie’s Angels star Jaclyn Smith who continued the tradition by working behind the scenes in the movie business. Deatherage and Richmond put a personal touch into the restaurant by putting some family recipes into the menu—Mike’s Teriyaki Chicken, Deatherage’s dad’s recipe, and Tony’s Bolognese, a recipe from Richmond’s father.
And The Local Cut is local to its roots, beyond even the menu.
“We’re local guys, we live in the area.… it’s been a long road building this place and putting it together, so we’ve used multiple different contractors that are local as well,” Deatherage said. He said the masonry and wood paneling are from local company Arete Construction, the poured concrete bar is by Leesburg’s Ricky Horseman Concrete, and the hand-painted signs are by Patti House of Purcellville-based Sign Design Inc.
Some of the restaurant’s innovations are less obvious from the dining room, but reflect the hand of an experienced restaurant insider, including the kitchen display system, or KDS screen, to help organize and streamline the work in a kitchen. Rather than a chef or other kitchen staff organizing order tickets as they come in and barking orders, managing the many jobs in a kitchen, the KDS screen simply routes the different parts of an order to the people who need to see them, when they need to see them—fries to a fry cook, salads to a salad station. It’s a system common to larger and chain restaurants, but less common in local restaurants like The Local Cut.
Find more onFacebook, atinstagram.com/thelocalcut,and when the restaurant opens atthelocalcut.com.
