Two amusing moments did occur at the Hampton during our stay. First off, the gym and pool area require your room key. We had just checked in and Brad wanted a quick swim but he neglected to take his key and had to ask the desk clerk who had just checked us in for a new one. Then on the second day he remembered to take his key but then locked himself out of the gym when he stepped out to do a lap around the building and left his key on the treadmill. I think the last official count was that the front desk provided a total of four room keys to Brad over a two day time period. Our other amusement was after dinner on Friday we get into the elevator to go to our room and a man with a brown bagged bottle gets on with us after he had exited a room nearby. I ask him what floor and he says ground floor please – which is exactly the floor we were on. I pause and say - I think we are on the ground floor (which causes Brad to bust out laughing) and the guy says thanks and gets off the elevator.
Dining options came as a bit of a disappointment only because I had really high expectations. I was expecting options like what we have experienced in Banner Elk and Blowing Rock and on the surface the listing of area restaurants I had glanced at online seemed to indicate that would be what we would find in West Jefferson, too. Maybe they are there but I did not find what I expected or had hoped for. Several restaurants on the online listing were closed or no longer there. Essentially in downtown West Jefferson we were left with a deli, coffee shop, restaurant/pub, a pizza place (which looked really good), an Italian place, bbq place (that seemed to stay very busy), and a bar. So at the recommendation of Hampton Inn staff we opted to try Frasers the first night (the restaurant/pub).
Frasers: The hotel staff indicated that the steak and Caesar salad was one of the best items to order. Once that idea is in your head that tends to be what you want. We arrived just after 7 PM to a very bustling restaurant. As we entered, the smell of seafood was very apparent, not in a bad fishy kind of way but enough to indicate that they were definitely serving seafood. Indeed a decent portion of the menu was devoted to that category and several items sounded really good. However, I don’t normally go to the mountains to order seafood unless it is something like mountain stream trout so we both opted for steaks. Brad had the special steak scampi which consisted of NY strip seasoned scampi style topped with shrimp. I had the tenderloin medallions served with a marsala mushroom sauce. The Caesar and house salads were both good, fresh, lots of dark greens and spinach in the house salad and good bleu cheese dressing. Our dinner rolls were hit and miss with one out of the four served tasting wonderful and the rest tasting stale. Brad’s steak was cooked perfectly but mine was closer to medium versus the medium rare I had ordered. We unfortunately waited a long time between salads and entrees - maybe they were actually baking the potatoes to order. Overall the flavors of the entrees were good but lacked a touch of salt (we are not heavy salt users but they were noticeably lacking this seasoning). We were thrilled to get a bottle of wine for half what it would have cost us in Raleigh so overall the price of the meal was reasonable for what we got. To be clear, the food was pretty good after application of seasoning but it wasn’t a place we would opt to return to time and time again just based on this one experience.
Since I have picked on Brad some pertaining to his room key issues I should reveal my own amusing moment on the way to dinner. We parked about a block away from the restaurant and as we walked across the street my heel gets stuck in a crack in the pavement and I step completely out of my shoe. I actually have to go back and pull my shoe out of the pavement then hop across the street as the light is changing. Carloads of people on both sides of the light appeared to thoroughly enjoy my performance. I am happy to report there was no damage to my shoe but do caution against wearing kitten heel open back sandals on rough surface streets.
After exploring downtown and seeing the lack of significant other eating options we decided on Saturday night we would either eat at the pizza place or the local bar. We ended up at the bar: Black Jacks. This is just a basic small bar but it had a very appealing menu of typical bar fair such as hot wings, burgers, etc. and they had a nice selection of beers on draft (Brad had Lagunitas IPA and I had Laughing Skull Amber Ale). We shared an order of hot wings, which Brad ordered hot and then found to be too hot for him to eat, but I thought they were fantastic. We then shared a burger and fries. The burger was cooked perfectly, dressed well and the fries were wonderful hand-cut skin on fries. We were really having a nice time but ended up leaving sooner than we would have due to a drunk local, who was obviously loved by the local patrons, wanting to visit with every table in the place. We asked that he leave us alone and he did but it was bothering Brad to see him go from table to table and frankly it had changed the mood of the place for us. So we opted to spend the rest of our evening back at the bar at Frasers. The pub side of Frasers is a different world from the restaurant side we had visited the night before. It has a very masculine feel to it, nice long bar and a seating area. The bartender was friendly and interesting without being on top of us constantly and we had a very nice time hanging out and chatting with him and some others in the bar area.
We did have coffee late one morning at Bohemia. This is a really cool looking place with seating ranging from couches to bar stools and artwork on the walls. We popped in just before noon and it ended up taking forever to get to the register with only three ladies in front of us. Turns out the one up front placed an order for four very specific/intricate coffees and it was just the one girl behind the counter all by herself. She was very apologetic when we finally got to place our order. She also did a good job of warning us about the difference in their syrups versus Starbucks but apparently we didn’t get how different they really were and we ended up with two excruciatingly sweet drinks. So if you stop in and order a flavored latte keep in mind they use six to seven pumps of syrup and even cutting that in half is still too sweet.
Beyond food, the downtown area has a variety of small shops that make up about a three to four block stroll. The highlight of the area is the Ashe County Cheese. If you are lucky enough to be there when they are making cheese there is a viewing window into the factory. While they were not making cheese the day we were there, they were packaging cheese so we got to see that activity. Across the street is the store which is a wonderland of local wines, selection of interesting and unusual snack mixes, candies, jellies, etc. and then of course all the cheeses that they make. They were providing tastes of three options when we were there: the bacon cheddar which has a nice smoky flavor, the extra sharp white cheddar which was just absolutely perfect, and cheese curd. Brad had never had cheese curd and obviously was caught completely off guard by the texture. Cheese curds are fresh, un-aged cheddar cheese before being processed into blocks and aged. So they have a texture similar to silly putty, squeak when you bite into them, and taste nothing like aged cheddar. Watching Brad’s reaction I laughed so hard I cried. Maybe if you haven’t tried something before you should consider taking a smaller taste not a mouth full. I thought he was going to have to cough it up into the trash can right in the middle of the store. The amount of different kinds of cheese was totally overwhelming. I would have loved to have bought everything but our hotel room did not have a refrigerator and we only had a small cooler. In the end we purchased sweet potato butter, a package of A.B Vannoy ham, which is also produced in this area, the white extra sharp cheddar, a yellow cheddar aged five years, and their bleu cheese.
I would definitely go back for a day to visit the cheese shop again and I would spend time at Frasers pub. The food at Black Jacks would get me back in there as long as Mr. Super Social Drunk wasn’t around and I would try a couple of the other places to eat if we were there longer than a day. But honestly, West Jefferson was nice to visit once and convenient for visiting area wineries but isn’t a place we would return to for a weekend stay when there are options like Boone, Blowing Rock, and Banner Elk nearby.
