Roadfood_ Revised Edition - Jane Stern [98]
Be sure to call ahead if you are planning to visit Hocutt’s. Travis sometimes takes his cooking skills on the road to festivals and fairs and, as he put it, “I don’t let anybody do my cooking in my kitchen. If I’m not here and I can’t cook, we ain’t open.”
Julio’s
501 Baltimore Ave.
304–622–2592
Clarksburg, WV
LD | $$
Across from the train station in the old Elk Point section of Clarksburg, Julio’s is a first-rate Italian restaurant with a tin ceiling, carved wooden bar, and plush leather booths that are, incongruously, outfitted with Lava Lites. While the food is excellent, and clearly prepared by a chef with culinary expertise, prices are reasonable and service is neighborhood-friendly.
A printed menu lists lots of inviting pastas including four different versions of pasta e fagiole—with cream sauce, with marinara, with potatoes and kale, and en brodo zesty with fennel—and primavera made with uncooked vegetables in red sauce. But some of the best dishes are not in print; waitresses recite extremely appetizing lists of the day’s appetizers, entrees, and desserts.
For hors d’oeuvres, we loved our “paisano salad,” a cold antipasto plate topped with the kitchen’s jade-green garlic basil dressing, and roasted peppers with gorgonzola served atop slabs of garlic toast. We devoured entrees of vivid red peppers stuffed with hot ground sausage on a bed of al dente spaghetti, a supremely comforting bowl of pastae fagiole, and a stylish plate of tuna pomodoro. The meal commenced with a basket of swell garlic toast with a smoky taste and concluded with an outrageously rich house-made éclair loaded with pastry cream and blanketed with good chocolate.
Oliverio’s Cash and Carry
427 Clark St.
304–622–8612
Clarksburg, WV
$
“This was once the spot in Clarksburg,” Angela Oliverio told us about seven years ago as she slid a long length of pig gut onto the spout of her hand-cranked sausage-making machine. “We had everything here in Elk Point [the Clarksburg neighborhood where her grocery is located]: prostitution, gambling, big business, street corner business, thriving industry. Now, there’s not much left.”
But Elk Point is coming back and, most important, Oliverio’s is as wonderful as ever. What a gem: a vintage, family-run grocery store where Angela sits in back, and with the help of her brother John, cranks out lengths of coarse-textured Italian pork sausage seasoned with paprika, fennel seed, and plenty of hot pepper. She also prepares bowls full of peppered green and black olives that she will sell you by the pint. On the front shelves of the store are a wide assortment of roasted peppers and vegetable relishes that Angela’s other brother, Frank, makes in his kitchen just down the street. Peppers are how Oliverio’s has been best known, ever since mama Antoinette Oliverio began canning them in the back of this store in the early 1930s. Some of the choice varieties made by son Frank today include diced hot cherry peppers, a spicy giardiniera (garden mix), and peppers in hot red sauce.
We need to point out the rather obvious fact that Oliverio’s is not a restaurant. It is a little grocery store, and unless Angela takes a liking to you and you happen to be lucky enough to arrive just when she’s cooked up a batch of her zesty sausage for tasting purposes, you cannot eat here. But a new place called Tre Sorrelli, just around the corner, does use the sausage in tremendously good sandwiches, and if you are able to take some of this good food home, you will inscribe this charming little cash-and-carry in your must-visit book of West Virginia culinary treasures.
Quinet’s Court
Main St. across from the courthouse
304–455–2110
New Martinsville, WV
BLD | $
“We use the area’s finest hobby chefs’ recipes often,” boasts the printed menu of Quinet’s Court, where the choice