If there’s a town to watch in 2016, it’s Purcellville. There’s the modern comfort food at West End Wine Bar & Pub (opened in January), the forthcoming French-themed coffee shop and creperie, Petit Loulou, set to open this summer, and now WK Hearth’s makeover as a pre-Prohibition cocktail bar, debuting next month.
“It’s in its infancy,” Jason Miller says of the cocktail scene in Purcellville, though as the headquarters of award-winning Catoctin Creek Distilling Company and a handful of new breweries, it’s certainly on the booze map. The owner of The Wine Kitchen family of restaurants (there’s one in Leesburg and Frederick, Maryland) will open the first cocktail-forward space in town, converting the first floor of WK Hearth to Hugo.
Named after author Hugo Ensslin, who wrote 1917’s Recipes For Mixed Drinks, the last cocktail book published before prohibition, the bar will mix both classic cocktails, including Ensslin’s Aviation, and drinks of the era like fizzes, coolers and punches, along with modern interpretations.
Miller is playing with an Apple Pie Old Fashioned, infusing bourbon with brown butter (a technique called fat-washing) and mixing it with apple syrup; look for a peach version this summer. There will also be spirit flights and a new menu of small shared plates. Dishes will include hand-held rabbit pot pie, wood-grilled sardines on toast, homemade potato rolls with cured Virginia ham and housemade Fig Newtons.
The farmhouse hosting Hugo, also established in 1917, will go under a makeover to fit with the new theme, with a cozier feel, plus gilded mirrors and draping separating the downstairs from the upstairs. The second floor will maintain WK Hearth’s Italian farm-to-table menu, but Miller hints at a change there soon. It’s another reason to keep tabs on Purcellville. / Hugo, 130 Purcellville Gateway Drive, Purcellville
