THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, August 13, 1995 TAG: 9508130092
SECTION: HOME PAGE: G1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY MARY FLACHSENHAAR, SPECIAL TO HOME & GARDEN
LENGTH: Long : 153 lines
IN THE STRETCH of land between the house where she lives and the restaurant where she works, Jeanne Steinhilber grows vegetables the old-fashioned way.
With water from a hand-held hose. With no pesticides. With the devotion to hard work that is her legacy.
And with love.
Lots of love, because Steinhilber is rooted to this soil in many ways. As rooted as the majestic magnolia tree down by the river, the one everybody said would wither and die after much of it was destroyed by fire in the 1920s.
Seventy years later, the tree is huge and healthy, despite the black scar at its base.
On this piece of land in the Thalia section of Virginia Beach, Jeanne's father, Robert Steinhilber, transformed the country club destroyed by that same fire into a restaurant in 1939. Today, Steinhilber's Thalia Acres Inn continues to do a thriving business. Jeanne and her brother Stephen have owned and managed the seafood restaurant since their father's death in 1985.
Stephen's home sits across from Jeanne's. And the slate roof on the house with log-cabin paneling where Jeanne lives with her husband and one of her two grown sons is the same roof that topped the structure when it was a small caddy shack on the Lynnhaven Golf and Country Club in the '20s. The same roof under which Jeanne and her two brothers were raised by Robert and Marion, who opened the restaurant next door just after they returned from their honeymoon 56 years ago.
The roots here go deep for Jeanne Steinhilber, whose motive for starting a vegetable garden 15 years ago was her love of things natural and old-fashioned.
``When I was a child, vegetables tasted better and they were better for you,'' she said. ``Lots of farms didn't use spray. Now everything is grown for appearance, for a long shelf life. The stores want produce that can keep for three or four weeks, that has no bug holes in it.
``I don't mind a few bug holes in my beans.''
She does mind pesticides, which she uses rarely, only in a last-ditch effort to save the most hopeless cases.
``And then I feel guilty.''
More often Steinhilber feels proud of her garden. Especially when she layers her homegrown squash, eggplant, tomatoes and basil, along with store-bought onions and mozzarella, into the casserole that she serves often to her family. And even more when she gathers vegetables from her garden to serve in her restaurant, a custom that began casually several years ago.
``Customers would come into the restaurant and say they liked my garden out front. And I'd go right out and get a tomato, slice it and bring it to their table. Lots of older folks would tell me that was the best tomato they'd had in years.''
When they did, Steinhilber beamed. She felt so good she made the practice of sharing her homegrown vegetables a daily habit. Now each morning the restaurant chef presents her with his list, and she shops the aisles of her garden. For cucumbers, lettuce and cherry tomatoes for the house salad. For the eggplant, peppers, tomatoes and beans that will be sauteed in oil and ladled over pasta. For the basil that will be turned into pesto, the dill that will make a sauce for scallops.
Sometimes, at the request of an adventuresome customer, she'll pick a fiery habenero pepper, though these can be ``kind of dangerous'' for the uninitiated.
Her old-fashioned garden merges well with the mood on this finger of land that juts into the Lynnhaven River, a place where time stands still. The only business in a residential neighborhood, Steinhilber's restaurant has been allowed to remain because it was here first. It may not grow out or up, turn neon or noisy, according to the city.
No need to worry.
Jeanne's vegetable garden and a few contemporary additions to the menu seem to be the only innovations in this quiet cul-de-sac, where, one recent summer day, the breezes blew gently through tall red cedars and lush crape myrtles and the song of a bird upstaged the distant drone of traffic.
The past is the present at Steinhilber's. Black-and-white photographs of a young Marion and Robert hang from the restaurant's mahogany walls. The walnut floor, open-beam ceiling and heavy white china rimmed with green suggest another era.
There are few tourists among the customers. Most nights the restaurant is filled with regulars.
``We've had folks come in on their 50th wedding anniversary and request the same table they sat at the night they were engaged,'' Jeanne said. ``At least twice a week someone will tell me how much they miss my father greeting them at the front door.''
In an era when so many restaurants are plastic and impersonal, the sense of tradition and timelessness is precious to Jeanne.
``I feel a responsibility to carry on for my father,'' she said. ``I really respect all the hard work he did.''
No doubt her father, ``Steiny,'' looking down upon his beloved restaurant from the portrait above the fireplace in the dining room, has enormous respect for his daughter's hard work, too. In addition to managing the business and overseeing the dining room every dinnertime, Jeanne bakes the pecan pie, key lime delight and chocolate delight that are the restaurant's trademark desserts.
Her father would have loved Jeanne's innovation of using homegrown vegetables in the restaurant. Personal touches like that were his specialty.
``The biggest challenge of the garden is the time it takes when you already have a full-time job,'' said Jeanne, who also tends the flower garden in her backyard and the one that wraps around the restaurant. ``You have to get into the garden every day because a lot can happen in 24 hours. Bugs attack, plants wilt.
``Every year I learn something new, because every year I make a new mistake.''
Mistakes like the trellis that collapsed under the weight of Jeanne's current crop of pole beans don't discourage this ambitious gardener. In fact, she is encouraged by her failures to keep learning and trying. So every year the garden gets a little bit bigger. Right now it is about the size of the foundation of a good-sized house, although Jeanne has never measured it. Just too busy.
``I keep adding to it with the intention of bringing more vegetables over to the restaurant,'' she said. Pointing to a square of brown earth she plowed this spring but never got around to planting, she added, ``Next year I'll fill in there.''
With the exception of a few of her 130 tomato plants, Jeanne started all of her vegetables from seed. This past spring her husband built her a greenhouse.
``One of the first things I learned was to open those greenhouse doors early in the morning, even when the air has a chill to it,'' she said. ``I was amazed at how hot it gets in there by nine in the morning.''
Over the years, she has also learned that when you start from seed, moving, watching and watering what you've sown, the plants become your children.
``You can't throw them out. So I cook ratatouilles to put in my freezer at home for wintertime. We use more and more of my vegetables in the restaurant. I give lots away to friends.''
This year, from the looks of the garden, friends will get tomatillos by the ton.
Jeanne has learned to keep the leaves of tomato plants off the ground so fungus can't set in, to plant things in different places every year to avoid blight. She has learned safe ways to beat the bugs.
``I always plant a little extra, knowing the bugs will get their share,'' she said. ``And I always harvest before the plants are past their prime because the bugs will get into the old stuff.''
This year, for the first time, Jeanne planted asparagus.
``They won't be ready to pick for a couple of years,'' she said.
Some folks might not have the patience to wait so long. Jeanne Steinhilber has the patience. She has the time.
Like the old magnolia down by the river, she's not going anywhere. ILLUSTRATION: L. TODD SPENCER COLOR PHOTOS
Jeanne Steinhilber grows a variety of tomatoes, peppers, eggplants,
squash, beans and lettuce in her garden, along with numerous herbs.
Jeanne and Stephen Steinhilber run the restaurant opened by their
parents.
Brady Viccellio, son of Jeanne Steinhilber, prepares some of the
vegetables his mom grew in her garden.
by CNB