The Last Course Is Water: A Weekend in Warm Springs, Virginia

A Bath County weekend of memorable meals, a tiny bar and mountain hospitality builds to an old ritual — surrendering to the Warm Springs Pools.

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Lifestyle

By the time we reach Bath County, it feels less like we’ve left the Commonwealth than returned to the part Northern Virginia keeps meaning to visit when traffic clears.

The Inn at Gristmill Square around 4. On the grounds, an old mill houses Waterwheel Restaurant. Its great apparatus hangs above the creek. Dark timber, rusted iron, mossy stone. Through a window, we glimpse the warm dining room within.

That can wait. The mountain breeze sends us elsewhere for cider. Foodlore Friday is already happening at Oakley Farm. Folks spread across the lawn while a makeshift kitchen grills meat for tacos. A violin and concertina play what the duo calls Irish folk. “With a Southern accent,” I suggest. A nod of agreement.

Behind the cidery counter, Evelyn draws Troddenvale’s house cider from the tap and tells me about another called Foraged. Made from wild seedlings and the neglected remains of old orchards. Ghost apples. Fruit that kept living after the plan dissolved.

Evelyn tells me only a small share of the crowd lives here year-round. The rest divide between seasonal homeowners and visitors, though you would have trouble sorting them by sight. Everyone appears at home. 

A Maryland couple has been coming for decades. His Malibu hat and my Santa Barbara shirt make the introductions. Two California beaches begin a conversation in rural Virginia. Out here, where my phone thinks we are in the middle of nowhere, an open-armed gathering is simply what happens. 

Nothing stops for our arrival, but there is room for us within it. We play gin rummy inside and watch through the open doorway. True escape may mean entering a story already in progress and remembering that we are characters, not the plot. We leave before the tempting aroma of tacos interferes with dinner.

Waterwheel still carries the logic of the mill in its bones. Iron machinery rises beside our table. An old grain hopper wryly holds wine corks. Bottles wait in the cellar near the gears. Guests are welcome to wander down and choose their own vino adventure. The machinery no longer cranks, but the room still works.

Ashley is our meal Sherpa. She guides without pulling up a seat and offers another local cider. This time Big Fish from up the road. Cider answers cider. A plate of breads might be treated as preamble but an everything-bagel roll with orange-zest butter makes a strong argument for ending the meal immediately.

Then summer arrives. Ripe multihued tomatoes, blue cheese, basil, onion. The salad is bright, salty, creamy, sharp. The kind of food that proves restraint is skill.

My mountain trout swims in with shattering skin over vivid carrot purée. Brown butter, preserved lemon, capers, watercress. The flesh underneath is luscious. Nothing here needs the qualifier “good for a small town.” The food alone earns the drive.

But food is only part of the room’s generosity. Ashley makes the meal feel less served than embraced. John Loeffler, the curly-mustached chef and innkeeper, stops by to make certain both plate and evening have landed as intended. Around us, diners settle deeper into their chairs. Nobody appears to be managed toward the door.

Many begin dessert while I am still meeting trout. Whispers of monkey bread cross the room. Perhaps a conspiracy. We surrender.

The monkey bread arrives warm, glistening and easily dismembered with a fork. Less plated dessert than shared project. We have stopped checking the time. The room has done what John will later describe: turned arrival into belonging. We came for dinner. Somewhere between trout and sugar, we have been received. 

Morning brings rolling mist and cool air. I walk to The Coffee Shop at the Inn at Warm Springs. Across the road, the bathhouses are empty. Fog creeps over the wooded hill behind the white buildings. I stand outside with coffee for the room while a man settles into the warm creek nearby. He knows something I have not yet learned. 

Back at Gristmill Square, breakfast arrives at our room. The menu matters less than the knock, the fresh orange juice and the feeling that the inn has sensed our hunger.

Later, John Loeffler gives that feeling a name. He and his wife, Kate, took the reins 15 years ago after careers in restaurants and resorts. They had come here for date nights well before they held the deed. During their first years as innkeepers, they lived upstairs and learned the property by sound. Doors by the squeak of a hinge, arrivals by suitcase wheels over gravel. Living above the inn taught them to anticipate needs before anyone had to ask.

John still thinks first about the moment of arrival. Guests reach Warm Springs after traffic, mountain roads, and the moment a phone loses its map. They are famished, frazzled, nowhere near the calm they intended to bring to dinner. “That’s not our fault, but it’s our problem,” he tells me.

The solution may be a glass of Virginia chardonnay and a pause. “Let’s change the mindset from the beginning,” he says. “Let’s reset.”

“We’re not in the business of serving food and beverage,” John says. “We’re in the business of making people feel good.” Arriving well is underrated.

John’s philosophy would sound like hotelier talk if dinner had not already made the case. The cider, the bread, the attention, the tomato salad. That crispy trout. These are not merely impressive for a small mountain village. Waterwheel is not destination dining. It is a destination.

Chef John’s generosity does not stop at the property line. “I want you to see as much of Bath County as you can. There’s a lot here,” he says in a register that is not a brochure. “The more you see, the more reasons you have to come back.”

That becomes the weekend’s hidden logic. No place hoards the visitor. One welcome hands us toward the next.

At Garth Newel Music Center, the staff has saved lunch for two late arrivals: a crab-salad croissant, warm potato salad and vegetable frittata. Thoughtful picnic fare before the afternoon’s main draw.

The Pacifica String Quartet moves from Ligeti’s restless transformations into late Beethoven. The musicians do not treat the pastoral setting as novelty. They simply fill the converted barn, along with an audience that has put in the miles to hear them. The mountains still feel remote. But they feel connected.

We are not the only ones from our neck of the woods. There is a constituency for crossing the Commonwealth, eating frittata from a picnic plate and hearing Ligeti in a barn. High art travels well. So does potato salad. 

That evening, the Inn at Warm Springs receives us again, this time at the Tavern. I order a rye Manhattan. “Something local!” I say, then never think to look at the bottle. Late sunlight enters the room, drawing my attention back to the bathhouses across the road and the hills. A deeper green at this hour.

Tomato bisque comes before rainbow trout with creamy risotto and green beans. Waterwheel’s trout was crisp and composed. This one arrives softer. Home-style. A relaxed meal that belongs to the view. Tomato answers tomato, trout answers trout. There is no medal, just a different river.

Gravity draws us back to Gristmill Square and Waterwheel. The Simon Kenton Pub occupies the former miller’s office in the front. Four stools face the bar. We take the tiny booth where John and Kate once sat on dates before they owned the place. I order another Manhattan, this time with Catoctin Creek rye. The first whiskey was local by request. The second is local by label.

One story involves trips to Uncle Charlie’s car trunk for whiskey. Another traveler reviews the hostels in Madrid and Barcelona. “You travel different,” says someone who fancies the resorts on Ibiza. A man enters long enough to ask whether his friend has gotten his bourbon yet. 

“Already had it,” comes from the opposite corner, mere feet away. In a larger bar, these would be separate conversations. Here they become one. No one presumes privacy. Architecture handles it.

By now, Bath County has shown its method. Begin without us. Welcome us when we arrive. Trust that we will understand the invitation before anyone explains it aloud. 

Sunday morning brings a change of scene. The Omni Homestead Resort spreads across the town of Hot Springs down the road. Red brick, white columns and the confidence of a place that expects history to arrive with luggage. We collect a breakfast sandwich and coffee from Claire’s Cakes & Café on Main Street then drive up the hill.

The scale has shifted, but not our game. Gin rummy returns on the Omni’s grand porch. Cards fanned out beneath columns large enough to make our little contest feel official. Friday’s cider lawn and Saturday’s strings seem far away. The pace is somehow exactly the same.  

Across the mountain the Warm Springs Pools reverse the scale. Morning reduces to wood, stone, water and body.  By now they do not feel like one more attraction. This feels like the answer the weekend has been preparing us to understand.

Thomas Jefferson arrived on horseback in 1818, hoping the water would relieve rheumatism in one knee. He called his first soak a “delicious bath,” then stayed nearly three weeks, bathing three times a day, complaining of “distressing ennui.” I enter with fewer medicinal ambitions.

The octagonal pool was here for Jefferson. The building above it came soon after. Clear mineral water rises through the creekbed about body temperature. Stones remain visible beneath my feet. Tiny bubbles loosen themselves from the bottom and tickle my back. White wooden ribs curve overhead toward the open center of the roof, framing the sky.

The spring did not begin when we arrived. We enter this story, too, somewhere around midcurrent.

Just off the pool at the overflow, descending water pulses against my back. A massage with some attitude. Not spa design. Just water following gravity as it has for centuries. Around me, even the splashes fall to a hum. Jefferson wanted a cure. I ask only for this moment of nothingness.  

Warmth is only part of why the pool relaxes me. Bath County has spent two days preparing us to float among strangers and somehow feel solitary. Cider taught us to join. Dinner taught us to pause. Music taught us to listen. The little pub erased the distance between strangers. By the time history touches the body, slowing down no longer feels like an instruction. It feels like the point.

Reentry begins at the Warm Springs Gallery & Garden Cafe. Barbara Buhr, who owns the place, tells me her exhibitions are influenced by Chinese aesthetics. “Simplicity, harmony with nature, a quiet and understated quality, acceptance of imperfection, freedom from conformity.”

That afternoon, Ellen Little’s large-format watercolors and Phil Elson’s porcelain vessels leave room around themselves. We pause at one asymmetrical vessel. It seems not unfinished, but still striving for perfection. Here, perfection is less a destination than a direction. Lunch, appropriately, does not overexplain itself. 

Barbara’s food follows the same logic. She begins with the season, then considers flavor, texture and color while allowing good ingredients to speak. My sandwich agrees. Tangy goat cheese, summer tomato, roasted pepper and pesto between good bread. With fresh strawberry lemonade, we eat in the garden and turn one final stop into another reason to linger.

Bath County does not ask visitors to slow down. It simply refuses to hurry. Alexandria waits somewhere beyond the Alleghenies, ready to make every lane change a decision again. 

Now I know what the man in the creek knew. Getting in feels good. The hard part is getting out.

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