The Table
Supper, properly kept.
Three dining rooms, a terrace in season, and a cellar that has been filling since 1962 — under Executive Chef Aurelio Fontaine, in his nineteenth year.
The Kitchen
Virginia first, then the world
Chef Fontaine's kitchen buys within the county first: beef from the Whitfield farm's own Angus herd, trout from the Rapidan, orchard apples in September, and softshells from the Bay when the season allows. The club's kitchen garden, two terraced acres behind the springhouse, supplies the rooms from April through the first frost.
Menus change with the market; the constants are the constants — the Whitfield crab soup since 1931, the spoon bread, and the club's batter bread, the recipe for which has left the kitchen exactly never.
The Cellar
Eight thousand four hundred bottles, fifty-five degrees
The cellar beneath the west wing was an afterthought of 1962 and is now the club's quiet pride. Wine Director Thomas Okafor keeps the list at eight hundred forty selections: depth in Bordeaux and Burgundy, a serious Virginia wing — Barboursville, RdV, and Linden within twenty minutes of the first tee — and the club's own bottlings from a long arrangement with a Cornas grower whose name appears nowhere on this page.
The Cellar Table, seated at the cellar's center, takes eight for dinner on the last Thursday of each month; the standing December dinner — five courses, five decades of claret — sells out by October.
- The List840 selections · 8,400 bottlesSommelier always on the floor
- By the GlassTwenty-two pours, changed monthlyFrom $14
- Member BinsOne hundred twenty private bins, by waitlistCellar keeping included
Private Events
Weddings, anniversaries, and the evenings in between
The club accepts a limited number of private events each year, hosted under a member's name: the Ballroom for one hundred forty, the Whitfield Room for sixty, the terrace lawn for two hundred under sailcloth, and the Cellar Table for eight. The events office, under Mrs. Delacroix, keeps a single master book — one event at a time, always.
Weddings at Ridgemont are booked in the member's name and remain, in every particular, the member's party. The club's part is silence, timing, and the kitchen's full attention.