Gayle Darugh

Chef Gayle Darugh has a fascinating history of food and wine involvement. In 1982 she was an ethno-botanist at the Foodways Pavilion for the World's Fair in Knoxville, Tennessee. During the fair she offered histories and food demonstrations of the region's historic foodways. She later worked as a consultant to the National Park Service in the creation of interpretive programs to clarify Southern Appalachian Heritage and Foodways.

Gayle is past National President of the American Wine Society. A membership in excess of 10,000 the AWS is the largest independent wine appreciation and education organization in the world. Together with husband David they attended many AWS National Conventions as seminar leaders and demonstration chefs sharing Georgia Grown wines, foods and products to a national audience. 

The two have owned and operated Beechwood Inn as a Farm to Table Inn and restaurant for 20 years. They seek to reconnect food to its origins and people to their food by serving local, seasonal, and sustainable food for breakfast, at wine-thirty, and for the inn's dinners. Further enhancing the diner's farm to table experience they operate "Grow, Cook, Eat, Culinary Garden," an organic vegetable, herb and edible flower farm. They also make and bottle several varieties of locally sourced table wine.

Their hope is that some of the inn's diners who experience local foods, foraged wild foods and sustainable practices will want to make their own connection to time, season and place and will be encouraged to adopt a more sustainable lifestyle and diet.

Finally, they amplify our unique regional heritage through the publication of countless entertaining and compelling articles in local and regional magazines and blogs about food, health, nutrition and foodways.  http://www.beechwoodinn.ws/blog/