There’s a deer thigh in a later stage of curing strung up nearby, its outer layer resembling a thick coating of barnacles in the dim light. Jars of tomatoes and string beans, jams and conserves are stacked on wooden shelves. Pyle pulls back a sheet of plastic on a white bucket in the corner to show me glistening bread dough.

“I learned to make a sourdough starter from my grandmother,” he says. “She used the same one for 50 years.” He takes a satisfied whiff and puts the cover back in place. “The stinkier, the better.”

Pyle and his co-executive chef, Brian Shaw, built the shelving from sweet-smelling cedar. The walls are stone, the original foundation of this 1764 farmhouse. Each shelf can either lay flat or slide in diagonally to become bins for the more than 500 types of wine stored in this impeccably clean, climate-controlled cellar.

It’s clear that Pyle and his partners—his wife, Venka, and Shaw—take their food and wine seriously. The restaurant, just outside of Elkton in Cecil County, relies on onsite gardens and hoop houses for its produce and an apiary for honey. Bushes and brambles provide fresh berries, grapevines supply the ver jus used in vinaigrettes and other sauces, and hogs, delivered whole from an Amish farmer, are butchered and cured by Pyle himself.

“We have more types of bacon than you can shake a stick at,” he says. “Bacon is on the menu every night.”

Despite the trendiness of the whole locavore movement, “I’ve never watched the food channel in my life,” says Pyle. Instead, the “farm to table” philosophy embraced by Fair Hill Inn is the way he’s been eating since he was a boy growing up 10 miles from here.

“I am amazed when I go to a supermarket and the cashier doesn’t recognize basil,” he says. “I want to ask, ‘Where are you from? How do you not know what basil is?’”

Pyle estimates that, annually, about 80 percent of the fruit and produce served at the restaurant is grown on site, 100 percent during the summer. Most of the meat and poultry are local, too. When it comes to cooking, he insists, homegrown food makes his job easier.

“You don’t have to do much to a fresh tomato,” he says. “You want to taste the tomato. I thought that was the point of growing it.”

After a varied career path that included everything from a job in construction management to a Grand Diplôme from Le Cordon Bleu in Ontario, Pyle ended up partnering with Shaw at the Ocean City restaurant Tutti Gusti. It was there he learned that Fair Hill Inn—which had had a long and storied history—was for sale. He jumped at the opportunity to move back to his roots.

“The décor was ‘Cracker Barrel meets colonialism,’” Pyle says of the place’s condition when he first took over. Today, however, the main dining room is serene, with walls the color of pine needles, a fireplace with a marble hearth, and a wall-sized map of the U.S. dating from 1913. In the rear dining room, once the farmhouse kitchen, the back wall is dominated by an immense fieldstone fireplace; gashes in one stone are evidence of long-ago knife sharpening.

Pyle shows me and my dining companion, Dan, the bar—with its Scotch cabinet and 11 types of Austrian stemware—where staffers are gathered to sample a new assortment of artisanal cheeses. The cheese menu, which changes monthly, lists around 25 different types.