The Richmond-based open-fire caterer traces his whole business back to a single autumn hike—and has spent the decade since trying to give guests the same jolt of place he felt that day.
Heirloom Fire is, on paper, a catering company based in Richmond. James Gop and his team cook for weddings, private events, and public dinners, almost entirely over open, hardwood flame, with dishes built around whatever's growing, running, or swimming nearby that week. In practice, it's also a traveling theater production that feeds while also telling a story of hyper-local history.
Gop can point to the exact moment the business began, and it wasn't in a kitchen. He was young, still unsure what he wanted to do with his life, when he went for a hike in Richmond. "It was a beautiful explosion of colors in the mountains," he says. "Almost like it was on fire. I remember thinking I have to figure out a way to build a life here."
Gop was born and raised in Great Barrington. Food wasn't sentimental in his house growing up, he says—no grandmother's recipes or traditions to speak of. Perhaps that's why they feel so novel and boundless to him now.
His real education started at Guido's Market as a young man, working produce. It's where he learned what seasonality actually meant to him—crisp asparagus straight out of the ground, or peaches from Kline's Kill farm so ripe they cover your forearm in juice. "You want to be standing over a bathtub when you bite into them," Gop says.
From there he went to the Institute of Culinary Education in Manhattan, externships at Wheatleigh and the Old Inn on the Green, and, at 24, his first head chef job at Route 7 Grill in Great Barrington. "I honestly had no business running a kitchen at all," he says now, "but I learned a lot." Burnout followed, then two weeks alone in Italy. What helped get him back on track was a pig roast a friend asked him to help with soon after—his first time cooking that way. "This is amazing," he remembers thinking. "You could be cooking outdoors over open fire, not constrained inside of a stainless steel kitchen, pumping plates out you never even get to have a human interaction with."
Gop calls Heirloom Fire "a restaurant without walls": no fixed dining room, no default menu. Every job starts the same way. "It really starts with me walking the property, chatting with somebody, then me getting inspired by it," he says, "then using that as a way to figure out how we tell this through four courses so that it makes sense."
The food itself is most often built around the cooking of whole animals and long, patient fire work: five-week aged beef cuts roasted whole and carved to order, chicken and lamb turned slowly on a mechanical flywheel in full view of guests, fish spun over the coals and finished with hand-whipped sumac-and-thyme butter, oysters shucked straight over red coals. Vegetables get the same treatment—young cabbage charred over open flame, sweet corn cooked low for hours with cream and basil until it turns into something closer to fresh polenta, hand-rolled pasta discs tossed with foraged wild mushrooms and cheese smoked over spruce tips. Even the coffee service is built in-house, brewed through a custom glass apparatus Gop designed himself.
Gop recently put on an event at Chesterwood, the Stockbridge estate where sculptor Daniel Chester French designed the seated Lincoln for the Lincoln Memorial. Heirloom Fire presented a four-course dinner for 50, served at a table set on the lawn with Monument Mountain in view, Heirloom Fire's crew working a gravel courtyard carved out specifically for the occasion, in their signature period dress, a whole lamb turning on a spit nearby. The event was built around dishes similar to those served at Lincoln's inauguration. But Gop did take some creative liberty, building a dessert shaped like a slab of marble—smoked cultured ice cream in a white chocolate shell, streaked with charcoal made from carbonized bone charcoal saved from fires—and had guests crack it open themselves with the back of a spoon.
At Wildflower Farms, the Auberge resort in Gardiner, New York, the land's own history became a course. The property had been a derelict apple orchard with soil so clay-heavy that neighboring farmers swore nothing would grow there. Gop's team wrapped a clay-baked Hudson Valley steelhead trout in foraged wild grape leaves, packed it in clay dug from that same ground, and cracked it open tableside.
An even more elaborate version of this instinct played out at the Widow Jane Mine in Rosendale, New York, an old natural-cement mine whose product once went into the Washington Monument and the previously noted Lincoln Memorial. Guests arrived by canoe to a custom soundtrack, given a wax-sealed map and a tincture bottle to hold onto. One stop hid a house-brewed spruce needle beer behind a fabricated dead tree, served with frog-shaped pretzels floating on a fake pond wired for tree frog sounds. Later, a bartender asked for the tincture bottle back: a butterfly-pea-flower cocktail base that turned bright pink the moment lemon hit it.
Gop is prone to wax prosodic about his work, getting lost in a story about a specific ingredient, sustainability, or sourcing dinnerware from antiques fairs. With Heirloom Fire, Gop tells stories, but it's not marketing. It just pours out of him.
Gop doesn't want the Berkshires and Hudson Valley marketed as a stand-in for somewhere else. He brings up a recent conversation among regional wedding vendors in which someone suggested the area lean into a "Nantucket sort of vibe" to compete as a destination. "I was like, hang on," he says. "There's so much beauty here. Why do we want to try to compare it or make it into something else?"
Maintaining that authenticity for Gop is vital but also takes a lot of work. Heirloom Fire runs roughly 40 events between May and November. "It really is about the team," he says. "You have to create a culture."
Weddings remain the core of the business, but public dinners have become a bigger part of the mix, alongside intimate dinners hosted in Heirloom Fire's own upstairs space in Richmond, capped at 25 guests.
For Gop, fire itself is doing more than cooking the food. "Once we smell food, specifically protein, cooking over open fire, there's something that triggers in our cells," he says, describing it as an inherited memory from a time when fire meant a successful hunt and another day of survival. Guests are even invited to get involved, to crank a flywheel on a custom vertical rotisserie. Whatever changes from property to property, the fire and the research into what actually happened on that patch of ground stay constant. As Gop sums up the whole approach in a single line: it's about giving people "that sense of place."
More at heirloomfire.com and on Instagram.
