Small Bites

Posana: The team behind Posana Café is as interested in what comes out of the new downtown eatery as what goes into it (in this case, the usual Asheville-sanctioned mix of fair-trade, organic and gluten-free food and drink).

Photo by Jonathan Welch

“For about two years, we were playing around with the idea of a traditional European-style coffeehouse, a place to congregate,” co-owner Martha Pollay says, explaining the project’s genesis. “We were thinking of a traditional coffeehouse where great minds can come together. Great ideas have been spawned in coffeehouses.”

Scott Joiner, the café‘s public relations director, describes the restaurant as a cross between the Biltmore Estate’s elegant Old World sensibilities and West Asheville’s bohemian culture: He envisions Posana as a petri dish for community activism and creative innovation.

“There’s a mission to make sure every person’s quality of life is improved by interacting with Posana,” adds human relations director Trey Scott.

Pollay and her husband, Peter, a veteran of top kitchens in Chicago and Los Angeles, formally launched the Posana project when the space formerly occupied by Café on the Square became available. The couple has since radically redesigned the 4,000-square-foot venue, creating a dining room with a mix of seating options, and a conference room they hope will be used for business meetings and artistic events.

“The aesthetics are being set up so it’s soothing,” Pollay says. “You can relax, because if you want to get your coffee to go, we can do that. If you want oatmeal brulée and fresh-squeezed orange juice, we can do that too.”

Posana will offer full breakfast and lunch menus, as well as an evening small-plates selection. Most dishes will be priced at $8 to $12. “We’re trying to keep it reasonable,” Pollay says. “It’s fine dining without the fuss.”

The restaurant will be open at 7:30 a.m. every day except Mondays for breakfast and lunch, with extended dinner hours on Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights. At press time, Posana was set to open during the week of May 11. “But we want to open up properly,” Peter Pollay says. “We don’t want to open till we can realize the vision.”

Posana Café is located at 1 Biltmore Ave. For more information, call 505-3969 or visit www.posanacafe.com.

Asheville Independent Restaurant Association: Asheville’s local restaurant organization is seeking a new executive director following the recent resignation of Roya June, who served the board for just less than a year. “Even though it did not work out as hoped, everyone on the board was very appreciative of what Roya did for the association,” former AIR president Michel Baudouin said in a release. AIR began conducting interviews for the position earlier this month.

Local Food Guide: Before browsing tailgate markets for tomatoes or shopping fruit stands for locally-grown apples, area eaters should seek out the latest edition of the Appalachian Sustainable Agriculture Project’s Local Food Guide, now in its ninth year of publication. The guide, which is distributed for free at more than 400 venues, includes indexed listings of farms, markets, restaurants and grocers specializing in locally-grown products. For more information, visit www.buyappalachian.org.