Flavor: Deftly-handled Appalachian ingredients Ambiance: Rendered irrelevant by the food The Market Place, Asheville’s legendary bastion of locally sourced cuisine, occasionally surfaces on Chowhound.com, the virtual restaurant-advice swap meet that unrepentant foodies obsessively troll for tips on where to eat. Chowhound is the sort of place a user can post a frantic plea at midnight […]

Thoughtfully saving their customers the cost of last-minute trips to Germany and Italy, the artisan bakers at City Bakery are offering traditional European holiday breads this December. Bakery co-owner Craig Peters suggests calling ahead to claim your loaf of stollen, a lightly sweetened German fruitcake, or panettone, a fluffy, long-proofing Milanese bread shaped like a […]

There are a gazillion resources, give or take, directing tourists where to eat in Asheville. But despite the blizzard of brochures, dining guides and food features like this one—or perhaps because of it—hungry visitors often resort to another strategy for selecting restaurants. As residents know, it’s called “Ask the nearest native.” I’m always slightly startled […]

Proving that good barbecue is more powerful than sentiment and sensation, Asheville’s 12 Bones Smokehouse last month beat out a Gulf Coast catfish joint that lost its roof to Hurricane Katrina and a Chicago eatery that earned the city’s first citation for serving foie gras, to win Good Morning America‘s Best Bites Challenge. The show […]

I suspect Sunday would still arrive if the New York Times suspended publication and the nation suffered a bagel shortage. As I recall from my time spent at sea and in the rural Deep South, the week rolls around even without such necessities. The best in town?: The bagels and lox at Over Easy Cafe, […]

Here’s a New Year’s resolution that’s easy to keep: Ensure a year’s worth of good luck by munching on Vasilopita, or sweet Basil’s Bread. The traditional Greek Orthodox bread (which is sometimes sweet enough to be called a cake) dates back to the fourth century, when Saint Basil the Great hit upon the idea of […]

Perhaps you can’t put new wine in old bottles, but you can put it in a space-age serving system, as evidenced by the recent debut of the Enomatic Wine Kiosk at Vino Vino Wine Market (1457 Merrimon Ave. in Asheville). The 16-wine serving system, which bears a vague resemblance to a standard soda machine, pours […]

Happy Birthday Kismet Cafe! The Biltmore Village coffeehouse is celebrating its fifth in an exceptionally mature way: “We’re staying open longer,” says Jen Rhea, who owns the cafe with her husband, Bob. Kismet will now open at 8:30 a.m. seven days a week, closing at 6 p.m. Monday through Thursday, 7 p.m. on Fridays and […]

Flavor: Latin/Caribbean wrung from WNC soil Ambiance: Cozy vintage soda fountain You know how sometimes you’re watching a movie and a certain actor seems intimately, yet unplaceably, familiar? Desperate to figure out in which film you saw him last, you shift into mental makeup-artist mode, picturing his inscrutable face outfitted with a villan’s moustache or […]

Flavor: Farm-fresh French Ambiance: Quintessentially fancy, with a slight rustic vibe Back when businessmen carried briefcases instead of Blackberries, important meals were almost always served with steak knives. In the primal 1980s, carnivorousness at the table was equated with ruthlessness in the marketplace, which meant entertaining a client invariably involved a thick slab of marbled […]

The downtown Asheville location of Rio Burrito, the pioneering California-style joint that perennially finishes near the top of the burrito heap in the Xpress’ “Best Of WNC” poll, has served its last overstuffed wrap. The restaurant, at 11 Broadway, shuttered last Wednesday after 12 years of providing Asheville’s health-conscious hippies with a beans-and-rice-based status symbol. […]

Flavor: Classic mildly-spiced Thai-American cuisine Ambiance: Accessibly elegant Here’s the good news: Not everything tastes the same at Tamarind, the Thai restaurant that this summer squeezed in behind the big-box stores that have lately taken up residence in Arden. Too many American Thai restaurants opt to tell the same story with each dish by dousing […]

What does the average person need to know about food? How can Asheville increase its food security? How can more food be grown in the city? The answers may not be easy, but they’re free: Six local food experts are convening a no-charge community discussion panel on Nov. 8 to address those questions and more. […]

Prime aged beef and wild salmon are fine and dandy, but wings and suds they ain’t. “It wasn’t that the restaurant here wasn’t doing well, we just knew beer and chicken wings sold,” Mack Kells executive chef Nick Sanford says of the recent decision to transform Battery Park Bistro into another Mack Kells. The original […]

If Columbus Day has left you with a hankering for Italian food, the most economical choice this month may be Sorrento d’Italia, 875 E. Tunnel Road. In honor of the restaurant’s 15th anniversary, owner B.J. Jabari is offering a free Caesar Salad with every entree this month. Lest this seem like a piddling prize, remember […]

Flavor: Meats and cheeses the way Northern Italians like ‘em Ambiance: Warm and quiet, like a seat by the hearth Word is a few of the first customers to patronize Sugo, the ambitious Italian-inspired eatery that opened this summer in downtown Asheville, didn’t quite get owners Damien and Lindsay Cavicchi’s grand vision for a restaurant […]

Seven small-scale North Carolina farms contributed the ingredients to Earth Fare Market and Cafe‘s Sweet Potato Salad and Sesame Kale concoction, slated to be honored as the “Best Dish in North Carolina” at the N.C. State Fair next week. The award, sponsored by the N.C. Department of Agriculture, was created to recognize chefs who regularly […]

Flavor: High-end Japanese steak, seafood and sushi Ambiance: As Zen as an overcrowded eatery can manage Back in 1976, Saul Steinberg submitted a drawing that would become perhaps the most famous New Yorker cover ever. A distorted view of the world from Ninth Avenue, the illustration has since been reproduced on T-shirts, co-opted by Hollywood […]

The closure of Weaverville’s Sunnyside Cafe has turned out to be just a hiatus, with owners Jack and Patty Keeran recently reopening their celebrated Main Street eatery. The cafe, which closed in 2005 after five years of serving American classics, is back in business. According to Patty Keeran, “We’ve adjusted our hours to have a […]

Flavor: Italian-style pastas, meats and cheeses Ambiance: Simple and restrained, just like the food It’s back-to-school season, which means mothers everywhere are shipping their little scholars off to college for the first time with the confident prediction “You’ll miss me when you’re gone.” And, undoubtedly, they will. Because as loathe as late-stage adolescents may be […]