With the recent opening of Azteca #2, Asheville now has two Mexican bakeries—both on Patton Avenue in Asheville. “I don’t know why he doesn’t open on Tunnel Road—maybe he’s wanting a fight,” mused a staffer at La Espija, which has already built up a steady clientele at its Patton Avenue location since its July opening. […]

The Blue Ridge Wine Festival is taking reservations for its popular Winemaker’s Dinners, which are held in conjunction with the three-day Blowing Rock event, scheduled for April 12 to 14. The festival, which celebrates regional wineries including Asheville’s Biltmore Estate Wine Company, features wine tastings, seminars and a cooking contest. For more information, visit www.blueridgewinefestival.com.  […]

Thanks to Ingles, grocery shoppers can now add “gourmet-cooking lesson” to their lists. The “Cooking with Class” series, which debuted earlier his year, invites local restaurants to demonstrate their techniques and offer samples in various Ingles locations. Next up is the Lobster Trap, appearing this Tuesday, March 6 from 4 to 7 p.m. at the […]

There are a few tough questions with which greasy-spoon diners must inevitably wrestle: Bacon or sausage? Home fries or grits? And would this joint be any better with five-star service and a seafood menu? Artur Loli improbably answered that last query in the affirmative while dining one day at his buddy Kosta Vlahakis’ popular Arden […]

Whether you’re all thumbs or green-thumbed, there’s a workshop to reinvigorate your joy for digging in the dirt at the upcoming Organic Growers School at Blue Ridge Community College in Flat Rock. This is the 14th edition of the popular conference, which draws upward of 1,000 growers of all experience levels. The 69 planned sessions […]

Cafe on the Square is slated to re-open this week after extensive renovations to its downtown Asheville dining space. The celebrity hangout closed last month to revamp the front-of-the-house. According to a staffer, the plan was to “make things look a little prettier.” A new menu is slated to debut with the new decor. Among […]

If you love your sweetie—but not enough to stand in line outside your local chocolatier’s shop shivering, The Chocolate Fetish has introduced a relationship-saving way to buy truffles for Valentine’s Day. The store’s “click and pick” website (www.chocolatefetish.com) allows Asheville residents to order their Velvet Sin and Ancient Pleasures truffles from home and bypass the […]

No offense to Carmel’s Restaurant and Bar, but I figure it won’t be long before a hot hip-hop dance club opens in its location in the southeast end of the Grove Arcade. With the opening of Carmel’s, a classy steak-and-seafood joint, the corner of Battery Park and Page avenues has cemented its reputation as the […]

Flavor: Creative ItalianAmbiance: Cool class that wouldn’t be out of place on a Manhattan side street Modesto’s owner/chef Hector Diaz at the restaurant’s wood-fired oven. photos by Jodi Ford There’s a whole lot of erratic underlining on Modesto’s dinner menu. The resultant herky-jerky effect is something like the experience of eating at Modesto, a paean […]

Success is a dish best served with blue cheese, as the thousands of entrepreneurs who’ve cashed in on the national chicken-wing craze have discovered. The bewitching blend of butter and hot sauce that Anchor Bar co-owner Teressa Bellissimo legendarily concocted in 1964 to quench raging teenage appetites has become big business, with nearly three-quarters of […]

The flames have gone out at Wild Fire, the much-heralded Waynesville institution that wooed locals and tourists alike with its spicy Pad Thai and incomparable chocolate cake. The restauarnt served its last meal at its Main Street location earlier this month: According to a restaurant staffer, the owner plans to set up shop in a […]

Flavor: Just like Nonna used to make Ambiance: Hamishe with a flair I’m willing to wager Sorrento d’Italia’s regular customers won’t read this review. Not because they aren’t Xpress readers — although the diners I saw certainly didn’t fit the stereotype of alternative news junkies — but because they’re already convinced Sorrento’s serves the best […]

Flavor: Straight off the Mexican street Ambiance: Cut-rate fast-food joint Americans are suckers for eating out. According to some studies, as many as two out of every three meals consumed in this country are prepared by professionals (meaning the meal eaten at home likely comes from a Styrofoam container crammed with last night’s leftovers.) photos […]

Chef Ann Cooper, the self-billed “renegade lunch lady,” makes two appearances in Asheville this week. Cooper’s manifesto, Lunch Lessons: Changing the Way we Feed our Children (HarperCollins, 2006), calls for schools to serve nutritious, local foods — and for public-policy changes to support the move. Then, at 7 p.m. on Saturday, Jan. 13, Cooper will […]

Flavor: Good ol’ Southern cooking Ambiance: Hand-shaking, knee-slapping, high-energy lunch spot I confess I had some trepidation about eating lunch in a church. Places of worship are generally good places to find inner peace, not a blue-plate special. As a child, I certainly ate my share of post-service snacks at synagogue, but lemon bars and […]

Flavor: Creative Italian Ambiance: Cool class that wouldn’t be out of place on a Manhattan side street Modesto’s owner/chef Hector Diaz at the restaurant’s wood-fired oven. photos by Jodi Ford There’s a whole lot of erratic underlining on Modesto’s dinner menu. In what looks like a slapdash effort to enhance the readability of the text-packed […]

A few words of advice for the no-fun-niks harrumphing about the country’s homogenization: Eat more hot dogs. According to wiener taxonomists, there are no fewer than two dozen regional variations on the snack, from northeastern Massachusetts’ boiled Frankfurt rolls to Seattle’s cream-cheese-wearing dogs. In the 150 years since an entrepreneurial German-American (historians debate over whether […]