Edible ornaments aren’t just for occupational-therapy patients or bird-loving revelers anymore. The Food Network is readying to award $10,000 to the winner of its televised Edible Ornament Challenge at the Grove Park Inn today (Wednesday, Dec. 6). You better believe these competitors aren’t just thinking popcorn garlands and pinecones smeared with peanut butter. The public […]
Author: Hanna Rachel Raskin
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Blackwater Grille
Flavor: Upscale AppalachianAmbiance: Rustic warmth in unlikely strip mall location I am not the target audience for Blackwater Grille in Laurel Park. Most folks in this upscale speck of a town, which bumps up against the western edge of Hendersonville, are retirees – according to the most-recent census data, the median age here is 58.6. […]
Small Bites
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 to credit Charles Feltman of Brooklyn or Antonoine Feuchtwanger of St. Louis as inventor of the nation’s […]
Everything new is old again
A-B Tech restoration program students learn to bring life to aging interiors — and to make new interiors look like they’ve weathered a few years. photo by Blake Madden There aren’t too many places in Asheville where “trompe l’oeil” qualifies as a punch line. But on a recent weekday afternoon at A-B Tech’s Ivy Building, […]
C.F. Chan’s
Flavor: A voyage through Asia, with a long layover in ChinaAmbiance: This was Beanstreets? While nobody would walk into C.F. Chan’s thinking they’d just gotten off a slow boat to China, the downtown spot – in the space formerly occupied by Beanstreets – does manage to serve up a solid menu of Far East fare. […]
Stone House Market
Flavor: Vaguely continentalAmbiance: Warm and cozy Damn you, Stone House Market. When I told friends I’d be reviewing restaurants for the Xpress, the most frequent response was a cocked eyebrow and a soul-scouring “Will you tell the truth?” These wary diners, most of whom had lived in other mid-sized markets where the resident critics had […]
Something to choo-choo on
courtesy Great Smoky Mountains Railway The Great Smoky Mountains Railway dinner train was crawling with characters on a recent Friday evening when it pulled out of its Dillsboro depot. Members of the mammoth WNC tourism venture’s self-styled Nightshade Mystery Theater had taken on the roles of Snake, a washed-up rocker with a weakness for ladies; […]
Fine flea-market fare
photo by Hanna Rachel Raskin The prettiest words in the Spanish language are “dos con todos.” Cervantes fans may protest, but the venerated author never wrote a phrase that could be so easily exchanged for gustatory enlightenment. I added the words to my gringo vocabulary – startlingly limited despite spending a few semesters in junior […]
Now … for something … different
Sign language not required: Todd Barry Comedian Todd Barry is playing the Grey Eagle this weekend in a pretty newsy appearance: The Clingman Avenue music hall has never before hosted a comic act. But in talking with Barry, one wonders whether the best venue for his material is instead his own mind. Barry, whose dry-as-sawdust […]
Comfortably numb?
One of the first assignments in Lori Horvitz’s introductory Women’s Studies course at UNCA this semester was to select the films for the school’s annual feminist film festival. Horvitz’s students — many so new to the discipline they still twisted their tongues on favorite WoSt alliterations like “patriarchal paradigm” and “inherent ideology” — pored over […]
In her father’s church
Charissa King-O’Brien married her partner in the Long Island church where her father is pastor. In documenting her journey, she redefined her views of the “f word.” Charissa King-O’Brien, whose film In My Father’s Church will kick off the Sixth Annual F-Word Film Festival at UNCA, never considered her work “feminist.” But as she grappled […]
Cannibalism not required
Cliffhangers, controversy … and paragliding grandpas. Some Banff films have begun to explore the existential side of adventure. Return2Sender-Bugout, ©Jean-Michel Casanova, courtesy of the Banff Centre Extreme-sports fans are wary of any activity that doesn’t come saddled with warnings and disclaimers, so here are a few for the ever-popular Banff Mountain Film Festival World Tour, […]
Like an Andie sighting, only funnier
The movies tell two types of tales about small-town dreamers and cinematic fame. In the first story, an aspiring star quits his/her job at Mr. Yokel’s grocery and buys a bus ticket to Hollywood, where home is a seedy motel and the only friendly faces belong to rapacious drug dealers and con men. For those […]
You don’t have to be a Mouse King to be in this show
As exciting as it is to watch a perfectly synchronized corps of white-tutu-ed ballerinas execute graceful arabesques, the real thrill for many audience members at the Russian National Ballet’s performance of Swan Lake will be staying up past their bedtimes. Swan Lake has a special hold on the kiddie set. According to the troupe’s artistic […]
In their blood
At my childhood library, the librarians – perhaps in a kind acknowledgment of their patrons’ only recently acquired literacy – painstakingly pasted thumb-sized hieroglyphic labels to the spine of each young-adult novel, indicating the book’s basic subject matter. A rough approximation of a horse’s head promised an equine adventure. Romances were marked with plump hearts, […]
Climbing every mountain
The hills are alive: The Von Trapp Children will appear at WCU’s new performing-arts center. How do you solve a problem like filling the seats of a brand-new, $30 million performance venue in a place most art snobs charitably call the middle of nowhere? Hire the Von Trapp Children, the latest incarnation of the beloved […]
Dog days
Mentioning demonstrators and the 2008 Beijing Olympics in the same sentence is enough to give shudders to International Olympic Committee members, who’ve already watched Free Tibet activists unfurl red banners embroidered with barbed-wire Olympic rings at the competition complex in China and at the 2004 Summer Games closing ceremonies in Athens. But not every demonstration […]
Weird science
For an eighth grader with designs on coolness, there’s only one peer-sanctioned response to a long lecture on bugs’ mating habits: boredom. Notebook doodling, loud gaping yawns – perhaps even a head slumped on the desk, for good measure – are all effective means of ensuring fellow pubescent classmates there isn’t some geeky girl-repelling chemistry […]
Nursing an obsession
by Hanna Miller Imagine a group of mostly mismatched strangers, all hailing from different backgrounds, united only by obsession, who wrench an emotional community from enforced physical closeness. That’s a pretty apt descriptor for the institutionalized men who populate One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. It’s also a fair characterization of the cast of Asheville […]
Only slightly more expensive than popping bubble wrap
Nearly 100 million Americans will celebrate the New Year by making resolutions, a well-intentioned exercise in ridding oneself of pesky habits that inevitably reappear around mid-February. But according to studies (resolution #1: Stick to the facts, at least in print) easily obtainable online (resolution #2: Spend less time online), goal setters have a better chance […]
A not-so-angry fix
If ever there were a beatnik approach to event planning, Thomas Rain Crowe, organizer and emcee of Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center’s upcoming tribute to Allen Ginsberg, exemplifies it. “The point is, this is where I live,” says Crowe, explaining why the celebration was scheduled for Asheville. Ginsberg wasn’t from Asheville, didn’t live […]