I'm sitting in the West Virginia woods, crouched against a tree, my fingers balled up in the palms of my camouflage gloves and my eyes trained on a point about 30 yards away. Through my itchy woolen facemask, I see brittle piles of leaves. I see weather-beaten twigs, which become exponentially more interesting after an […]

• The Wine Studio Of Asheville
• Nothing "Crummy" About It; A Correction
• United Way Fundraisers
• The Blackbird
• Organic Growers School

• The Lobster Trap
• Beacon Pub
• The Wine Guy
• Cook-Out

If you've somehow managed not to get to Chai Pani yet, here's what you need to know about the supremely energetic Indian street-food eatery: The place was so popular its first week that its owners were forced to close their doors, turn customers away and spend a few days figuring out how they were going […]

• ASAP
• Asheville Independent Restaurant Association
• Fred's Speakeasy
• Tupelo Honey
• Southern Highland Craft Guild

College may very well be intellectually enthralling and socially beguiling, but all that excitement calls for small sacrifices. As any frosh will readily confirm, being a full-time student means wearing flip-flops in the shower, sharing the remote for the student-lounge T.V. and giving up one's garden. Courtesy James G.K. McClure Jr. Farmers Federation Collection, Southern […]

• Craggie Brewing Company
• Dining Out For Thanksgiving
• Decades
• Caffiend

It's probably not American wine drinkers' fondness for lots of alcohol and oak that most thoroughly confounds Old World wine lovers: It's their tendency to let fictional characters tell them what to drink. In one of the goofier episodes in American wine history, a film intended to celebrate the joys of oenophilia nearly decimated an […]

• Wasabi
• Lee Bros
• Green Man Brewing
• Pies In Disguise

The tourists strolling through downtown Asheville on a weekend night might appear to be window-shopping or people-watching, but that's not all those wide-eyed visitors are doing: More often than not, they're waiting for a table. An hourlong wait for a restaurant meal isn't uncommon in Asheville, where locals' laissez-faire attitudes toward reservations and the universal […]

• Sazerac
• Waking Life
• Sugar Beet Cafe

Like most homegrown cuisines, Appalachian cookery is rife with makeshift techniques and food-stretching ingenuity. But for pure resourcefulness, no mountain dish can match buried cabbage, an underground delicacy for which the preservation period starts this month. The recipe for buried cabbage sounds like the punch line to a "How poor was he?" joke: In the […]

• Asheville Ale House
• Rezaz
• Razcal's

• French Broad Chocolate Lounge
• Buffalo Wild Wings
• Raw Food
• Grove Park Inn

To achieve the goal of eating closer to home, last month some food activists took a trip to a very faraway place. Asheville's Appalachian Sustainable Agriculture Project this fall hosted its first-ever Local Food Institute, designed to familiarize local-food-market developers from Tennessee to Toledo with ways to energize their economies. For three days, participants tromped […]

• Hard Lox Cafe
• The Green Sage
• Grove Park Inn
• The Lobster Trap
• Fall Menus

I always thought the expression "slow as molasses" referred to the viscous liquid's stubbornly glacieresque pace: You could probably upend a bottle of the stuff while your pancakes were still being plated and not have to worry about a drop touching the table. That's pretty slow. Photos by Kenny Raskin But, as it turns out, […]

• Pies In Disguise
• Straightaway Cafe
• West Asheville Tailgate Market

• Chai Pani
• Oktoberfest
• Canyon Kitchen

On the "-est" lists of Asheville restaurants, there are plenty of venues that surpass The Market Place, which isn't the oldest, ritziest, boldest, biggest or hippest place in town. Indeed, the restaurant is so staunchly understated that Frommer's once described it as "somehow undervalued and underappreciated."  But Mark Rosenstein can take solace in knowing he […]

• Asheville Tourists
• Root Bar
• Thomas Wolfe House
• Future Legends Of Barbecue