Asheville’s Big Attraction, Its Food Scene, Tries to Hit Reset
The New York Times
Hurricane Helene’s floods have wreaked lasting damage on a tourist town whose nationally recognized restaurants are especially vulnerable to disasters.
Earlier this month, Drew Wallace started paying the cooks, bussers and the rest of the 20 or so employees of his restaurant the Bull and Beggar, in Asheville, N.C., for the first time since two feet of river water flooded its dining room in September.
“It’s a really victorious feeling,” Mr. Wallace said, his feet planted on a floor that had recently been buried under several inches of fine brick-colored silt. He seemed a little surprised as the words came out of his mouth. “It’s strange to say, ‘I can’t wait for payroll to kick back in.’”
Payroll is one of the biggest expenses in operating a restaurant, but it can’t be funded unless there’s a restaurant to operate. In that sense, the Bull and Beggar is among the lucky ones. If it starts serving dinner again on Jan. 31, as Mr. Wallace hopes, it will be one of the first restaurants in Asheville to reopen after taking on water on Sept. 27, when Hurricane Helene tore through western North Carolina.
President Trump’s visit to Asheville on Friday brought a fresh round of media attention to Helene’s devastation in the state, estimated at $60 billion. The storm washed away buildings near the French Broad and Swannanoa Rivers. It also toppled what Stu Helm, who has led culinary tours of the city since 2016, likes to call the “three-legged bar stool” of Asheville’s tight-knit food community: “the growers, the makers and the eaters.”
While the lights are back on in most of the city’s bars and restaurants, those in the low-lying River Arts District and Biltmore Village neighborhoods are still dark. Bottle Riot, a wine bar next door to the Bull and Beggar, closed permanently, along with El Patio de Guajiro, the four-month-old brick-and-mortar site of a beloved Cuban food truck. Dozens of other trucks, bars, smokehouses, breweries and bakeries are gone. Gourmand, a nearby farm-to-table restaurant — the phrase is almost redundant in Asheville — was knocked off its foundation weeks before it was scheduled to open. The owners now aim to have it up and running next year.
