Earlier this month, Drew Wallace began paying cooks, businessers and the other 20 employees of The Bull and Beggar restaurant at Asheville, NC, for the first time from two feet of the Water River flooded his dining room in September .
“It’s a really victorious feeling,” said Mr Wallace, his legs were planted on a floor that had recently been buried under several inches of fine brick. It seemed a little surprised as the words came out of his mouth. “It’s strange to say,” I can’t wait for the payroll to kick. ”
Payroll is one of the highest expenses for the operation of a restaurant, but it cannot be funded unless there is a restaurant to operate. In this sense, the Taurus and the beggar are among the lucky ones. If the dinner starts again on January 31, as Mr Wallace hopes, it will be one of the first restaurants in Asheville to reopen after taking water on September 27, when Hurricane Helene broke the western North Carolina.
President Trump’s visit to Asheville on Friday brought a new round of media attention to Helene’s destruction to the state, estimated at $ 60 billion. The storm was washed away buildings near French wide and swannanoa rivers. It was also overthrown by Stu Helm, who has led cooking to the city since 2016, wants to invite Asheville’s “three -foot bar” stool: “Growers, Manufacturers and Eathers”.
While the lights come back to most of the city bars and restaurants, those in the low -river and neighborhoods of Biltmore Village are still dark. Bottle Riot, a wine bar next to Taurus and the beggar, was permanently closed, along with El Patio de Guajiro, the four -year -old place and the mortar of a favorite Cuban food truck. Dozens of other trucks, bars, smokers, breweries and bakeries are gone. Gourmand, a nearby farm restaurant on a table-phrase is almost unnecessary in Asheville-was hit by the weeks of the foundation before it is scheduled to open. Owners are now aiming to operate it next year.
Eda Rhyne, a distillery that flavors its fernet and other spirits with Appalachian forest plants and the urban Plēb winery, which was fermented grapes by vineyards. So it was the pottery studio that made the expressive small ceramic pigs holding toothpicks at every table at the DownTown Tapas Cúrate restaurant.
About 90,000 people live in Asheville, but over the last decade or so the food scene has pulled the kind of national headlamp that usually shines in cities that are often larger. His restaurants and chefs Katie Button of Cúrate, NenG Jr’s silver Iocovozzi, John Fleer of Rhubarb, Charwan Irani of Chai Pani, Ashleigh Shanti from good hot fish and more and more are regularly from James Beard, Branches Beard, Food and Wine, Bon Appétit, Esquire and The New York Times. For several years his craft brewery has won the title Beer City USA in a poll by Examiner.com.
As the food and consumption scene has grown, tourism also has tourism. Nearly 14 million visitors came to the city and around the Buncombe County in 2023 – about 154 people for each resident. According to the Local Chamber of Commerce, recreation and tourism are the second largest business sector in the Asheville economy, after health care and education.
The huge role played by food and drinks, a source of power in good times, made Asheville particularly vulnerable to Helene. The damage to the tanker system abandoned the city without drinking water by mid -November. Even the many non -flooding restaurants could not operate unless they could afford to buy clean water delivered by tankers. A restaurant he did, Mr Irani, said his private water costs about $ 7,000 a week for each of Asheville’s three restaurant in a small point Chai Pani.
For almost two months last fall, local officials asked tourists to stay away. Not that there was anywhere to stay, with most of the about 90 hotels in the area closed. The unemployment rate of the county rose to 10.4 % in October before slightly decreased slightly in November to 7.2 %, according to the State Ministry of Commerce.
Although the quality and quantity of Asheville’s food and drink are impressive for its size, in many ways it is characteristic of cities and cities in the United States that fell after World War II but prosper in the economy of its services. 21st century, led by restaurants and other small businesses.
This new series, however, is extremely fragile, as shown in the pandemic, the Los Angeles fires and the countless large storms. Massive closures of restaurants can destroy their owners, destroy jobs and range from dozens of sellers who are often small, independent operators.
“Every dollar that comes to our door goes back to our suppliers – local honey, cheese, eggs, cleaning service,” said Ms. Button, the chef and owner of Cúrate. Since September, she has permanently abandoned more than 50 employees of her company, which includes a wine club, a gastronomic journey, a series of Charcuterie and a second La Bodega restaurant, which said she would not reoperate.
Her insurance company has not gained her so far for most of her business losses, she said, a very common experience that has outraged many restaurants in the city.
“It is really a fraudulent situation where the business interruption insurance for which everyone pays is not passed,” said Molly Irani, head of the Chai Pani restaurant hospitality, which she founded with her husband Meherwan. None of their foundations received business distribution insurance.
Federal programs to help small businesses survive natural disasters, are mostly taking on the form of loans that restaurants and other businessmen are reluctant to take over.
“This cannot happen anymore,” she said. Button. “Something has to change.”
For Asheville, the storm could not come in a worse moment, just like the slopes of the mountain around the city began to light in red and gold. Millions of leaves-Peepers make October the busiest month of the year for the hospitality. Thanksgiving and weeks around Christmas are almost as profitable.
Then they come in January and February, when the city is quiet even in normal years.
Neng Jr’s, on high ground in the West Asheville neighborhood, did not flood, but remained closed until mid -December. The first weeks back to business were healthy.
“You ride this holiday wave for a while and then people are starting to go down to their caves,” said Cherry Iocovozzi, who is married and holds the restaurant with the chef, silver ioCovozzi. “This is my underlying stress at the moment, how slow the next few months will be.”
Iocovozzis delayed the opening of a harmony, a small wine store and a bar under the room from their restaurant, initially for October. The bottles of natural wine are stacked and a complete set of classic manga manga “drops of God” Lines of a cabinet bought by a river Arts District Antique Shop destroyed by the storm.
“As soon as we realized that we were going to stay open, we thought,” let’s dig in our heels here, “said Cherry Iocovozzi.
In part because of the money lost to the restaurant last year, NENG JR’s is likely to throw his menu à la carte in favor of a fixed price model. Silver Iocovozzi hopes that the most predictable cash flow will allow it to spend more on regional farmers, who already provide about 60 % of NenG Jr. ingredients.
“I just want my money to go to western North Carolina right now and see everyone survive after that,” he said. “And see us survive.”
For the farmers of the area, the pain came from many directions. A landslide killed Brittany Robinson, the owner of Four Winds Farm on Boone, NC, at the age of 36.
At the Evan Chender farm in Weaverville, Winds cross the steel of four of the eight plastic tunnels where it grows Mizuna, purple broccoli leaf and several rare varieties of radio that can be found in the kitchens of NENG JR and a handful of other restaurants. In 2023, Mr Cender sold $ 635,000 products. Everything went to fewer than two dozen restaurants 30 miles from his land, some of which bought from him from his first week in 2013.
Before September, “I felt that I had finally understood it,” he said. The local restaurants “got their quantity and quality and we made a lot of money. Now it’s really hard to say what the future looks like.”
The storm also destroyed the house of one of the oldest and most popular markets for the city’s farmers in the river. Sellers have moved to a parking lot at a windswept Hill on the campus of Asheville-Buncombe Technical Community College, but the crowds seem to have not yet followed them.
In a frost on Wednesday afternoon, Gwen Englebach was behind Shaggy Lion’s knife baskets, chestnut mushroom About 75 what was on the old market last January. Restaurant mushroom markets have also got a hit.
“They do exactly what they can to stay in life,” he said.
In West Asheville and in other areas outside the flood zone, businesses continue as usual, although the city center is so empty in the weeks that in a recent night men were fighting with remote gaming cars in the middle of the road.
To spread the word that it is safe to dine again on Asheville, the visitor’s office spends $ 700,000 to broadcast a television advertisement, “to be part of the return”, with a smiling chef video and a couple drinking in one of the bar of the center of the center. The Bureau is also working with the James Beard Foundation to support a Food Policy Symposium in April, the Chef Action Summit. ASHEVILLE restaurants is just produced by the Chamber of Commerce in January as usual, with more than 50 facilities offering discounts or agreements, but this year the hall repeats the promotion in February.
