Glimpsing the Back Story of a Town’s Restaurant History

Nan Chase says the suggestion for a book about restaurants that once existed in Asheville puzzled her. “Why would anyone want to read about businesses that are gone now?” she thought.

“But as I did the research, I quickly fell in love with the topic. The project was really history: social history, how people lived, how national economic trends affected individual family businesses, and so on.”

The result was Lost Restaurants of Asheville, the latest in a series of “lost” Americana published by The History Press, part of a litany of lost community titles including lost ski areas, lost attractions, and lost car companies.

“It blew my mind that in the space of about 50 years, roughly 1920 until 1970, this country went from the horse-and-buggy days to the space age. So many changes, so much nostalgia,” Chase said. “In the end, I was thrilled to get an on-the-ground look at it all, including the immigrant stories, the racial situation, how malls destroyed downtowns. Mostly, the hard, hard work that goes into running a restaurant.”

The book offers a glimpse into the back story of 30 restaurants that fed the people in Asheville over the decades. From the Stockyard Cafe, which served up meals for those frequenting the colorful stockyards and livestock markets along the French Broad River, to Stone Soup, a 1977-era, worker-owned soup-and-sandwich shop that was “a pioneer of Asheville’s farm-to-table movement,” the establishments paint a portrait of a growing Appalachian city.

“I had a great interest in Asheville’s food scene,” having patronized several of the places profiled in the book even before writing another book about Asheville, Chase said.

“Well before I started work on Asheville: A History,” I had done a lot of travel writing — around the 1990s — about Asheville’s rebirth. Of course, that led me to many evolving restaurants of downtown. In a bigger sense I have been writing about food for a long time.”

She ate at the Hot Shot Cafe (best eggs Benedict), Burgermeister’s (for the adult milkshakes), Magnolia’s (always during Bele Chere), Three Brothers (spanikopita), Laurey’s, and La Caterina Trattoria. “That last one was special, as my husband and I got to know the owners, and the food and ambience were wonderful,” Chase said.

One of the restaurants profiled in the book is Rabbits, a popular but largely unheralded African American-owned and focused restaurant.

“You couldn’t eat in a white run restaurant,” says Louella Byrd, who is kin to Rabbit’s founder, in the book. “There was nowhere for black people to go.”

Except, that is, for Rabbit’s, which was included in the famed Green Book for African American motorists traveling the country.

Diners there offered glowing reviews, Chase writes. Take the side dishes, one wrote. “It would be easy to make a complete dinner of these, accompanied only by a slab of homemade cornbread. The green beans and squash were delicious, the macaroni and cheese was to die for, the black-eyed peas were amazing but the collard greens … were the best any of us had ever had,” she quotes in the book.

Chase is sorry she missed Rabbit’s, which opened just after World War II and was serving into the 1990s. “The Rabbit’s apple cinnamon pork chops sounded outrageous,” she said.

Like so many American cities, Asheville saw an influx of migrants who created or worked in food service, offering everything from sandwiches or take-out to classic meals with offerings from a sommelier and pastry chef.

As is so often the case, the restaurants, no matter how successful, had their heyday and then disappeared, possibly due to rising real estate prices, bad economies, or just because children or grandchildren of the owners were’t interested in spending their lives working in a hot kitchen.

Yet the memories remain, if only in archived newspapers or books like hers.

Chase says Asheville has often surprised her, and it took time for her to grasp “how long Asheville has been a food-producing, food-preparing center. Take the story of Biltmore Dairy. Not all the visitors to the mansion know about the key role that Vanderbilt played in modern farming in the South; truly epic, and agriculture is still a focus of the estate’s operations,” she said.

All in all, food, whether experienced immediately or perhaps only vicariously imagined through archived menus and brittle newspaper advertising, is never boring, she said. “The topic of food from and in Asheville is always evolving, always marvelous and exciting,” Chase said.