Helene shakes Asheville food scene to its core

This is where my Asheville time began.

Storm clouds brewing in the Caribbean. Warnings getting louder. Flooding beginning in a city, then getting worse. Confusion and lots of unknowns. Checking news sites. Reports of deaths slowly emerging, followed by an emerging realization that the damage is massive. Residents engaging quickly in cooperative self-help, with outside aid starting to flow in. Checking news sites again.

That was what my world looked like when I first moved to Asheville from Sacramento at the end of August 2005. I was safe and sound, monitoring Katrina from afar. I raised funds for folks with Food Not Bombs and the Rainbow Gathering, who were teaming up to open free food kitchens. A sympathetic Asheville community donated heavily to these efforts.

And this time I’m in the affected city, though one of the lucky ones on higher ground, with electricity out only 30 hours, well water, and cell service that is often there.

Most of the “lucky” ones in greater Asheville—who weren’t close to a creek, and didn’t have a tree fall on their car or house—faced the prolonged loss of electricity for lights and refrigerators, water for washing and flushing, and cell service. In this modern world, we talk about getting dumb phones again or going on digital fasts. But when you only know what people tell you, or can’t relay when you’re in trouble, not having cell service is very stressful.

My cell service was restored by Sunday. I used it to ask Hanna Raskin if The Food Section planned to write about the Asheville food industry in the wake of the storm; she responded with an assignment. So, on Monday, I started poking around.

After filling up jugs from my well for others, my first stop was Firestorm Books, an anarchist-leaning coffeeshop in West Asheville. The bookstore is in its third location, having bought a Haywood Road building from “Dr. Dave” Anderson, one of three local hippie VW mechanics.

(Disclosure: I had my VW serviced there, back when I still used it. A few days ago, my landlord pulled the van—waters halfway up the tires and rising—out of the flood plain with a tractor. A creek had traveled 200 feet across the field to become a 300-foot-wide river.)

I got to Firestorm just as a meeting of 250 people was breaking up. “I’ve been the facilitator for two days now,” the facilitator announced, “and it’s time for someone else to do it tomorrow.” I got the sense that this was less out of burnout—though guiding a meeting of 250 people is no easy task—than political philosophy: No one should amass too much power.

There were more than five tables in front of Firestorm, with canopy tents over some of them: food and non-food items, a big jug of water for filling bottles. There might have been some donation jars, but everything was free: My first glimpse of a money-free Asheville.

I was lucky to talk with Libertie Valance, who’s been a collective member longer than anyone else. She explained how it was that people assembled daily at 2 p.m.:

“Someone—not one of us in the collective—put up a sign Friday afternoon that said ‘Community Meeting, here, Saturday 2 p.m. We figured that those of us in the collective should show up.”

As did 40 people that Saturday afternoon, followed by 400 people on Sunday. One of them asked Libertie, “Are y’all FEMA?” Of course, I understood from Libertie that the distribution of food, water, and other essentials, such as tampons and flashlights, was in fact the work of punks and anarchists.

“This whole thing is inspiring,” she told me. “We’re using equipment that came from Standing Rock,” the 2016 grassroots action against the Dakota Access Pipeline.

After I left Firestorm, I walked a block down Haywood Road to the Patton Avenue intersection. The Shell station there didn’t have any gas, but there were three or four cars at the pumps, driven by people just waiting and hoping they might come online.

I turned my attention to The Plug, a tobacco and cannabis product store, where a busy staffer was dealing with a line of cars at their drive-in window. While marijuana is not legal in North Carolina (except for the newly opened store on the Qualla Boundary, 60 miles away), CBD products are OK.

Why were they so busy? Cooped-up demand? No.

“It’s insane,” the attendant shouted. “People are stocking up for another hurricane,” referring to the widespread but false belief that one or more the four pre-hurricane systems in the Caribbean that afternoon would develop into more devastating storms in Western North Carolina.

One person who’s attuned to what’s on the minds of Asheville restaurant owners is Jenny Townsend, the owner of Kickback Delivery, an independent local competitor to DoorDash. (Disclosure: I am a Kickback driver a few hours a month.)

Asked about the middle-term future of the next four months, she sighed. Most people do when I ask that question.

Still, she said, “I’m hopeful. We should have water in a month, and then restaurants can begin cleanup and operation. We got through [Covid], and we can get through another [crisis].”

Cat Fitzgerald, the co-owner of Regina’s, said the current situation is “triggering a lot of Covid-like emotions” for members of the hospitality industry, many of whom were emotionally scarred by laying off staff and closing restaurants.

I met Fitzgerald in front of her one-year-old restaurant on Patton Avenue. She was standing behind a table of free items. Having lived in Atlanta before moving to Asheville, many of the items were donated from her network there.

“The nice thing about Asheville is that it’s always been kind of weird, and the weird people take care of one another,” she said.

Asked about the coming months, she responded like Townsend did. She took a silent drag on her cigarette, then said, “I’m literally just living one day at a time.” Only when pressed did she reveal that most of her savings are in this restaurant, which she bought with a partner a few months ago.

Next to Firestorm, Diatribe Brewing Co. is open for business. Owner and head brewer Dave Byer opened the Sunday after the storm without power, but with help from another bartender and brewer, Matt Huntley of downtown’s The Bier Garden. I assume they were charging for beer, but got the sense they weren’t there to make money; there’s been no word-of-mouth here about looting or gouging schemes. They wanted to provide community, to chip in by doing what they do best.

Byer stated what’s obvious to anyone who has lived more than a year in Asheville: He and everyone else in food-and-beverage will lose the money that comes from leaf season in Asheville, the autumn windfall that gets restaurants and bars through the lean months of January, February, and March.

As I’m writing this on Thursday morning, Gov. Roy Cooper has just said, “We’re continuing to ask people not to come. And that’s tough…but I’ve talked with people in the Chamber of Commerce, they understand that meeting people’s immediate needs, saving lives, is first.”

This is sensible and reasonable.

It also spells economic disaster for this tourist town.

Did you know that it takes five gallons of water to make one gallon of beer?

Me neither. But that means that in a city short on water, but full of breweries, that there is a lot of water in tanks. And it won’t be needed in the near-term for beer.

Most restaurants are closed. This is because there is no water, and you can’t legally open without clean water. In fact, in all my wandering, I only noticed three restaurants that were open: Two upscale places in the Grove Arcade downtown, and a Chinese place, which on Monday had $5 to-go containers at a table out front.

This is crucial, and bears repeating. Tourism is the heart of Asheville’s economy. Restaurants are the core of tourism. Until there is water, there are no restaurants. And no matter how many gallons are stored in the breweries, it’s not enough. Assuming there is any left after they give it out to a community in need of water for drinking, cleaning, and cooking (people are using creek water for flushing.)

And speaking of flushing—it is important and wonderful to note that the outgoing water system is fine. It is the incoming clean water that is a problem. Memories linger of waterline breaks which cut off water to tens of thousands of Asheville residents over the 2022 holidays, an episode that left many people profoundly distrustful.

While one of the city’s three drinking water treatment plants is partially functioning, the other two—including the main facility—are damaged.

At River Arts District Brewing on Tuesday, owner Robert “Lem” Lemery was hard at work, sorting food. The brewery has 600 gallons of drinking quality water, and he shared a few gallons with me. I didn’t need them for myself, so took them to a woman who works downtown in emergency management, right next to where a huge water truck is parked. She felt selfish taking from it because she felt others needed it more.

As best I can tell, she is no exception. At least in downtown and West Asheville, generosity and sharing are in abundance.

World Central Kitchen is set up on South Slope, with dozens of volunteers, local and otherwise, in t-shirts. Strangely, though, conversation is hard with the workers: They have an official media person, reachable only by email. I admire the many good things about World Central Kitchen, about its work in Washington D.C., Gaza, and elsewhere, but in the informal world of Asheville, they are a bureaucracy.

A block away is Burial Beer Co. I talk to co-founder Tim Gormley, who’s looking for a generator. Both of Burial’s facilities are powerless, as is Gormley’s house. After I probe a little, he reveals his worries about beer spoiling. He shares some technical details that go over my head—was it beer fermenting at 68 degrees, and being stored at 32 degrees thereafter?—but it’s clear that he’s got a thermometer and sense of quality control, as I imagine all brewers do.

Burial has a big event coming up: the Burn Pile Festival, scheduled for October 12. They’ll have to pay the touring bands they booked, the loads of beer they bought, and refund the tickets. 

Gormley didn’t say any of that in a whining or self-interested tone. I asked, and he answered. “Ways to recuperate will emerge,” Burial’s co-owner said. “People bought things from us in the states where is it legal to receive beer by mail. We’ve gotten so many texts and messages.”

A block over, at Green Man Brewery, with its huge two-story water tanks, a party is underway. Staff members came to the locked building to hang out, catch up, and blow off steam. It’s better than sitting around at home.

As I return home via West Asheville, I’m surprised to see that the normal Tuesday afternoon farmers market is underway. 

I’m not the only one who didn’t expect this. The vendors didn’t either.

Vinnie Bonanno, the executive director of the tailgate market, explained, “I reached out to our regular vendors to find out who might want to show up, and to other market directors, to find out if any of their people wanted to show up.”

Fifteen of the 40 regular vendors made it to market. Of the 25 that didn’t show:

• One chicken farm lost every bird in its flock
• Another farm lost its entire crop and is done for the year
• Another farm donated its food to local relief efforts
• Others haven’t been heard from

It is worth noting that the best farmland is “bottom land,” the flat area near creeks, where the silt from past floods has built up the soil over centuries.

The band playing for marketgoers? They simply showed up, on the chance there might be a need for music.

At some point, I bump James Robertson, the catering manager at Chai Pani, now a growing group of restaurants owned by Meherwan Irani. “You think you understand a concept like community support,” he tells me. “And then you have an experience that gives you a much deeper understanding of it.”

That was SO Asheville.

When I first arrived in Asheville, one often heard the phrase, “That is so Asheville.” Back then, life was perpetually like the first week of college: It was easy to make friends with newcomers, and those who had been around longer were much friendlier than people in the places we had come from.

Here’s an example: My first week here, I rented a new film that I really wanted to watch from Orbit DVD. Then when I got home, I realized I had lost it. I walked back to the store and explained that I wanted to buy the copy I lost and then rent another.

“That’s OK,” replied the clerk. “Someone will find it and return it. What film did you want again?” And he handed me the film at no charge.

Someone DID find it and return it. (I think I left it on the ground at a Katrina benefit.)

That is SO Asheville. Or was, for a while. I think the moment that I realized things had changed was in 2014, when I saw a bunch of tourists in a gaggle near Orbit, being led around by someone. I asked what was up. A food tour. Well, I thought, there goes the neighborhood.

Apart from a compliment paid last month to a wonderful bread seller, I hadn’t used the “SO Asheville” phrase in at least 14 years.

It’s not that I blame the people who’ve come here. The difference between anywhere else in the U.S. and Asheville was so enormous that moving to Asheville was a no-brainer, if one could swing it.

“How do we keep Asheville a great place?” a workshop leader asked a few months after I moved here. I responded, “Make Akron, Ohio a nicer place to live.” The poor workshop leader didn’t get it at all.

The point of this very long digression is that to say that the old Asheville is back. Amidst the grief, misery and destruction is the cooperative, generous spirit that made this place great.

But let’s make Akron a nicer place to live, shall we?

Jim Barton is a restaurant worker and freelance writer who has called Asheville home since August 2005.

How to help: If you can afford to donate money, rather than goods, that’s what relief groups need most. In addition to the vetted list of organizations maintained by Blue Ridge Public Radio, Jim suggests donating to the Mother Earth Food Hub, the Grassroots Aid Partnership, and the Asheville Poverty Initiative. Furthermore, if you’re looking to read up on western North Carolina or political, economic, and environmental factors contributing to the current crisis, Firestorm Books accepts book orders online.