Southern Road Trip: Asheville/Nashville/Asheville

We decided to make our recent visit to Nashville by car rather than fly as we have the last few times we’ve gone to see our daughter Zoe. To break up the boring six hours+ trip and to reward ourselves for our faux frugality, we added one-night stopovers in Asheville in both directions.

Nashville continues to boom, with a sky full of cranes and tons of new restaurants and bars to try. It is said that in the US, most innovations start on the west coast and migrate east. In Nashville the poles are reversed: most of things weird and new can be found in East Nashville. Two new restaurants (at least new to us) make my point.

We had an excellent experience at the Peninsula, a small, well-lighted corner space that features creative takes on Iberian cuisine. We were tended to by co-founders Craig Schoen and wife Yuriko Say. They did not steer us wrong, recommending a series of sharable plates from the limited menu. The four of us agreed that grouper with navy beans in a horseradish foam and the braised rabbit with pimentón in a garlic broth were our favorites. The wine list was very short with only two reds, but both proved worthy companions to the wonderful food.

The next evening, we returned to East Nashville to try a very new hotspot called simply lou. Zoe writes for the Nashville-based magazine StyleBlueprint and had been invited to their opening where she had been impressed enough to book a table for us. Lou is a café/wine bar. It is a labor of love by Chef Mailea Weger, who came to Nashville after stints that included cooking in Paris (Café A, Echo Deli), New Orleans (Herbsaint) and LA (Gjusta and its sister Gjelina). Labor she does, as Lou is open for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Garrulous and restless, she frequently leaves the kitchen to chat with diners.

lou’s cozy interior and natural wine selection. Image credit: lou

The setting is an old house, conveying a welcoming, homey atmosphere. Every dish we tried at lou was outstanding. They offer an excellent house wine, a French blend, by the half liter. The highlight of our meal was a fitting climax, a dessert of dark chocolate semifreddo. This chunk of deliciousness was a creation of pastry chef Sasha Piligian who honed her craft at LA’s hyper- popular Café Sqirl. Be sure to save room for whatever she is offering, even if you’re there for breakfast, when they also offer glasses of wine left over from the previous evening’s open bottles!

Both of meals in Asheville were wonderful, and in very different ways. Our first stop was at long-time favorite Cúrate. Chef Katie Button has created a Catalan restaurant that rivals many in Barcelona. It is now double its original size and yet has lost none of its charm. The menu changes slightly, reflecting seasonal availability of certain items such as Padrón peppers, and the regular offerings never get old. We always have to get the white asparagus with mayonnaise foam. Button’s star continues to rise. She was not at Cúrate when we were there as she is nearing the completion of a two-month residency at New York’s NoLita’s Chef Club. The food back in Asheville did not suffer from her absence. Our meal was as delicious and enjoyable as any of our many previous visits.

On our return we tried a very new place, Benne on Eagle. It is located at the Foundry Hotel, which was developed from old brick industrial buildings in the historic black neighborhood called the Block. Chef John Fleer, who came to Asheville several years ago from Blackberry Farm to open his restaurant Rhubarb, created Benne and called upon a young African American chef, Ashleigh Shanti, to take charge. The result is brilliant, a restaurant that honors the history of its setting and the food traditions of its roots.

A chance encounter—we literally bumped into each other in the hallway-- with Chef Shanti before our visit gave me a few brief insights. She is very young (28!) but brimming with confidence and enthusiasm. She was charming and impressed me later by sending out an unordered dish for us to try.

I discovered that she was raised in the tiny Georgian coastal town of St. Mary. She spent a gap year before college in Kenya. Her travels after graduating from Hampton took her to such diverse spots as West Texas, Charleston, Baltimore.

The word benne is another name for “sesame”, one that was brought to the South from West Africa. Every Christmas, Allie makes benne wafer cookies from the recipe in the famous Charleston Receipts cookbook. They are a perennial hit at our holiday parties. The Italian word of the same pronunciation means good, which is totally fitting.

Excitingly different dishes at Benne on Eagle

I was disappointed to read several reviews of Benne that were less than glowing. Some criticized the service—ours was excellent—and others did not care for some of the food. Perhaps some people are not ready to try unfamiliar interpretations of Appalachian cuisine. We loved each of the dishes we tried at Benne. Allie especially enjoyed the cabbage pancake, an African American take on the wonderful Japanese dish okonomiyaki. I liked both the ogbono (another type of African seed) pork ribs with chowchow and the shrimp and scallops purloo, a traditional Southern dish with red rice, Benton’s bacon and a crawfish aioli.

You may have noticed there was something of an unintentional theme is our dining experiences on this trip: the feminization of restaurant kitchens! Why in the world have most of the celebrated chefs in the US and beyond been men? Most of them credit their love of food and introduction to cooking to their mothers and grandmothers. It’s about time that super-talented women such as those whose work I’ve enjoyed on this journey and praised here get the recognition they deserve.