Asheville’s Restaurants Hit Reset After Hurricane Helene

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.

Eda Rhyne, a distillery that flavored its fernet and other spirits with Appalachian forest plants, and Plēb Urban Winery, which fermented grapes from Appalachian vines, were destroyed. So was the pottery studio that made the expressive little ceramic pigs that hold toothpicks on every table at the downtown tapas restaurant Cúrate.

About 90,000 people live in Asheville, but over the past decade or so its food scene has drawn the kind of national spotlight that typically shines on cities that are many times larger. Its farm-to-table restaurants and their chefs — Katie Button of Cúrate, Silver Iocovozzi of Neng Jr’s, John Fleer of Rhubarb, Meherwan Irani of Chai Pani, Ashleigh Shanti of Good Hot Fish and others — are regularly noticed by the James Beard awards, Food & Wine, Bon Appétit, Esquire and The New York Times. For several years its craft breweries won it the title Beer City USA in a drinkers’ poll by examiner.com.

As the eating and drinking scene has grown, so has tourism. Almost 14 million visitors came to the city and surrounding Buncombe County in 2023 — about 154 people for each resident. According to the local Chamber of Commerce, leisure and tourism make up the second-largest business sector in Asheville’s economy, after health care and education.

The outsize role that food and drink play, a source of strength in good times, made Asheville especially vulnerable to Helene. Damage to the reservoir system left the city without potable water until the middle of November. Even the many restaurants that weren’t flooded were unable to operate unless they could afford to buy clean water delivered by tanker trucks. One restaurateur who did, Mr. Irani, said private water cost him about $7,000 a month for each of his three Asheville restaurants, an amount that would have been far out of his budget a decade ago, when he owned just one small Chai Pani location.

For almost two months last fall, local officials asked tourists to stay away. Not that there was anywhere for them to stay, with most of the area’s roughly 90 hotels closed. The county’s unemployment rate spiked to 10.4 percent in October before falling slightly in November to 7.2 percent, according to the state’s Department of Commerce.

Although the quality and quantity of Asheville’s places to eat and drink are striking for its size, in many ways it is typical of towns and cities across the United States that fell apart after World War II but are thriving in the 21st-century service economy, led by restaurants and other small businesses.

This new order, though, is remarkably fragile, as seen in the pandemic, the Los Angeles fires and countless major storms. Mass closings of restaurants can ruin their owners, destroy jobs and ripple out to dozens of vendors, who are often small, independent operators themselves.

“Every dollar that comes in our door goes right back out to our suppliers — local honey, cheese, eggs, our cleaning service,” said Ms. Button, the chef and owner of Cúrate. Since September, she has permanently laid off more than 50 employees of her company, which includes a wine club, a culinary travel program, a line of charcuterie and a second restaurant, La Bodega, which she said may not reopen.

Her insurance company has so far not reimbursed her for most of her business’s losses, she said, an all-too-common experience that has angered many restaurateurs in the city.

“It’s truly a fraudulent situation where the business-interruption insurance that everybody’s been paying for is not coming through,” said Molly Irani, chief hospitality officer of the Chai Pani Restaurant Group, which she founded with her husband, Meherwan. None of their establishments received business-interruption insurance money, either.

Federal programs to help small businesses survive natural disasters mostly take the form of loans that restaurateurs and other entrepreneurs with slim margins are reluctant to take on.

“This cannot happen anymore,” Ms. Button said. “Something has to change.”

For Asheville, the storm could not have come at a worse time, just as the mountain slopes around the city were starting to light up with scarlet and gold. Millions of leaf-peepers make October the busiest month of the year for the hospitality business. Thanksgiving and the weeks around Christmas are almost as profitable.

Then come 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 it stayed closed until mid-December. Its first few weeks back in business have been healthy.

“You kind of ride that wave of the holidays for a while and then people start to go down into their caves,” said Cherry Iocovozzi, who is married to and owns the restaurant with the chef, Silver Iocovozzi. “That’s my underlying anxiety right now, how slow will the next few months be.”

The Iocovozzis have delayed the opening of a Harmony, a small wine shop and bar down the hall from their restaurant, originally set for October. Bottles of natural wine are stacked up, and a complete set of the classic wine-cult manga “Drops of God” lines the shelves of a cabinet bought from a River Arts District antique shop that was destroyed by the storm.

“Once we realized we were going to stay open we thought, ‘Let’s dig in our heels here,’” Cherry Iocovozzi said.

In part because of the money the restaurant lost last year, Neng Jr’s is likely to drop its à la carte menu in favor of a fixed-price model. Silver Iocovozzi hopes the more predictable cash flow will allow him to spend more on regional farmers, who already supply about 60 percent of Neng Jr’s ingredients.

“I only want my money to go toward western North Carolina right now, and see everyone survive after this,” he said. “And see us survive.”

For the region’s farmers, the pain came from many directions. A landslide killed Brittany Robinson, the owner of Four Winds Farm in Boone, N.C., at age 36. Rushing waters drowned livestock, washed away whole fields and spoiled crops in the ground.

On Evan Chender’s farm in Weaverville, winds tore apart the steel frames of four of the eight plastic-covered tunnels where he grows mizuna, purple-leafed Padovano broccoli and several rare varieties of radicchio that can be found in the kitchens of Neng Jr’s and a handful of other restaurants. In 2023, Mr. Chender sold $635,000 worth of produce. All of it went to fewer than two dozen restaurants within 30 miles of his land, some of which have been buying from him since his first week, in 2013.

Before September, “I felt like I had finally figured it out,” he said. Local restaurants “were getting their quantity and their quality, and we were making a lot of money. Now it’s really hard to say what the future looks like.”

The storm also destroyed the home of one of the city’s oldest and most popular farmers’ markets, in the River Arts District. The vendors have moved to a parking lot on a windswept hill on the campus of Asheville-Buncombe Technical Community College, but the crowds seem not to have followed them yet.

On a frostbitten Wednesday afternoon, Gwen Englebach stood behind baskets of shaggy lion’s manes, amber-colored chestnut mushrooms and other fungi she and her husband grow at Black Trumpet Farm in Leicester, N.C. She said sales for the month at the new site were about 75 percent what they were at the old market last January. Mushroom purchases by restaurants have taken a hit, too.

“They’re just doing what they can to stay afloat,” she said.

In West Asheville and other areas outside the flood zone, business goes on as usual, although downtown is so empty on weeknights that on one recent night men were racing toy remote-control cars in the middle of the street.

To spread the word that it’s safe to dine in Asheville again, the visitor’s bureau is spending $700,000 to air a TV ad, “Be Part of the Comeback,” with footage of smiling chefs and a couple drinking at one of downtown’s rooftop bars. Asheville Restaurant Week was just produced by the Chamber of Commerce in January as usual, with more than 50 establishments offering discounts or deals, but this year the chamber is repeating the promotion in February.