Standouts include accara (black-eyed pea fritters) with sorghum mustard and piri piri yogurt, and spiced oxtail with curried onions-a nod to the popularity of oxtails at restaurants on The Block during its heyday. The just-opened Foundry Hotel, set in The Block’s historic center, celebrates that history with its restaurant, Benne on Eagle.Ĭhef John Fleer and his firebrand chef de cuisine Ashleigh Shanti have devised a menu that draws on black Appalachian cooking, blending in West African tradition. From the 1920s through the 1990s it was a place of segregation but then also of pride, business, and community. This area, long known as “The Block,” was once Asheville’s most prominent African-American neighborhood. Yet like all Southern cities, the surface charm belies a complicated history. If you love to eat and drink, you will likely gravitate toward that tangle of downtown-adjacent streets where such diverse outfits as Katie Button’s Spanish restaurant Cúrate, French Broad Chocolate Lounge, and Wicked Weed Brewing Pub lend a worldly personality to this Smoky Mountain town. How easy it is to fall hard for the progressive spirit of Asheville-a place of drum circles and street buskers, meditation retreats and organic food co-ops. Those are two of the five restaurants, presented here in alphabetical order, that kept us excited this year-both to eat and to see where Southern food goes next. At Houston’s UB Preserv, which opened in May, chefs Chris Shepherd and Nick Wong showed diners a whole new way to cook collards. In Asheville, for example, chefs John Fleer and Ashleigh Shanti began exploring the intersection where Appalachian cooking meets African-American traditions at Benne on Eagle, which opened this November. Every year, a new crop of restaurants continues to expand the universe of Southern food.
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