Cúrate, a Spanish tapas restaurant and one of the best-known eateries in Asheville, North Carolina, sat empty for two days after Hurricane Helene last September.
Then co-owner Katie Button reopened it alongside World Central Kitchen to provide meals for many community members who were without electricity and running water. To do so, Cúrate installed a tank and brought in clean water at the cost of $1,000 a day, racking up $30,000 in water, tank rental and delivery fees.
In mid-October, Cúrate – which won a 2022 James Beard Foundation hospitality award and was honored as a top wine restaurant from Wine Enthusiast in 2021 – reopened to paying customers. But in order to survive in the post-Helene restaurant market, the restaurant’s owners had to make some changes. The biggest? Closing Cúrate’s sister restaurant, La Bodega, which served lunch.
“Post-storm, we needed to shrink the size of our team and shrink the size of our overhead and operating costs pretty quickly to rebuild,” Button said. “We were worried about the impact of tourism and trying to operate two Spanish-themed restaurants downtown.” She opened La Bodega into an event space, which is “easier to manage”, she said.
Such recalibrations to survive are emblematic of Asheville’s food scene one year out from Helene, when the city’s existing restaurants have a renewed focus on planning for the future.
However, not every restaurant survived. “In spring, it felt like a restaurant was closing once a week,” said Mike McCarty, executive chef of the Lobster Trap. In fact, some of Asheville’s most well-known restaurants closed, including Laughing Seed, one of the region’s oldest vegetarian restaurants; Bouchon, a longtime French restaurant; and Bottle Riot, Vivian and Rhubarb, which were beloved to locals and tourists alike. There were also temporary closures of restaurants flooded by Helene, such as the Bull and Beggar.
The executive director of Asheville Independent Restaurants (AIR), Meghan Rogers, noted that Asheville’s restaurant closures are due to a “combination of things”, not simply Helene. Several of the restaurants that shut their doors had owners who were already mulling closures, she said. An Asheville Watchdog report in June noted the closure of more than 40 businesses, including 15 restaurants, in the downtown area alone.
The question restaurateurs are asking themselves now is “if something is on the horizon, how can we better protect our investment?”, said Rogers. For some, she continued, this meant purchasing restaurant-sized generators. But for other restaurants, it meant strategic downsizing of staff and trimming menus. “Overall, [Helene] brought everything back to the basics,” she said.
When Helene knocked out Asheville’s water supply, the local Mellow Mushroom pizzeria had electricity. Beginning the Monday after the storm, co-owner Gerry Mahon said his staff made 1,000 pizzas and gave them away for free for four hours each day. (“The health department said, ‘You can’t sell anything, but since you’re giving it away, we really can’t have any issue with that,’” Mahon said.) Mellow Mushroom offered free pizzas for two weeks and delivered them to rescue teams and residents in areas outside the city.
Mahon realized the blows to the Asheville tourism industry would affect his business. “You look up and realize you aren’t going to have a customer base for more than a month,” said Mahon. “That’s more than $300,000 in sales that we lost,” which he called “a bit of an economic hit for us”. Sales have still been down since the hurricane, he said.
To survive, Mellow Mushroom cut staff – and its menu. “That was our immediate response, to say, ‘OK, let’s make it where this machine runs more efficiently,’” Mahon said. “If you’re going to lose one in five customers, you naturally benefit by making a menu smaller.” He said the restaurant trimmed 30% of its menu and has decreased the product it inventories by 40%. The smaller menu has received “no complaints at all”, according to Mahon. He surmised that because Mellow Mushroom’s customer base is largely tourists, and they may not even be aware the menu has been pared back.
In addition to a slimmed-down offering of food, Mellow Mushroom also employs one-quarter fewer staff. “For as much as I hate to have to save on labor, it was the necessary thing to do,” Mahon said. “We still had to pay our bills.”
Other restaurants took a similar tack of downsizing staff. The Market Place, a high-end farm-to-table restaurant also located in downtown Asheville, closed for 70 days following the storm. Chef William Dissen took “a really tempered approach” in reopening after Helene, and cut service from dinner seven days a week and two weekend brunches to dinner only five days a week. “It felt very similar to reopening after Covid: we’re open, [but] that doesn’t mean the crowds are going to come back,” he said.
Dissen also relied on advice from others who’ve lived through a similar gut punch to the industry. “I have some friends that live in the New Orleans area,” he said. “[I asked:] ‘What did you do after Katrina?’ They all said: ‘Keep things small, operate your business as small as you can to still try to make a small margin, small profit, and focus on a small menu, small team and cook your heart out.’”
Luella’s Bar-B-Que made a similar choice to go leaner with staffing. “We had to trim down out of necessity and we’ve stuck with that model,” said owner Jeff Miller. And Cúrate consolidated both its team and menu, too; it reopened to the public with a downsized menu, although it has returned to its full spate of offerings. Since the closure of its other restaurant La Bodega, Button said her team had since added some of their favorite sandwiches to Cúrate’s menu.
Button lost a third of her staff both to layoffs and people moving after the storm, she noted. “These kinds of consolidating decisions that a lot of restaurants are making are important because they’re ensuring the restabilization so we can rebuild and continue with the vibrant food scene that Asheville has,” she said.
What’s insurance got to do with it?
For many restaurant owners, their Helene experience has been defined by their insurance coverage. Several realized they were not covered for experiencing a loss of business in general, but rather for specific weather-related harm.
“All of our businesses are taking a closer look at their insurance policies,” noted Rogers from AIR.
McCarty from the Lobster Trap filed a loss-of-business claim with his insurer and was denied. He appealed and was denied again.
“The explanation I received was that my business interruption and lack of water service were considered the result of flooding, and therefore my claim was denied,” he explained. “I’m not in a flood zone, being located in downtown, and had no reason to have flood insurance.”
Mellow Mushroom’s filed a claim for the $300,000 in sales it lost, Mahon said. However, the restaurant is also on higher ground in downtown Asheville and therefore didn’t have flood coverage. “If that restaurant realistically floods, we better have a friend named Noah,” he joked.
Mellow Mushroom ended up diving deep into the intricacies of its policy. Mahon said he was told by his insurance company: “If you can prove to us that the loss of water service in downtown was not caused by a flood, but was caused by a landslide, we could then pay out.” Doing so would have meant proving “the rain caused a landslide that came down and actually knocked out all of the water service from the hillside next to the reservoir,” Mahon said. And he actually gave it a go: “I said, ‘Well, it’s still caused by a flooding event, which is rain.’” Alas, the insurance company came back and said the argument didn’t adhere to the “verbiage … in the policy … Naturally, we were denied that [claim].”
Luella’s policy covered its restaurants from wind damage. That came in handy when a gust brought down five 80ft trees from a neighbor’s properties on to the restaurant’s property and downed power lines and transformers.
Many “people didn’t know their policies very well, and I was one of those people”, Miller said. “But thankfully, once I really dove into the fine print, [I saw] we’re covered.” Asheville’s widespread lack of electricity and water – which is part of the reason the restaurant was temporarily closed – wouldn’t have been covered on its own. “Utility disruption alone, typically, is not part of those commercial policies. But we had a wind claim,” Miller explained.
Miller heard “horror stories” from other restaurant owners who had difficult times working with their insurers, or who have learned their insurance coverage didn’t cover what they needed it to cover. That wasn’t his experience. “It definitely took a lot of phone calls and meetings,” Miller said. Fortunately, “our insurance carrier stepped up to the plate”.
Coming back means starting up
Several restaurant owners who spoke with the Guardian underscored how they want to look to the future and pointed to new eateries that opened since Helene.
Rogers said she is aware of “almost 20 that have newly opened or are planning to open”. These include Crusco, started by the former team from Cucina 24, which closed this year after the sudden death of chef and owner Brian Canipelli; Kenny’s Pizza, which was opened by the pizzaiolo at Cucina 24; ButterPunk, a bakery which opened in the River Arts District, an area badly damaged by flooding; and Fitz and the Wolfe, a downtown music venue serving smash burgers.
The Market Place’s Dissen wants potential tourists to understand that Asheville’s restaurant scene is open. He’s toured the country over the past year promoting a cookbook, he said, and he’s encountered people who have asked about Asheville: “‘Can you even go there? Do you have power still?’” he said. “People think we’ve been wiped off the map!”
On the contrary, he tells them: “‘It’s wide open … Asheville is beautiful. Come visit us.’”