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breakfast in West Asheville
Thursday, May 7 2015
location: AirBnB in a basement in West Asheville, North Carolina
After getting up, we drove along Haywood Road (the commerical heart of West Asheville) and ultimately parked near the West End Bakery, where we decided to get our breakfast. We ordered the veggie sausage with biscuits, unaware that the biscuits contain lots of butter. But that's the thing about being vegan. You can eat so long as you are ignorant. Indeed, ignorance (or at least willful denial) is the main reason people eat the shit they do. We sat down next to a young woman in the outdoor area and spent the next 15 minutes fussing over her dog. Then, ignoring the sounds of a nearby jackhammer as best we could, we proceeded to read articles in different issues of The New Yorker. But then an older middle-aged couple sat down nearby and the woman half of it, being the outgoing component, engaged Gretchen (our outgoing component) in a conversation. It turned out that she and her husband were liberals from Omaha, Nebraska, who had come to Asheville researching intentional communities for a possible relocation. Her name was Diana and his name was David. I forget what Diana did for a living but, being the shy one, David of course worked in information technology. We talked to them for awhile about Asheville, Nebraska, living in a red state while not being an asshole, and that sort of thing. Eventually our four-way conversation got intruded upon by a grizzled older gentleman who hailed from somewhere locally in Asheville. Still, he had the ironic qualities of a New Yorker. That's how deep the hip goes in Asheville.
After our breakfast, we wandered eastward on Haywood, stopping at a thrift store raising money for an animal shelter. Gretchen needed sunglasses, and it turned out that the store, in addition to having a very charismatic cat named Huey, also had a pair of Christian Dior glasses for sale for $3. Gretchen wanted to know if they provided protection from ultraviolet light, so she looked them up using her smart phone and soon determined that they had retailed for over $300. She ended up paying $10 for them after lavishing praise on the store's mission.
Our last stop on Haywood was at the Ingles supermarket (we liked to pronounce "Ingles" as a Mexican might, though of course folks from North Carolina do not pronounce it that way). We found a good variety of vegan creamers for future pots of coffee made at our AirBnB place, as well as a six pack of a cheap locally-brewed IPA (though of course it later proved to be mediocre).
Though there's a hip improvised funkiness to West Asheville, there are things about it that provide evidence that it is very much a part of the south and that it has a ways to go before it completely gentrifies. There remains, for example, a Family Dollar on prime Haywood Road real estate. And none of the many red brick churches have been converted into movie theatres or sculpture studios.
Later we went into downtown Asheville and had lunch out in front of another vegetarian place called the Laughing Seed. Soon after we sat down, Diana and David (the couple from Nebraska) wandered up, and Gretchen invited them to join us. So all four of us had a nice vegan lunch. I ordered the Banh Mi wrap, which was good except for the wrap part; it really would have been better in a piece of french bread. The jalapeño fries were a disappointment; they were orange with excessive grease and there were far too few slices of pepper among them. I think it was over this lunch that Gretchen and I told David and Diana the story of how we got back together. And then lunch ended and we never saw them again.
Somehow we ended up at a store on the corner of Lexington and College that sold interesting sculptures made with a mix of old industrial equipment (particularly large gears and chains welded stiff into various forms) and various massive wooden pieces, particularly hollowed-out burls spray-painted silver on the inside. It turned out the shop was unstaffed save for the hairdressers next door. Gretchen wanted a handmade wooden spatula, but none of the hairdressers could figure out how to do the transaction. So all Gretchen ended up buying was a set of rings sold at the hairdressing salon.
For dinner, we drove a little north of downtown to Plant, Asheville's one upscale vegan restaurant. It's pristine modern-looking place located directly across Merrimon Avenue from a Chik-Fil-A. Though the beer selection wasn't great, the food we ordered from its tiny menu was complicated, and delicious. For me, best of all, we weren't taunted with tiny zig-zag-bedrizzled portions on enormous plates (yes, of course the portions were bedrizzled, but their scale matched the plates they were served on). While we were there, I looked around at the other customers (all of whom were white or Asian) and noted that, despite the fairly cosmopolitan context, I could still see that I was in the Appalachian south. The hair on some of the women (even the younger women) was a little bigger, owed more of its form and color to chemistry, and had been shaped with a trace of an 80s sensibility. Though she had tattoos, one of the waitresses looked not too different from the way one of the popular girls in my high school had looked in 1985. There were also a youngish man present wearing a baseball cap, a checkered shirt, and a mustache (though that could have been ironic). Unusually for a restaurant meal, Gretchen ordered dessert, and (also unusually) I helped her eat it. It was a blondie with surprisingly-convincing vegan icecream. The key to a great dessert (at least the way we judge them) is keeping it from being too sweet.
On the way back to West Asheville, we stopped at Wedge, a huge brewery on the east bank of the French Broad River (the Tennesee River tributary dividing West Asheville from Asheville proper). Wedge has a window where cheap beers are dispensed to anyone who wants one and provides a dusty outdoor area with picnic tables for people to congregate and drink. There's also a stage, so presumably there is also music on occasion, though tonight the only entertainment was watching millennials do the sorts of things I did twenty (and also ten) years ago.
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I drank an Iron Rail IPA, and though it was the best IPA I'd had in Asheville so far, I was getting a sense that the biggest difference between Asheville and Portland was the poor quality of Asheville's IPAs. Gretchen, meanwhile, didn't have anything. For some reason alcohol hasn't been appealing to her of late, and she's also nursing a bit of a head cold.
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