“Every day is an emotional rollercoaster,” James Beard Award finalist chef Ashleigh Shanti says of life in Asheville after Hurricane Helene. At least, that’s what I think she says. Cell phone service still isn’t great in the Appalachian town, so she breaks up a little. But her next line comes through loud and clear: “This has been a really painful experience.”
Shanti is quick to clarify she’s one of the lucky ones; her house on the banks of Shenandoah River is still standing, unlike those belonging to many of her neighbors. (“The river just swelled over and washed away our road,” she says.) Yet Asheville—a city known for its eclectic arts and culinary scene set against the rolling backdrop of the Blue Ridge Mountains—was devastated by the once-in-a-century storm: around 100,000 people in Western North Carolina still don’t have running water, and the city’s schools are closed until at least October 28. Remote learning has been impossible as internet connection is scarce. It’s been hard to see the town that she lives in, works in, and loves like this, she says.
Like most Asheville businesses, Shanti’s critically acclaimed restaurant, Good Hot Fish—which was named to the New York Times’s Best Restaurants of 2024 list just two days before Hurricane Helene hit—is yet to reopen. So instead, she’s opened a free outdoor food pop-up called Sweet Relief Kitchen with fellow Asheville chef Silver Iocovozzi. Over the past few weeks, they’ve served everything from smoked chicken to Filipino spaghetti to whoever wants it. “We’re cooking in a way that I think is very Appalachian—just using what you have,” she says. The biggest challenge? “Finding clean water where we can—filling up buckets, making hand washing stations, and boiling water to wash dishes,” she says.
Amid it all, Shanti’s first cookbook, Our South: Black Food Through My Lens, was published. A love letter to the wide-ranging traditions of Black Southern cooking, Shanti breaks her book up into four micro-regions: Lowcountry, Midlands, Lowlands, and, yes, her beloved backcountry of Southern Appalachia. “Each micro-region here is so distinctly different from the other,” she explains. “I thought it was important to highlight that because I think everyone thinks that they know what southern food is, but it’s so much more diverse than what meets the eye.” (A lifelong Southerner, she compares the region to Italy, where different areas have entirely different categories of cuisine.)
