On a fall Sunday in Asheville’s busiest tourist season, I drove to the charming downtown recently to see what’s opened since the destruction of Hurricane Helene. Chairs sat upside-down on the tables of White Duck, so I looked around as a rainbow of leaves drifted down the mostly empty street.
And then I noticed it: Cúrate, literally my favorite restaurant in the world. It was open.
Just two other people occupied a single table when I took a seat at the chef’s table, facing the Josper oven. I ordered a traditional gilda tapas, then a wonderful bibb salad with olives and orange, before going on to a fried shrimp bocadillo, like a mashup of a po-boy and an Iberian sandwich.
I’ve been traveling to Asheville for nearly two decades now and became a part-time resident two years ago. And the last time I snuck into Cúrate without a reservation in the height of season? Probably a decade ago. It’s indicative of the state of the city now. Fewer tourists mean the city is like it was a generation ago before the digital nomads and vacationers discovered it.
During my recent trip there, I learned that’s both bad and good. Some tourist attractions are still shuttered, as are an estimated 56 percent of local businesses, according to Explore Asheville. But fewer people means what is open is far more accessible, and so, in many ways, it’s a delightful time to visit Asheville.
Just how hard of a hit Asheville is taking isn’t entirely clear since figures aren’t available yet. The lack of people downtown seems to tell a story. The flooding also just about destroyed the River Arts District and Biltmore Village. Tourists skipped the fall foliage season and likely won’t return in their usual numbers this winter, the off-season. Whether they’ll return next summer and fall is hard to predict.
Clean water returned to Asheville on November 18, but until today, the few hotels that have reopened have mostly provided bottled water for their guests to drink. Locals had to pick up boxes of drinkable water from National Guard stations. Restaurants have had to set up massive black tanks to hold water for washing hands and cooking, a major expense for the restaurants that are already suffering.
But for those who come, there’s experiencing uncrowded Asheville. During my trip, I took a motorcycle ride on a road that hugs the French Broad up to Marshall. Fall leaves showered down as the morning sun twinkled in the rapids. This is the very place I picture when I need a meditative break. Yes, there’s trash and debris lining the banks, everything from mobile homes to PVC pipes, and seeing the devastation in Marshall was heartbreaking. But during the hour ride, I didn’t spot one single out-of-state plate. It’s Asheville, circa 2010.
It seems somehow wrong to take joy in the lack of people, but the benefits were evident everywhere I went. I immediately got a seat at Itto Ramen, Grey Eagle, Cúrate, Manicomio and the sports bar Daddy Mac’s smack in the middle of Sunday football.
At the Biltmore Estate, among the city’s largest tourism draws, the 8,000-acre property reopened for visitors on November 2 and let 2,700 people through the gates, compared to the 4,000–6,000 it would typically see this time of year. A spokesperson for the estate said attendance is still off from normal, but she’s hopeful they’ll see a steady increase through the holidays.
For visitors, though, that means fewer shoulder-to-shoulder tours of the historic mansion, the reason I don’t go to the Biltmore. Instead, I’ll tell visitors to get a drink at sunset at the Omni Grove Park Inn, which reopened November 15; on the veranda, there are wide-open views of blue-tinged Appalachians jutting like a crooked scissor cut across the horizon.
Over burritos at the Grey Eagle, I talked with my friend Dusty Allison, a broker with Premier Sotheby's International Realty and a Western North Carolina native (also, his Insta is worth a follow for a journey into the mountain lifestyle). He talked about going into Cúrate a couple of days after it reopened and seeing friends he knew, something that rarely happens anymore in the tourist-inundated downtown. “It felt convivial, like it was a necessary antidote to the situation,” Allison said.
He’s been hiking in Pisgah National Forest since the storm and saw almost nobody at Bent Creek, Graveyard Fields and Black Balsam, trails where it can be hard to find a parking spot in the summer. But there’s a bit of survivor's guilt in enjoying a trail to yourself or watching the server open a nice bottle of Spanish wine. “I know there are people still digging their lives out of the mud, so it’s hard to enjoy yourself.”
If you’re going to come these days, Allison says, be mindful that most restaurants are keeping weird hours and are understaffed. Allison said, “I’m using this personally as a point to say to people, ‘Hey, come to Asheville, but just know it’s impacted in a big way.’”
Not everybody wants the tourists to return. Instagram posts by Explore Asheville, the local tourism board, were flooded with comments after the organization asked tourists to return. Reddit posts on r/Asheville have similarly been inundated with locals angry that tourists are coming back to a town that largely still doesn’t have drinkable water and may not until mid-December. John Boyle, a columnist for the Asheville Watchdog, wrote an opinion piece that spoke of the divide among locals who see the economic benefits of tourism but also want the city to concentrate on recovery efforts. Boyle wrote, “It’s kind of like figuring out when it’s OK to joke again about a departed loved one....”
I called Dodie Stephens, vice president of marketing for Explore Asheville, and she said the $3 billion tourism industry in Asheville needs help right now from visitors. That industry is expected to see a 70 percent decline in the fourth quarter of 2024, which will no doubt be a hit to the $1 billion in wages paid to folks who work in tourism.“We need visitors to return,” Stephens said, “and chefs and makers and artists are there with open doors. Asheville needs travelers more than ever.”
During my last meal in Asheville, while ordering an eggplant parm hoagie at Manicomio, the cashier asked: “You local?” I thought I detected an underlying anti-tourist note in the question (a common thing in Asheville, even in better times). But maybe that was me projecting. “Yes,” I said, banking that my status as a part-time resident counts.
In the end, the hoagie was fantastic, with tangy-sweet sauce and crispy edges on the battered eggplant. Sitting outside, I took in the cool fall air as the sound of leaves meandering down Biltmore Avenue rivaled ocean waves. I say go ahead and return to Asheville, put money into the local economy, and party like it’s 2010.
Traveling to Asheville?
The local tourism board, Explore Asheville, has a website that keeps track of which businesses have reopened.