THE PODCAST
The podcast above was originally recorded on 04/15/2025…
00:00 - 01:14 INTRO: It Me
01:15 - 05:15 FOOD NEWS: Asheville’s Finest Deli
05:16 - 05:56 MANNA SPOT: Please Donate to MANNA Foodbank
05:58 - 09:57 PUKE REVIEW: I’ll Probably Never Go Back
09:58 - 18:55 WHERE’D YA EAT? Franklin Pizza Tavern
18:56 - 23:38 7TH HEAVEN: The Wildwood Still Rooftop Is Very Exciting!
23:39 - 28:01 PEANUT BUTTER TRIPLE DOWN: + THCa & Caffeine
28:02 - 37:41 THE PIZZA GUY IS HERE! The 4/20 Special
37:42 - 52:18 ASHEVILLE ON $68.50 A DAY: A La Rachael Ray
52:19 - 54:47 BYE! Thanks To Deb & All The Listeners and WPVM 103.7fm!
THE NEWSLETTER
WNC PIZZA MAP ROAD TRIP: My friend Andrea and I took little road trip out to Franklin, NC, where we visited the Franklin Pizza Tavern and tried two very tasty pies! Plus a meatball. Andrea built her own pie, with green peppers and crumbled house made Italian sausage.
I ordered one from the menu called the Hawaiian Hottie. It was great! And yes, it did have pineapple on it. I don't have a lot of rules around pizza, and I am definitely down for Hawaiian style. (I am part Canadian after all! 😂) It also had ham, bacon, and jalapeños on it. It was hot and spicy and sweet and savory and hit all the nails on the head.
They are proud of their meatballs, so they brought me one to try, and it was great! Nice texture, classic flavor, thumbs up! Service was very friendly, and we also met one of the owners, who was super nice and very enthused about their business! So, I totally recommend Franklin Pizza Tavern! I remarked to Andrea on the way home that we are all so lucky in WNC to have really good pizza tucked away here and there all over these mountains! 🙏 🍕‼️
ASHEVILLE ON $68.50 A DAY
Y'all, 21 years ago Chef Rachael Ray helped put Asheville’s burgeoning culinary scene on the map when she featured our city on an episode of her “$40 Per Day,” television series. I rewatched the episode on YouTube recently, and decided to take on the challenge, in honor of Chef Ray’s historic visit! Adjusting for Inflation, $40.00 from 2004 would be equal to $68.50 today, in 2025, and feeding myself a reasonable and realistic amount of delicious and iconic food in Asheville for $68.50 per day sounded pretty easy to me! Below is a synopsis. You can read the whole piece by clicking HERE. It was really fun to do, so maybe I'll do it again!
8:30AM: BREAKFAST AT THE MED: The first person-on-the-street that Chef Ray asked where to eat in Asheville gave her the best advice ever, which she ignored! LOL She did just fine, but Dude was absolutely correct, and it was already on my list so, I started my journey by going to The Med for breakfast, where I got their classic biscuits ‘n’ gravy, with a cup of coffee, and it was frickin’ delicious! It filled me up, hit the spot, tasted great, and was all scratch made, in house. I love The Med! I could have added an egg for another $2.00, but the dish didn’t need it in my opinion, and was just right the way it was: Straight-up, and the perfect something Southern to start my day, at downtown Asheville’s oldest restaurant!
COST: Biscuits & Gravy + Coffee + Tax + Tip = $14.77
12:30PM: LUNCH AT BURGERWORX: I wasn’t hungry again for a long time but when I finally was, I was REALLY hungry. 21 years ago, Chef Rachael Ray had an elk burger and an enormous pile of quinoa for lunch from a Native American restaurant called Spirits on the River, which closed about 5 years after her visit. I never had a chance to visit it myself, regrettably, and these days an elk burger in this town is probably gonna run about $22.00+, so with my budget in mind, I opted to hit up one of my favorite spots and just jam a giant, fully loaded smash burger into my maw.
I’ve been going to Burgerworx in the Grove Arcade Building Downtown since they first opened. They are an independently owned little “fast food” smash burger joint, and I love them with all of my heart… attack… medicine… inside of me… because gah. So decadent but so delicious. I have a mathematical approach to the number of patties I add to a smash burger: 1 patty for a snack, 2 patties for a meal, 3 patties for my last meal. Since this was lunch, I went with 2 patties, added American cheese for a dollar, plus all the freebies: Lettuce, tomatoes, DJ’s Pickles, and jalapeño wheels. No onions. I could have purchased a side of fries for $4.00, but I knew that for me, it would have been overkill, so I went sans fries, and as expected, I was stuffed.
COST: Classic Smash Burger + Add A Patty + Cheese + Tax + Tip = $15.41
3:30PM: SNACK AT BOTIWALLA: Back in 2004, when Chef Rachael Ray came to Asheville, she had an afternoon snack at a place called Picnics that is no longer around. She had an enormous piece of pie with whipped cream and fruit, and to be honest, if I ate that much pie in the middle of the day, I’d be DONE. Couch-bound. I usually have a cup of coffee in the afternoon, so I decided to combine my caffeine intake with a moderate snack, and I know of a little trick to get that done on the cheap in Downtown Asheville!
Did you know that every cup of chai that you order from Botiwalla by Chai Pani on Battery Park Ave in Downtown Asheville comes with a free package of 10 Parle-G “original gluco cookies?” It’s true!
And yeah, no, I have no idea what “gluco cookie” means, but I like ’em! They are small, crunchy, sweet but not cloying, and have a unique little somewhat vanilla-y flavor to them. They obviously go great with chai, and the chai at Botiwalla is by far the best I’ve ever had. It’s packed with rich, deep, Spicewalla flavors, and is creamy, sweet, filling and served hot or cold. I got mine hot on a damp rainy day and it was the perfect thing to take the chill off.
COST: Chai + Tax = .27¢ + Tip = $4.87
7:00 PM: DINNER AT TWISTED LAUREL DOWNTOWN ASHEVILLE: Yeah, yeah, I know: No big surprise that I’m adding these guys to my list. I eat at Twisted a lot and I’m good friends with the chef, and the managers, and pretty much the whole crew at Twisted Laurel Downtown Asheville, which is indicative of how much I love the food and the folks who work there. I wasn’t always friends with them! Seems weird now, but there was a time when we didn’t even know each other. Then I started going in… again and again… on my own, with food tours, with friends and family, and it just became my number one jam. I eat there more often than anywhere else, and I always recommend it to locals and visitors alike, and in particular I point out their trout to everyone I can, so that’s what I had for dinner: TROUT!
Trout is our only local fish up in these mountains, and you can find it on just about every menu in WNC in one form or another, and while lots of people do great things with it, for my money, no one does it as consistently well as my friend Chef Tom LaFauci. He doesn’t mess around. He does it old school, but with his own touch: Pecan crusted, topped with whiskey braised peaches, served on mashed potatoes, with green beans, and topped with a beautiful beurre blanc sauce. It was perfect, and I told my friend Sarah that it’s the kind of dish I could eat almost every day, and it was the best way I could think of to end my Rachael Ray-esque journey through Asheville, with a very local bite from a local chef that I personally know and love. Thanks, Tom!
COST: Trout Entree + Tax + Tip = $28.25
GRAND TOTAL FOR THE DAY: $63.30
PEANUT BUTTER TRIPLE DOWN: I smoked an "Icy Cone" from Mellow Fellow on my walk downtown, and then my friend Jarod at the bank gave me a homemade peanut butter chocolate egg that was super delish, then my friend Andrea at the The Cottage Collections gave me a mini peanut butter cup, and then I got a Peanut Butter & Jelly Latte at Izzy's Coffee Den on N. Lexington Ave in downtown Asheville and now I feel awesome.
We’ve been through some tough times here in WNC lately. I recommend some me-time and self care in the form of peanut buttery things. 🙂
ASHEVILLE FOOD TOURS: We've been bringing our Asheville Food Tours into Wildwood Still on the 7th floor of the Moxy Asheville hotel lately, and I've come to believe that it's the most exciting new restaurant to (re)open so far in 2025. Chef Austin Tisdale has been serving us something different every time we go in, from braised short ribs to confit duck bao buns, and sometimes with a little extra taste of wonderfulness on a spoon, so I've tried a lot if the menu in sample form, and it's top notch stuff. High end, attractive food that's tasty AF. My tour patrons tell me that the cocktail samples are also on point, and I can tell you from experience that the mocktails are too.
Chef is a super nice person, so hopefully you'll get to meet him if you go. Everything he's served us has been a highlight of every tour we've brought up there. So I highly recommend a visit, either on your own or with me and a food tour, to the Wildwood Still, where the views are excellent and so is the food!
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