Eagle Street Soul

The kitchen isn’t serving the pork chops and plastic bowls of black-eyed peas and collard greens that the mention of soul food surely conjures (though each of those foodstuffs has its place on the menu). At first it may feel like a new kind of soul food, seamlessly weaving mountain ingredients into West Africa’s ogbono soup and akara fritters, along the way touching down on the South’s familiar deviled eggs and biscuits. But then again, wouldn’t that make it the epitome of soul food—a cuisine forged when cultures collided and then evolved at the hands of migration? At Benne, it’s both. The food is an old soul in a new form; it moves forward but always looks back.

In the last decade, as Asheville exploded into a craft beer mecca that beckoned thirsty travelers, developers’ eyes turned back to the Block. Hilton’s Curio Collection announced it would open the Foundry, an eighty-seven-room boutique hotel in the brick-building complex that formerly forged the steel used for the Biltmore Estate. They approached Fleer about becoming a restaurant partner. “My gut was to not do the project,” he admits. At the time, his first restaurant, three-and-a-half-year-old Rhubarb, was just starting to find its groove. He’d been asked to partner on other projects in town, and always turned them down. But he felt strongly that the hotel’s forthcoming restaurant needed to honor the history of neighborhood. “This was the location for a really healthy soul food restaurant population,” Fleer says. “So it really was the location that was the impetus to say, ‘Let me think about it.’ There was a passion for doing the right thing that was driving me forward in this project.” So he said yes. Before Shanti met Fleer, she’d racked up an impressive resume for a young chef. After attending culinary school in Baltimore, she got her start under the city’s distinguished restaurateur Cindy Wolf at Cinghiale, a paean to northern Italy.

But she said she’d sit down with Fleer. And when he shared his vision for the restaurant, with its foundations in the nearly forgotten history of the neighborhood and devotion to the evolution of soul food, Shanti says she got chills. “It sounded so unbelievable,” she says. “It’s what I was trying to do in my career, the stories I was trying to tell.” Flash-forward two weeks and she and her partner were packing up a U-Haul bound for Asheville.

Half a year later, Shanti has found her home in the mountains. Asheville, the town with a weekly drum circle and patchouli to spare, is just the place for an avid forager and fermenter. When Shanti’s not in the kitchen, she craves adventure. So she takes to the hills with her pup, Roux, in search of sorrel, nettles, oyster mushrooms—anything she can get her hands on and play with in the kitchen. Lately, she’s zeroed in on spruce tips, the fresh growth of evergreen limbs that are only available for a short window in late spring; by summer they’ll have hardened into mature needles. “You have to climb,” she says. “They’ve got this great botanical, herbaceous pine flavor.” She loves them pickled. “When you realize you really can eat off the land, it’s like a challenge. It’s exciting,” Shanti says. “I don’t know how else to cook other than seasonally.”

She’s quick to point out this mantra connects her with the generations of her family who preceded her, like her great-grandmother Inez who lived along the Dan River in Virginia. “She saw what was growing outside and cooked from that. There wasn’t always a grocery store to buy your produce. So you were automatically cooking farm to table,” Shanti says. “It’s a thing that is trending, but that’s what the women of my family did.”

And then there are Shanti’s ferments: miso, kefir, kombucha (“I was once pretty convinced I’d be a kombucha brewer,” she says). Fleer was converted by a tincture she made from reishi, a mushroom with origins in Asia that’s said to have healing properties. “He claims he almost got incredibly sick, but took my reishi tincture and got better within a day,” she says.

Her live-off-the-land, DIY ethos fits squarely with Benne’s culinary philosophy. It’s a restaurant where the fish sauce is fermented in house and the menu is dictated by what local purveyors can supply. With Shanti at the wheel, there are elements of her journey, too. Brook trout, a main- stay in mountain cooking, is breaded and fried in a dish that recalls schnitzel (Shanti fell for it in Copenhagen). Crowned with peas and foraged nettles bathed in buttermilk, it’s springtime in Appalachia on a plate. Panzanella—the beloved bread salad of Tuscany—is partly a reference to Shanti’s time at Chingale. But it’s also steeped in soul: cornbread comprises the base; it’s accented with sour corn, blueberries, and buttery walnuts.

There are distinctively African elements, too. Consider the akara fritters. Shanti puts her stamp on the popular West African street food, made from black-eyed peas, with the addition of hominy and a rum mustard for dipping. Collard greens, so often a soul food solo hit, are incorporated into salad of field peas swathed in sumac molasses vinaigrette. The dish reminds Shanti of the pickled bean salad she, like so many Southerners, grew up eating.