Good Hot Fish

At street level on the corner of Buxton and Collier in Asheville’s brewery-soaked South Slope, the only indication you’ve arrived at one of the Carolinas’ most anticipated restaurant openings of 2024 is a small chalkboard on the sidewalk that touts Good Hot Fish’s fresh catches—recently grunt, catfish, and rainbow trout. One flight up, a neon-lit, multicolored, 3D fish marks the entrance.

Step into the small, cheerful space—bedecked with memorabilia, kitsch, historic photos, whimsical signage, Jet magazine covers, original art, lures, oars, and a fish-shaped disco ball—and at the flat top, working the fryer or emerging from the small prep kitchen in the rear, you’ll find one of The New York Times’ “16 Black Chefs Changing Food in America” (as well as a finalist for the 2020 James Beard Rising Star Chef of the Year).

In November 2020, when Ashleigh Shanti left Benne on Eagle—the restaurant where the young chef made a national splash cooking what she describes as Affrilachian food—she says she had no plan. Nor did people who had urged her to open her own restaurant step up to the plate to invest. “That didn’t happen. I don’t know why and don’t need to know,” she says.

But as a chef, she needed to cook. She took the opportunity to travel, do one-nighters with other regional chefs, including Sean Brock in Nashville, and launched Good Hot Fish as a monthly pop-up at Asheville’s Burial Beer brewery. A fervid following grew, and the fish fries regularly sold out.

A plan steeped in family heritage, Black culture, and personal experience was emerging. “I come from a family of fish-frying women. My great aunt Hattie Mae used to set up a tent on a church lawn or near a produce stand; clean, scale, and gut whole fish; bread and fry them; put it in a brown paper bag; hold it up; and yell, ‘Come get your good hot fish!’”

That was the source of the name; exposure came eating at coastal fish camps on family vacations; experience came from working in seafood restaurants in Virginia Beach.

When the Burial Beer Co. owners offered to lease her a small space in their building, she and her wife, Meaghan Shanti, jumped on it, and Good Hot Fish opened in January 2024.

The Good Hot Fish sandwich is the calling card of the succinct menu. Eight ounces of catfish filet—usually two pieces—sourced from Carolina Classics are dredged in Bloody Butcher and Cateto cornmeal milled by Farm & Sparrow, fried to a golden hue, spread with GHF’s tangy buttermilk tartar sauce, and sandwiched between two slices of squishy white bread.

The cabbage and sweet potato pancake is both a throwback to a savory pancake Shanti’s mother often made for breakfast and a nod to the Japanese okonomiyaki, cooked in a cast-iron skillet. “You have to have that crisp,” she says.

Her love for the bologna and cheese sandwich from Asheville’s Hot Dog King compelled her to create trout bologna—steelhead trout and bologna spices formed into a chub, sliced, seared on the flat top with a slice of Kraft American cheese, set on a potato bun, and dressed with white onion and yellow mustard.

Shanti uses heads of crisp, sweet Crispino grown by Jamie Swofford at Old North Farm to change hearts and minds about iceberg lettuce, one Ranchovy salad at a time. Sides hearken back to those fish camps: stewed Old North Farm greens, Sea Island red peas, hushpuppies, and individual tins of baked macaroni and cheese.

Shortly after opening, 10-year-old regular Ivy Bull hand wrote a fan letter to Good Hot Fish, which concluded “If my cats came to your restaurant, they would be like Gimie that fish!!!’” The letter is preserved under glass at the register and the sentiment immortalized on the Ivy Bull tee.

There’s just one dessert and it’s exclusive to Good Hot Fish: a fat, gritty cornmeal cookie slightly sweetened with blackstrap molasses and Muddy Pond sorghum by baker Lyndon Johnson.

Plates to Share

Sweet Potato Cabbage Pancake
Rice flour and Farm & Sparrow cornmeal form the foundation of eggy batter with scallions, shredded cabbage, and roasted sweet potatoes cooked in a cast iron skillet, flipped, then striped with house Captain Crik sauce, sorghum hot sauce, and a toss of GHF furikake.

Ranchovy Iceberg
Shanti’s Ranchovy salad elevates the oft-maligned iceberg lettuce with sections of locally grown Crispino ladled with creamy “ranch meets Caesar” dressing, crispy shallots, minced chives, and lime-pickled onions.

Main

Good Hot Fish Sandwich
It would be unthinkable to visit GHF and not get the titular fried catfish sandwich with a ramekin of blue-ribbon-worthy refrigerator pickles.

On the Side

Sea Island red peas are cooked with ham hocks for seasoning and finished with a little sorghum.