Does it still count if a local business becomes a chain? Asheville is home to a few restaurants that, like kudzu, are beginning to creep across the South, sinking deep roots into cities and towns everywhere in the area. Tupelo Honey, an upscale Southern restaurant on College Street downtown, has opened fourteen other branches. Likewise, Chai Pani, an Indian place on Battery Park Avenue, has colonized Atlanta. Papa's and Beer, the (not "a," the) Mexican place is on pace to take over the Carolinas and Tennessee from their flagship palace of flavor in Hendersonville.
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"To sustain the life of a large, modern city in this cloying, clinging heat is an amazing achievement. It is no wonder that the white men and women in Greenville walk with a slow, dragging pride, as if they had taken up a challenge and intended to defy it without end." -- Rebecca West for The New Yorker, 1947
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