Welcome to DKos Asheville. This space appears each weekend to share links to news and opinion from Asheville and Western North Carolina. The floor is open for comment and discussion. Wishing all a good day from this beautiful part of the world.
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Highly acclaimed North Carolina chef Ashleigh Shanti, who owns a restaurant that celebrates Black history through its food and decor, says a group of racists shut off the power while customers were dining and left a racist sticker near the restaurant's entrance, the Citizen Times reported.
According to an Instagram post from this Tuesday, Shanti says her restaurant Good Hot Fish was attacked by a "group of racists" who defaced it with a sticker after cutting the power.
“Last Saturday, around closing time, a group of racists were doing what they do best and decided to shut the power off to our dining room while our last guests were enjoying their dinner,” Shanti said. “They then ran away, like cowards, when confronted by a guest and an employee but not before outfitting our entrance with this disgusting sticker.”
An image of the sticker shows the phrase, “How to ruin a white city” at the bottom along with a hand holding a can that says the N-word. On the cuff of the hands sleeve is a Jewish Star of David.
acclaimed Chef Ashleigh Shanti opened Good Hot Fish Jan. 20 in Asheville’s South Slope neighborhood. The restaurant preserves and celebrates Black history through its food and decor, bringing Southern fish camps and Gullah cuisine to Asheville’s brewing district.
Covers of Jet magazine are pasted to the lunch counter in front of the open kitchen. The sounds of Black jazz musician Hank Mobley travels through the business. Photos taken by Black Asheville photographer Andrea Clark line the walls.
But the night of Feb. 3, Shanti claims a group of people tried to interrupt her business with a racist act.
In a Feb. 6 Instagram post through the restaurant's account, Shanti said the group defaced Good Hot Fish’s entrance with a racist sticker and cut the power of the newly opened restaurant.
Thanks to open-space bonds passed in 2022 and generous landowners, the Buncombe County Board of Commissioners voted to conserve 360 acres at its meeting Feb. 6.
The county used $400,000 in bond funding to bolster the conservation of about $3.4 million worth of parcels near Leicester and Black Mountain. “These are beautiful pieces of property, and it’s really exciting that they’re going to be preserved for our future,” said commission Chair Brownie Newman after the 6-0 vote. Commissioner Jasmine Beach-Ferrara was not at the meeting.
The larger tract, 336 acres adjacent to Lake Eden and the site of the Lake Eden Arts Festival in Black Mountain, was ranked a top priority by the Southern Appalachian Highlands Conservancy, which completed the “bargain purchase” of the property, said Michelle Pugliese, land protection director at SAHC.
The tract is special because of its seven headwater streams and its location surrounded by three protected ridgelines, including the Blue Ridge Parkway, Pugliese said.
Asheville lost one of its greatest when Connie Bostic died last month. Connie was a creator, and Asheville was her beneficiary.
Connie first impacted the Asheville scene in 1983 when she opened a private gay club named Craig’s at 46 Wall St. with friend Craig Culbertson. When the bar closed in 1984, Connie and her husband, George Bostic, opened the Asheville Music Hall in the same location. It was one of the few spaces at the time to offer live music that included local groups, such as the women’s band Crimes of Fashion and the Beth Riser Band, as well as national bands like the Gregg Allman Band.
As Asheville Citizen-Times entertainment critic Tony Kiss noted at the time, “The Asheville Music Hall, one of the best things to happen to the city’s nightlife, offered John Prine, Tim Weisberg, Weird Al, John Lee Hooker, John Sebastian and the original Byrds, to name just a few.” It was a place open to all and provided a much-needed entertainment spot for dancing and meeting with friends. I remember a sign above the bar that said, “If the sight of two people of the same sex kissing bothers you, you can leave” — a radical statement for Asheville in the mid-1980s.
Calling all movie fans. While the Academy Awards envelope openings are still a month away, starting next week in Asheville you can see some of the shorter works nominated this year.
Grail MovieHouse will present Oscar-nominated short films in the animated, live-action and documentary categories. The theater has offered movie fans a chance to watch these works that haven't always played in mainstream theaters since they opened.
“Every year that we run these, the audience builds a little more and they typically come back because it's a variety of things. Short films are interesting because they can be great or it can be not so great. So, you get a package, like when we do the documentaries, there's five or six documentaries in that show,” Grail MovieHouse co-owner Steve White said.
Thank you for stopping by DKos Asheville, wishing you a nice weekend.
“Be safe out there.” Lamont Cranston