ASHEVILLE Restaurant owners deal constantly with fluctuations in costs, employee turnover and cranky customers. But some have more esoteric concerns.
For some owners, the memory of businesses that failed in the same location even the spiritual remnants of a previous occupant can cause equal concern.
Joe Scully, who owns Chestnut and the Corner Kitchen with business partner Kevin Westmoreland, is a straight shooter whose accent recalls time spent in New Jersey and New York.
A no nonsense businessman, it’s somewhat surprising to hear him acknowledge that the 48 Biltmore Ave. building in which he opened Chestnut in 2012 had a reputation for being cursed, even though the evidence was hard to ignore.
“We were immediately told ‘don’t do it,'” Scully said. “But we decided that we felt the best thing for us to do was change the way the place feels and to make it such a departure from what it was, that it would be hard to see the other places.”It’s hard to say what caused the five previous occupants of the building The Blue Rooster, The Golden Horn, Thibodeaux Jones Creole Kitchen, The Raven Grill and Ed Boudreaux’s Bayou Bar B Que to fail within about a dozen years.
Even Oscar Wong, owner of Highland Brewing Co., couldn’t say what caused The Blue Rooster, Asheville’s first brewpub,Cheap Jerseys china http://www.cheapjerseysshow.com to go under two years after he opened it with Frank Smith and Lou Bissette in 1996.
“I don’t know why, whether it was the parking or the type of food or the price of food,” Wong said in a 1998 Citizen Times interview. “. The handwriting was on the wall.”
To avoid a similar fate, Scully hired Samsel Architects to erase reminders of restaurants past through smart design and lighting.
Still, Scully said, a different sort of spirit lingered.
That was until an unannounced group of individuals offered “to clarify and to cleanse our space, (using) smudges and different herbs to purify it and to change the energy,” Scully said. Then another group showed up with a more straightforward plan.
“We can move the spirits from here,” they told Scully, who describes himself as a recovering Catholic. “So, we said, obviously there’s something here, so let’s follow this and let it be what it is. That kind of went against my tendency to take things at face value.”
Neither group charged for the work, and to this day, Scully says he’s not sure who they were.
“They were just connected to the Earth and to the sky in a way that was different than maybe you and I are,” he said.
With the help of the spiritual cleaning crew, Scully identified two “trouble” spots in the building, one near the wall Chestnut shares with its next door neighbor, Barley’s Taproom and Pizzeria (which has a reputation with local ghosts hunters for being haunted), and another on the basement level.
“They both found something in the building that was not conducive to happiness and joy,” said Scully, who joined in on the clearing process.
“We were literally sweeping the spirits from the building and visualizing them lifting out and going away,” he said. “It was really amazing. I would say that, personally, the space feels better as a result of it.”
Honoring, not erasing, the past
Scully isn’t the only local business owner to claim to have spiritual trouble spots to clean. Double Crown, a bar that opened in 2012 on Haywood Road in West Asheville, feels time worn in a way that belies its relative youth.
The artifacts that decorate the space, including decor from the now defunct Vincent’s Ear and photos of Asheville’s past, lend warmth to the bar, despite its tragic past: the previous bar in that location, Mike’s Side Pocket, was shut down after a gruesome knife fight that spilled from the bar’s front porch left three men dead along a half block stretch.
Co owner Chris Bower said in a June interview that confronting those events was necessary in order to create a vibrant community spot that works to honor its past rather than erase it.
“We were conscious of the reality of what that was,” said Bower. “There are metaphysical realities in this world, and you can either ignore them, or you can deal with them.”
How does one deal with such realities? “We put a lot of work into it, and we got the right people to come and take care of some business, you know? You fight fire with fire.”
Like Scully, Bower did not name his helpers.
“(They were) friends who are powerful people,” he said, “in a spiritual sense of the word.”
Marco Garcia, the owner of the now closed Curras Dom, is skeptical of claims of curses and cures.
“I believe more in outer space guys than ghosts,” he said, laughing. “But that’s just me.”
Since Garcia’s restaurant closed just three years ago, the 72 Weaverville Highway building has housed Baja Cafe and Magnolia Ray. Recently, Moe’s Original Bar B Que, a national Alabama style barbecue chain, announced plans to open a restaurant there.