ASHEVILLE – Blair Long’s voice echoes in the large, well-appointed showroom of the Cultivated Cocktails distillery in downtown Asheville, where she’s the been the bar manager for over a year. The business had been open for three days after closing in the wake of Tropical Storm Helene. Save for a mailman, she’s the only one here.
“Usually right now on a Friday we would have four staff on, we would be booming, we would be doing tours, doing experiences, sharing what we love,” she says. “It has taken a big hit to our company and business.”
Long’s an Asheville native who has worked in the service industry her entire adult life — a little over a decade. She’d been looking forward to the tourists coming in this time of year, not only for the friendly interactions but also for the nest egg those extra shifts help her build for the winter months ahead.
But Helene effectively ended the autumnal migration to Western North Carolina.
“I love the leaf season. I know what it brings in, so it is kind of painful to watch because usually January, February, March are slower, so that’s when we pretty much make our money and save,” Long says. “So it’s kind of like up in the air, frustrating, and [I’m] also worried about what’s next.”
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Long’s not alone. Layoffs, furloughs and shift reductions have imperiled the livelihoods, or otherwise reduced the incomes, of many food and hospitality service workers in the Asheville area. These workers, who serve as the backbone of Asheville’s tourism industry, have spent the last few weeks navigating grant and aid applications, relying on GoFundMe donations and taking whatever odd jobs they can find to stay afloat.
Amid the grief of Helene and the frustration of day-to-day life, service industry workers in food, retail and hospitality are simply finding ways to make it work. Susannah Gebhart, owner of Old World Levain (OWL) Bakery, says the community here knows “in their bones how to rally around each other.”
“People who are attracted to live in Asheville tend to be really community-minded and very resourceful,” Gebhart says. “This area has a history of resourcefulness and, even now, many people who live here have to quilt together a living just as they did decades and centuries ago.”
More:More Asheville restaurants reopen nearly a month post-Tropical Storm Helene, issues persist
‘Look around, it’s dead’: An industry on the ropes
The Asheville Food and Beverage United (AFBU) union estimates about 75% of service industry workers in the area have either lost their jobs or had their hours drastically reduced in the weeks since Helene.
“We’ve had to reevaluate how we’re going to staff now,” Long says of the crew at Cultivated Cocktails. “One person [on shift] at a time, how to make it spread evenly across our staff so that we don’t lose them but also do what’s best for them.”
That presents a tricky math problem for restaurant owners and managers. Cultivated Cocktails is one of many Asheville area restaurants and hotels to re-open in mid-October after Helene hit on Sept. 27, but getting people back to work, and giving them enough work, is a challenge.
“As more and more restaurants reopen, they’re having to do so under limited menus, limited hours, maybe carryout-only. They can only bring back a certain number of people right away, which extends unemployment for others,” says Meghan Rogers, executive director of the Asheville Independent Restaurant Association. “Some have left the industry.”
Indeed, while service workers have relied on emergency aid and grants to get by, they’re also trying to read the tea leaves to see how they’ll make enough money to survive here in the coming months.
Miranda Escalante works at the Flatiron Hotel in downtown Asheville. She and her husband are both “service industry lifers” and have applied for every grant they’ve come across, with mixed results. They’ve begun to ponder the viability of working and living here.
“We both can’t imagine living anywhere else,” Escalante says. “This has been our home and we’re committed to the work and rebuilding, but if we don’t get financial aid, we don’t know how long we can wait that out. I have heard of people going back to work and they’re only making $300 a week, which is not enough to sustain people in Asheville.”
Long, too, is considering leaving Asheville for the first time. She’s grateful Cultivated Cocktails pays a living wage, and that she can get five shifts a week as a manager, but knows that’s not the case for the vast majority of service industry workers.
It’s a particularly devastating time to curtail service industry jobs because of how much those workers depend on income from tourists coming for fall activities. Downtown Asheville is particularly reliant on tourists to boost business. Ryan George, a bartender at Asheville Club downtown, which reopened Oct. 17, says business is slower there than at the restaurant’s sister Black Mountain spot, The Station.
“[Asheville] caters to tourists and all the tourists are gone, like… look around, it’s dead,” George says. “Theres so much gearing toward tourism that there’s not a lot of locals who live downtown.”
Long sees the push to reopen as a “double-edged sword” — more tourists means more work for more people, but without reliable access to potable water, power and internet, the experience may not be what visitors have grown accustomed to.
“I want to bring people in for me and our staff, but I also want to keep tourists away until we can efficiently and gratefully provide the hospitality they deserve,” Long says.
More:Asheville restaurateurs prepare for a potential ‘mass exodus’ of food service workers
Finding community and a path forward
The financial hardship service workers face is concurrent with the personal issues and property loss with which they — and so many others are — are coping.
Escalante, for instance, was without power for 19 days at her Woodfin home and still had neither water nor internet, and nary any cell service when speaking to the Citizen Times. Gebhart says members of her 36-person OWL Bakery team have lost homes and cars; some have been displaced for weeks with no end in sight.
“Many were without running water and still are, so obviously finding potable water and water for flushing and bathing is a part-time job on its own,” Gebhart says.
Stories of such loss are common around Asheville. What’s rallying the service industry, though, are the connections to their community that have been born out of that hardship.
“Our community is coming together,” Long says. “We made it through COVID, we’re going to make it through this.”
In October, Cultivated Cocktails has served as a resource distribution site and has also hosted family-style dinners for staff members and essential workers in the area.
“There is some normalcy with being able to come together and feel like a family, which we always have been,” Long says.
Gebhart says OWL staff members have been making supply runs, volunteering with local groups to provide support to underrepresented communities, providing translation services, partnering with groups like World Central Kitchen to make and distribute hot meals and more.
Their bakery locations have also been used as communal meeting spots for staff members. Not only have they been used to distribute canned goods and personal hygiene equipment, but also as a spot for camaraderie: Gebhart recalls walking into their North Asheville location recently to find five employees making pasta by hand.
“It’s actually been really sweet to have everyone use the bakeries to find community,” she says.
Like many other restaurants, OWL Bakery launched a GoFundMe to support its staff members. As of Oct. 19, it had raised over $28,000, which Gebhart says goes to helping her employees make ends meet.
“We’ve been able to distribute the majority of those funds to our team and everyone’s getting the same amount whether they were part- or full-time or no matter the length of time they’ve worked with the bakery, [we’re] just distributing across the board evenly.”
It’s bittersweet, right? So many folks in the community are supporting service workers, but there’s not enough reliable financial support from other means to ensure the financial health of these people so integral to the culture in Asheville.
“It’s really heartbreaking to see literally every restaurant that I adore in this town do a GoFundMe because there’s no other option at this time,” Escalante says.
There are other options on the horizon, though. Escalante is co-chair of Asheville Food and Beverage United, which, with others, is asking for a 90-day moratorium on evictions, supplemental rental insurance, further increases and extensions on unemployment insurance (which was recently expanded to $600 a week for up to 26 weeks) and renewed investment in small business grants.
Of course, the ultimate goal is getting every food and hospitality worker back to their full-time jobs with full pay. Amid the uncertainty of when (or if) service industry jobs will return, some people have left town, but others are committed to staying and rebuilding Asheville into the vibrant community it worked hard to become.
“We just have to accept what’s in front of us and do the best we can with the resources that we have,” Gebhart says. “It’s like little spider webs that get torn asunder by wind and rain and every day the little spider gets up and makes its web again.”
Matt Cortina is a food writer with the USA Today Network. Reach him at mcortina@gannett.com.
