A restaurant named after two things that were already here

The building came first. From 1931 to 1991 the corner of Currant and Vine was Ashe Brothers Seed & Feed, the store where half the small farms in Buncombe County bought their spring, and its twelve-foot windows were built for a practical reason: so farmers could judge seed color in honest daylight. The farms got bigger or disappeared, the store closed, and the corner spent almost thirty years as offices with the windows painted over. Nobody had seen that light in a generation.

Etta Boone grew up an hour west in Haywood County, learned to cook beside her grandmother, and left for the kind of kitchens you leave home for: Charleston first, then three years in Lyon. What she took from France was not technique so much as a schedule, the habit of restaurants that buy in the morning from people they know and write the menu after. What she missed was the ingredient she could not import: the specific produce of these mountains, ramps and sorghum and mountain trout and apples with no supermarket names.

Cal Marsh was running the wine program at a Savannah dining room when Etta cooked a friend's wedding there in 2017. They argued about chenin blanc for most of an evening, agreeably, and kept arguing by phone for two years while the plan turned real: a restaurant at home in the mountains, light-filled instead of dim, serious about sourcing without being solemn about anything, with a wine list bought grower by grower.

They found the corner in the winter of 2018 with the windows still painted over. It took a heat gun and three weeks to get the paint off, and Etta likes to say the lease was signed at 5:40pm on a January Tuesday, the moment they saw what the room does in the last hour of sun. The name came the same week: the plovers that nest on the bald up the ridge, and the heart-pine floor the seed sacks had polished for sixty years.

Plover & Pine opened in June 2019 with twelve tables, a wood oven, and a menu that has changed every week since. The farms the seed store served are now the farms on the menu; a few of the growers' grandchildren eat here on the nights their fruit is on the card. We think the building approves. It was always a place where the mountains came to town.