When chef Trevor Payne opened the popular bistro Tall John’s in 2022, he made clear he did not want to take reservations. Service was first come, first served—and the reason was simple: Reservations in a town like Asheville, which attracts millions of tourists each year, could be filled by visitors who plan their trips weeks in advance, making it difficult to build a connection with local customers.

“It will be the traveling community who snags the reservations and locals will be locked out,” Payne says now. “We stuck with no reservations for 14 months and it really built and encouraged our incredible repeat business.”

That repeat business has created a strong base of regulars for Tall John’s—the folks who show up, come hell or high water—an increasingly important segment of business for restaurants in the wake of Hurricane Helene.

Among the customers delivering repeat business is a local resident, Chris, who has eaten at Tall John’s hundreds of times and prefers a favorite seat at the bar. “We documented him coming in 204 times as of September, but we believe it’s at least 300,” Payne says. “The staff notices right away if his seat is taken when he arrives and do what they can to get him there.”

There’s also a local couple, Judy and Aaron, who almost always stick with their favorite order—mussels with dry toast—while Marie and Roy always sit at the kitchen bar, drink Old Fashioneds, order the Parker House rolls and roast chicken. “Lately they’ve been venturing into the pork chop, which has stunned the staff,” Payne says with a laugh. Shawnie and Willie Gruber, meanwhile, owners of the nearby 1900 Inn on Montford, are what Payne calls “bullhorn supporters” of Tall John’s and are big fans of the Steak Diane.

Then there’s Laurie Crosswell, co-owner of Hole Doughnuts in West Asheville. “Almost since day one, as soon as the door opened on Tuesday afternoons, she was there with friends, every Tuesday. She almost always gets a Martini, steak tartare and mussels. She has probably brought more people into Tall John’s than anyone.”

Judy and Aaron, Marie and Roy, Laurie, Chris, Shawnie and Willie—these are the coveted regulars who are devoted to places “where everyone knows their name.” Many eateries in Asheville and Western North Carolina try desperately to cultivate these relationships. But the regulars have become a lifeline for restaurants in the weeks and months after the storm forced tourists to cancel their trips—and their dinner reservations.

“We reopened [after the storm] on November 1, and less than 10 minutes later we were completely full,” Payne says. “There were 20 people waiting to get in, primarily regulars. The energy was incredible. And Chris has been there nearly every day.” 

A PLACE YOU ARE KNOWN

The French restaurant RendezVous, located in Asheville’s Haw Creek neighborhood, reopened its doors on October 19, similarly counting on regulars to show up despite a lack of potable water in the taps.

“I knew everyone in the dining room the night we opened,” says owner and long-time Asheville restaurateur Michel Baudouin. “People wanted a place to be social with people they knew and tell their stories. We have all been through so much, it helps to be in a place that is comfortable, and you are known.”

Located in a residential neighborhood, far from the cluster of hotels, RendezVous is Baudouin’s second restaurant in Asheville. The first one, Bouchon, is located on the bustling Lexington Avenue in Asheville’s downtown district and was one of the city’s first dining hotspots. But when Bouchon first opened in 2005, Asheville did not yet have the swells of tourists it does today, and Baudouin found himself wooing locals with a warm and welcoming atmosphere.

“It was like ‘Cheers’ some nights,” he remembers fondly.

Shortly after he opened Bouchon a big snowstorm moved through Asheville, quickly blanketing the street with layers of white powder. “We ended up having a snowball fight between staff and customers right out on the street,” Baudouin says. “I knew we would make it then.”

But as the downtown area transformed and tourism exploded, something was missing: Baudouin began to see less of his people. “We started to be on a wait at 5pm, which was great for business but I wasn’t seeing my regulars, and I didn’t like that,” he says. “I was losing them because of the wait; they didn’t want to deal with downtown and the lack of parking.”

One night after cheffing a private dinner in the Haw Creek neighborhood, he spotted a For Sale sign in front of a former church; the expansive parking lot got his attention. When he saw the interior, he immediately envisioned where every part of his future new restaurant would be. He bought and renovated the property, installed a pétanque court and opened RendezVous in 2019.

While training a new staff and counting on the former Bouchon regulars to find their way there, he warned his employees that the customers might know the menu better than the servers. “A few days later a waiter came to me and said he had never seen anything like it,” Baudouin says. “A few weeks later he asked me if there was anyone I didn’t know.”

Establishing a relationship with regular customers is key, Baudouin says. When the owner greets you by name and the staff remembers the wine you prefer and brings it to your table without asking, it builds loyalty. “Everyone wants to be recognized and feel special.”

REGULARS FROM THE START

Shortly after Drew Wallace and his partner Jonathan Robinson opened The Admiral in West Asheville, they discovered an easy way to remember the names of a growing list of regulars. Using a Sharpie, they’d write down the names on the inside of a cabinet behind a bar. “Those little things mean so much,” Wallace says. “That we knew them, even as we were getting busier and busier.”

Wallace and Robinson opened The Admiral in 2007, transforming an old cinder block building on Haywood Road formerly known as the B&D Bar. “The B&D was a video poker, slot machine, third-shift bar when we got it,” Wallace remembers. Even after scraping multiple layers of linoleum off the floor and painting the nicotine-stained ceiling tiles, there was still the perception the place was a dive bar.

“The bar drew people in at first, and we had regulars right from the start,” Wallace says. There was no call or need for reservations then. But soon, they talked chef Elliott Moss—who they had worked with at Robinson’s bar, The Whig, in Columbia, South Carolina—into taking over the food side.

“Elliott was obsessed with the food and word started to get out around Asheville,” says Wallace. “We began to see nicer cars parking outside, people coming from other areas of town. Hospitality people downtown were sending people here, like, ‘You have to go, it looks like a gas station and eats like fine dining.’”

Subsequent glowing reviews and national media attention brought calls for reservations from distant area codes. “We were over the moon, like we had really made it,” Wallace says. “But some of that I regret, because it changed things. I live in West Asheville and ran into people we used to see all the time who said they stopped trying to get in. When we added reservations, we thought it would help locals, but it turned out to be the opposite.”

About 10 years in, they turned what was a roofed outdoor waiting area into full-service enclosed dining, complete with a fireplace. During the early days of Covid, Wallace flipped the small parking lot into al fresco dining, adding six tables with umbrellas, and welcomed people with dogs.”That’s where a lot of our regulars with kids and dogs prefer to sit.”

The patio is always walk-in, as is half the bar and a couple of tables in both dining rooms. “We don’t ever want to lose the people who have been with us from the start,” Wallace says. “There is great satisfaction in seeing familiar faces.”

THE UNTOUCHABLE DISHES

In a city like Asheville, where there are dozens of amazing dining options, restaurant owners and chefs are constantly asking themselves what keeps customers coming back for more. What’s the secret to repeat business when diners are often drawn to “the new” and “the now”?

Relationships are no doubt important, and regulars like to feel valued, but the food is an equally powerful magnet. For this reason, many local restaurants feature signature dishes that can’t and won’t be touched, in part because they risk mutiny from their regulars if they do.

At Tall John’s, it’s the glazed beets and goat cheese, roast chicken, steak tartare, and Parker House rolls (created for Payne by Heidi Bass of the local bakery Mother’s).

At RendezVous and Bouchon, it’s the restaurants’ famous frites, the deep bowls of mussels Parisienne, steak au poivre and roasted half duck. The Admiral recently brought in a new partner and executive chef, Austin Inselman, who spent four years as executive chef at Wallace’s other West Asheville restaurant, Leo’s House of Thirst.

Inselman will introduce new dishes, but for now he will fine tune and put his spin on the signatures, which include arugula salad, beef tartare, mussels and a big burger. In a rapidly changing and growing city—one struck by an unimaginable disaster that stopped everything in its tracks—the ties that bind are familiarity and comfort, at the door, working the floor, in the kitchen and on the menu.

“I love to take chances and let chefs run with things,” Wallace says. “But I also know what works here and why: classic, craveable and comfortable.”