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EDITOR’S NOTE: Due to Hurricane Helene, Mount Mitchell Café is closed until further notice. Please visit their website for updates. Our continued thoughts and prayers go out to the affected communities.
Mount Mitchell Café and Eatery has new operators.
After a five-year hiatus, the restaurant at Mount Mitchell is serving hungry travelers again. The Park Service completed $2.7 million in renovations that were slowed during the pandemic, and it awarded a four-year contract to Melissa and Leigh Howell to operate the Mount Mitchell Café & Eatery, which opened on May 1.
The couple loves their North Carolina heritage and the chance to play a role in the history of this state park. Michelle is from Marion and Leigh is from Burnsville, where the couple have been running the popular Pigs & Grits Restaurant since 2014.
The Howells drive up the mountain from their home in Asheville every day and have been very strategic about creating a fast, casual menu that is different from what they serve at Pigs & Grits.
“We offer barbecue here, but it’s not Pigs & Grits barbecue,” says Michelle. “This menu was designed to be very approachable because you’re an hour away from everything. We had to ask, ‘What is something that everyone can enjoy whether they’re hiking or just out with their family?’”
The answer is gourmet sandwiches, delightful salads, soups, some entrees like mountain trout and a bevy of desserts including fruit cobblers, pound cake and cheesecake.
The Howells make sure staff training includes the history of the area. “More importantly,” says Michelle, “is training on Mount Mitchell, to be sure they understand where they are, because guests are going to ask, ‘Is it really the highest peak east of the Mississippi?’”
And when they ask, staff can point to the 6684 Burger on the menu. Those numbers, of course, answer the question. Another popular menu item is a turkey-pimento cheese panini named for Elisha Mitchell, who identified the peak as the highest in the East.
Mount Mitchell Café & Eatery doesn’t offer outdoor service because wind gusts are unpredictable. They do have Adirondack chairs overlooking the mountains for folks who want to get a to-go order and then sit outside.
“When it’s real crisp and not hazy, you can see the skyscrapers in Charlotte from up here,” says Leigh. “That’s about 120 miles away.”
Open seasonally May 1 – October 31; 10:30-6 for September and October.
The story above first appeared in our September / October 2024 issue.
