RAD to the Roots: Asheville’s Summer Revival Isn’t Just a Vibe — It’s a Rebuild

It’s not exactly breaking news that Asheville has an arts scene. Or that people here care a lot about local food, handmade goods, and getting misted by waterfalls on weekends. But this summer, those familiar threads feel rewoven — tighter, scrappier, and somehow more generous.

After a year that brought floods, closures, and more than a few “For Lease” signs, the city didn’t just bounce back. It dug in, rerouted, and reemerged with a sort of soft-spoken power.

You see it first in the River Arts District. The new walking tour, “Flood to Flourish,” doesn’t sugarcoat what happened — the water damage, the relocations — but it also doesn’t wallow. Instead, it winds through stories of artists who rebuilt their studios in new spots, often alongside folks they didn’t know well before.

Now they’re co-signing leases and co-hosting shows. Take ceramicist Akira Satake and Rite of Passage, a fashion boutique that somehow makes “slow fashion” feel less like a marketing term and more like a deeply considered act of love.

Then there’s RAD Market Saturdays, which have become something like group therapy meets pop-up art fair — with snacks. Displaced artists rotate through, showing work that often speaks quietly to loss and resilience without yelling about it. That’s the tone across the city right now: not defiant, just determined.

And that creative churn isn’t staying in the galleries. Asheville’s kitchens, never known for playing it safe, are in one of their weird-and-wonderful phases. Yes, you can still eat duck confit and wild mushrooms for dinner — but you can also start your day with a biscuit from ButterPunk, which is more punk than butter, and end it slurping pho at Pho Real, a no-frills Vietnamese spot with a fiercely loyal lunch crowd. Rowan Coffee is now slinging cortados inside an old Greyhound station (the bus signs are still there.)

At DayTrip, a freshly reopened bar that feels like your grandma’s house got taken over by queer maximalists with excellent taste in wallpaper, the energy is off-kilter in the best way. You can sit under a fringed lamp, sip something pink and fizzy, and realize halfway through that nobody has looked at their phone in an hour.

The city hasn’t lost its taste for spectacle either. The usual suspects — fireworks at Grove Park, Shindig on the Green, the Craft Fair of the Southern Highlands — are back, but with a layer of “we really missed this.”

Even Fitz & the Wolfe, the new three-story downtown bar that sounds like a Wes Anderson band, manages to feel grounded. Each floor has its own personality, and if one level’s not your scene, the next probably is.

And for the burned out and overstimulated (hi, yes, also me), Asheville still knows how to hand you a glass of cold mountain air and tell you to lie down. Shoji Spa is doing its forest-bathing thing again, with private soaking tubs and very few reasons to rejoin the real world. The Spa at the Grand Bohemian just reopened, if you want your restoration with chandeliers. Or you could just head to the Parkway and let the mountains do their thing.

This version of Asheville isn’t trying to prove anything. It’s not begging for attention. It’s just quietly showing up — a little muddier, a little more neighborly, and wide open.