Never Blue’s Jesse Roque has spiced up the Hendersonville food scene. Next up? Radio gigs. And a chocolate lounge.

by Cassady Sharp . photos by Matt Rose

Never Blue’s chef and owner Jesse Roque doesn’t want to make fancy lavender-infused chocolate ice cream. She just wants to make really good chocolate ice cream. Yes, the menu of her Hendersonville restaurant is filled with sassy, playful dishes—like Mermaid’s Chow (herb butter-seared shrimp) or Mary’s Rent (basil-pine nut pesto with lamb sausage, artichokes and manchego cheese). But she insists that the inventive, Latin-infused cuisine she serves isn’t all that exotic. “I don’t want to be one those weird, avant-garde chefs. I want to be creative, but I also want to make good chicken pot pie,” Roque says.

During some late-afternoon downtime at her Main Street restaurant in Hendersonville, Roque held forth on the virtues of simple cooking. “People should eat food because it tastes good—not because a famous chef made it,” she says. Still, her resume includes a few rock-star chef credentials. She graduated from the Johnson and Wales culinary program when it was still in Charleston. Then she worked at the Fontainbleau Hilton Hotel Miami in her home state of Florida and the five-star Charleston Grill before moving to Hendersonville and starting Never Blue with her husband Edson in 2007.

The restaurant is nothing if not a family operation. Edson, a native of Mexico, cooks at the restaurant, Jesse’s mother’s art lines the walls and her two young daughters play in a nursery in the back.

Enthusiastic about sharing her philosophy and her recipes, Roque recently started hosting The Chef’s Table, a weekly radio show on 1600 AM WZQX with on-air personality George Henry. She answers submitted questions ranging from how to make a soufflé to the one famous restaurant at which she’d like to dine. (Prime Steakhouse at the Bellagio Hotel in Vegas). Roque, who exudes confidence in person, claims that going on air terrifies her. “I’m actually doing hypnotherapy to help with the public speaking,” she says. This spring, she’ll be the first female ever to participate in WNC Magazine’s Chefs Challenge, in which local gourmets square off against one another in front of cameras and a crowd—something that makes her equally nervous.

Roque may be putting on her celebrity chef’s hat lately, but she is basically the antithesis of the moody, stressed-out terror chefs slamming knives and oven doors on competitive cooking shows lately. She thinks Chef Ramsay on the Hell’s Kitchen show is completely over the top.

The place she feels most at home is in the kitchen—specifically, in a pastry kitchen. She’s had specialized training in pastries and chocolate, and next month, she’ll put that training to use in a new chocolate lounge in the back of the restaurant. Chocolate is trendy, and Roque wants to see if Hendersonvilleans are as wild about a chocolate lounge as Ashevilleans seem to be. “People are always willing to eat chocolate,” she says, explaining that she was amazed to see a line out the door of Asheville’s French Broad Chocolate Lounge—even on a Monday night. “If you have the recipe for the right surroundings and ambiance for chocolate, you will bring people in.”

In Never Blue’s case, they’re building a low-lit, sexy back parlor with cocoa-colored chairs and a leather couch. Roque says she wants to create a place where Hendersonville’s sophisticated palettes can come to sip scotch and enjoy, say, a European-style sipping chocolate.

Until then, she and her staff will be serving up the Roques’ signature hearty brand of tapas. Don’t look for delicate portions of carefully crafted seafood croquettes. After sipping on a Fuzzy Handcuffs—Roque’s favorite cocktail, made with vodka and grapefruit juice—you should probably just give in and order the Fat & Happy, a grilled chicken breast topped with goat cheese and served over mashed potatoes. Or the double fudge brownie, topped with dark chocolate ganache, wrapped in buttered phyllo dough and served with ice cream. You may not leave slimmer, but, as the restaurant’s name suggests, you’ll never be blue.

For menus and more details, check out www.theneverblue.com.