After 30 years styling hair, Maggie Ewing tries her hand at kitchen therapy.

by Jess McCuan . photo by Matt Rose

For a while, with new clients, Maggie Ewing talks hair. She’s happy to. The bubbly 56-year-old has cut and styled people’s hair in two states for nearly three decades. But eventually, these days, Ewing steers the talk towards her new love: food. “It’s only hair ‘til we get to know each other,” she jokes.

Truth be told, Ewing was a perfectly satisfied stylist, running a shop in her home state of Massachusetts, and then, when she moved to Asheville, renting a small, chic downtown salon, Aubergine, where she has clipped and snipped Ashevilleans’ locks for the past 14 years. Perhaps, she admits, there was a time in her 20s when she might have gone to law school. But she had a son at a young age and dropped out of Rhode Island College. No matter, Ewing says. The notion of a career change never even crossed her mind until a couple years back. Suddenly, it dawned on her: “I didn’t want to be 60 years old and doing hair,” she says.

She has started scaling back her salon hours to do what can only be described as kitchen therapy. Ewing doesn’t teach cooking lessons, and she is not a trained chef. (Though she does do a fair bit of basic teaching.) And she’s not a concierge or an errand service, though she’s not opposed to grocery shopping for people. In fact, what Ewing does through Aubergines and Olives is come to your house and size up your culinary life—mainly by talking with you and looking through your cabinets and fridge. Then, she charts a course that will help you learn to love your kitchen.

It’s often a matter of making cooking less intimidating, she says. Or convincing busy professionals that they do have the time. “People are stuck,” she says. “They’re scared about the kitchen. They’re busy, whether they have children or not.” Her main points in “kitchen counseling” include talking people through the notion that not all home-cooked food need be complicated, or made from scratch. For these reasons, Ewing likes the Barefoot Contessa cookbooks, which emphasize efficient food prep and relatively simple dishes.

Ewing herself learned to love the kitchen with her mother, who gave birth to a brood of 12 children. Ewing adopted her second child from China, and now Sophia Ewing, 8, helps her mother chop garlic. Following in the footsteps of the Berkeley chef and Chez Panisse owner Alice Waters, Ewing advises clients to cook with fresh herbs and local ingredients. Slowly. “We live in such a society of go, go, go, and hurry, hurry,” says Ewing, who lives with her husband John in North Asheville. “You have to turn it all off, all of these laptops and iPads, even your home phone. You shut it all off. It’s a conscious decision.”

For details, check out www.auberginesandolives.com.