No Soup for Her Patty Dowdy of Sunny Point Cafe. photo by Matt Roseinterviews by Cassady Sharp and Jess McCuan

Patty Dowdy Sunny Point Café, West Asheville
At work, Dowdy whips up elaborate veggie-heavy dishes like enchiladas with tofu chorizo and Asian “tuna crunch” burgers with lemongrass and wasabi lime aioli. At home, she can’t even cook a frozen pizza. Really. “The time I was trying to cook a steak for my husband, I pepper gassed him,” Dowdy says, laughing. “I created this white pepper smoke. He was coughing violently. Nothing goes right at home when I cook.”
When she goes out to eat at other restaurants, she rarely orders pastas or soups. “Pasta dishes can be a dumping ground for things that no one can get rid of,” she says. Same for soup. A chef might make soup as a way to use up a small amount of leftover seafood or meat.

Debi Thomas Wildflour Bakery, Saluda
What’s the best excuse Thomas has ever heard from an employee for missing work? “Well, Miss Debi, I’m sorry I didn’t come into work today. I sorta kinda had a baby,” Thomas recalls an un-expecting teenage bread bagger telling her. Unbeknownst to anyone, including the mother-to-be, the girl had a perfectly good excuse to bail on the early bread-baking role call. She already had a bun in the oven.

Jenny Kommit Stovetrotters, South Asheville
Kommit, who opened Stovetrotters in 2008, was once a private chef for Jackie Onassis.  In her early chef days, she responded to a boss who teased her that she shouldn’t handle meat because she was female. “He was just scared my fertility would hatch the caviar and live fish would be crawling around tables at the White House,” she recalled as she braced for a bustling Wednesday lunch at the bistro.
She’s had some explaining to do regarding her restaurant’s unusual name. Her daughter warned her that everyone would think Kommit sold stoves. Sure enough, one of her first phone calls to the bistro was a man looking to buy a stove.

Susan Casey Purple Onion, SaludaWhat does Casey do when the dishes start piling up during a busy dinner rush?  Open the front door and start recruiting people off the streets, of course. “When we first started out, I would just ask young kids on the streets, ‘Do you want to wash the dishes tonight?’” she says. She originally joined Purple Onion as a part-time consultant after her sister bought the restaurant in 1998. But her sister fell in love with a man a month after she bought the restaurant, so Casey bought her out. That’s when “We made her then-fiance wash dishes on our first Memorial Day when people were just spilling in the front door.”

Avi Sommerville World’s Best Carrot Cake, Woodfin
Three summers ago it was so hot outside that Sommerville couldn’t get icing to stick to her gourmet carrot cakes. “It was like water,” she says. A customer was on his way to pick up an enormous four-layer cake for an event that day, so Sommerville set up a table inside her walk-in freezer and iced the entire cake there.