photo by Brent Fleury

Carson Lucci says it’s not the tourists she’s trying to impress when she goes out of her way to make omelets with local eggs, peppers, cheese and meat. It’s her regular customers, the people who will keep showing up at her downtown Asheville café, Over Easy, during the winter months when most tourists have gone home. “One of my main goals in opening a restaurant was to build a community,” she says. “I never thought I’d be in a town that’s so supportive of that.”

Lucci moved to Asheville ten years ago from Portland (after making a year-long stop in Boone) and has owned Over Easy for nearly five years. She’s grateful for the busy summer and fall, when her 47-seat breakfast-and-lunch spot is packed and her staff can’t whip up croissandwiches, breakfast burritos and tempeh scrambles fast enough. But her most enjoyable time is when it’s slow enough to sit and gossip with the regulars, who always scrutinize the menu. If something isn’t local, they ask Lucci about it. “Of course, you can’t support local so much that you go out of business yourself,” she says, noting that she recently cut costs by switching her egg-buying habits. For four years she bought hormone- and antibiotic-free eggs from a farm in Canton, but in June she switched to buying similar, cheaper eggs from a company in Louisburg, North Carolina, about four hours away. “It’s about picking your battles,” she says. In Western North Carolina, where “locavores” abound and the “buy local” movement has deep roots, she’ll earn extra points by continuing to fight the good fight.   — J.M.