Starstruck foodies will eat up this restaurateur’s pedigree.

by Melanie McGee Bianchi . photos by Matt Rose

Having trained at the world’s greatest restaurant, under a chef as well known to the dining elite as Paula Deen is to fried Twinkie fans, Katie Button might be excused for having her head stuck in the culinary clouds. Instead, she expresses an earthy appreciation for WNC’s specialty agriculture, praising the excellent lettuces at Jolley Farms and the subtle sweet honey varieties offered by Wild Mountain Apiaries.

Those ingredients, and countless more, find their way into the Spanish tapas at Cúrate, a simmering new “it” spot on Biltmore Avenue in downtown Asheville. A family restaurant run by a handful of recent New York City transplants—Button, her fiancé Felix Meana, and her parents Ted and Elizabeth—Cúrate is not the first joint in Asheville to do the high-end, small-plate thing. Button mentions such groundbreaking eateries as Zambra and Enoteca: “I’m so grateful to [the chefs there] for introducing the concept,” she says.

She acknowledges the creative fusion that gets plated in those places—bringing in Asian and South American flavors, for example. But at Cúrate, where she is executive chef, the staff stays true to traditional Spanish recipes. That means importing ingredients such as white asparagus, Ibérico ham and boutique paprika. House favorites include setas al jerez (wild mushrooms in sherry), rossejat (paella made with noodles instead of rice) and one of Button’s signature contributions to the menu, berenjenas la taberna (fried eggplant, sprinkled with rosemary and covered in honey).

Cúrate serves the same tapas you might get if you were visiting Barcelona, says Button. And it was in a Spanish seaside town called Roses where she gathered her own laurels, interning at a restaurant, elBulli, that has been called “the most imaginative generator of haute cuisine on the planet” by The Guardian of London. Owner, chef and “molecular gastronomist” Ferran Adrià has been starred with too many awards to list—the sort of aristocratic celebrity chef to be profiled, as he recently was, in the New York Times and Vanity Fair. Although Adrià’s avant-garde food experiments have been dubbed “pretentious,” his restaurant still gets two million reservation requests for every 8,000 people it can serve in its short season. Similarly, elBulli fills only 40 chef-intern spots from many thousands of applicants.

Button got a lucky break and became a server there through her fiancé, who was running elBulli’s front-of-house. The aspiring chef was finally invited back—as in, back into the kitchen—one day after she intercepted a cold soup. The elaborate dish, meant to mimic a water lily, had failed to receive a miniscule but crucial garnish.

Once ensconced in the hallowed kitchen, she didn’t experience the kind of clashing egos and hotheaded chaos trotted out for hungry Food Network watchers. Rather, what she observed was more like reverence and blazing efficiency. “It was nothing like a reality show. These were very professional people, acting as peers,” Button says. She soaked up more experiences at stops like Jean Georges in New York City and The Bazaar in L.A., where she worked under Jose Andres, who just won a James Beard award in May. “If you can learn how to run a restaurant on that tier, you can learn anything—and use pieces of what you know at more casual restaurants, too,” she says. Cúrate may not be totally casual—she and her family transformed the Asheville Area Arts Council gallery it was built in, giving the space the feel of a swank eatery inside a European train station. But casual or not, Button certainly seems to have learned how to run a top-notch restaurant. Asheville foodies should take note.

For more, visit www.curatetapasbar.com. Curate will participate in this month’s Blue Jean Ball fundraiser at Manna FoodBank on June 4. For details, go to www.mannafoodbank.org.