The dining room at Cúrate.
The Katie Button story is a life lesson in following your bliss. It goes like this: Cornell graduate in chemical engineering moves to Paris to earn a master’s degree in biomedical engineering. Then, as she’s gearing up for a neuroscience Ph.D. program, she has an epiphany. “It was while reflecting back on my time in Paris that I realized that my true passion was in cooking,” says Button. She quit academia and never looked back. So long lab coat, hello chef’s coat.
Button threw herself into the kitchen with the same intensity that characterized her academic scholarship. She cooked in kitchens run by José Andrés and Jean-Georges Vongerichten. She worked in Spain at Ferran Adrià’s famed ElBulli, widely regarded as the best restaurant in the world at the time. (It closed in 2011.) Landing in Adrià’s kitchen wasn’t an easy task. Button even spent a season working in the front of the house—the first American to ever do so. “From the day I stepped foot in that restaurant, I made it clear that I was trying to prove myself so that I could come back the following year to work in the kitchen,” Button says and did just that, soaking up everything she could from ElBulli’s team. “The more precise and organized you are, the less mistakes are likely to happen—and the best restaurant in the world can’t afford mistakes,” she says. “That level of organization is something I’m always striving for in my restaurants.”
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Chef Katie Button. Photo by Evan Sung.
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Button was raised in New Jersey, but her roots trail back to South Carolina, and she’s a Southern girl at heart. When the opportunity to open her own place arose, she picked Asheville, North Carolina. “It’s a beautiful town in the Blue Ridge Mountains,” Button says. “There are great outdoor activities, but it also has a wonderful, vibrant downtown full of music, art, great beer and food.” It’s also home to fantastic farmers markets and world-class ingredients, which is what the food at Button’s restaurant Cúrate—a bright, energetic Spanish tapas bar that opened in 2011—is all about.
Her second and most recent concept, Nightbell Restaurant & Lounge, which offers more modern American fare in a moody and romantic setting, also feeds off the local farms and food producers. “The [menus are] very product-focused,” Button says. “I spend a lot of time and effort sourcing the best ingredients. Both of my restaurants serve small plates because I love cooking that way. It allows me to hyperfocus on the ingredient at hand.”
Small plates are about all the two have in common. Cúrate’s 20-foot bar serves as the restaurant’s focal point, with an open kitchen directly behind it that provides a view of the cooks rapidly firing hundreds of dishes all night long. Order classics such as Iberian dry-cured ham, fried marcona almonds or berenjenas la taberna—fried eggplant drizzled with wild mountain honey and garnished with rosemary. The menu’s shining star is the pulpo a la Gallega, perfectly tender Spanish octopus served with olive oil, sea salt, smoky pimenton and a Yukon Gold potato purée.
Around the corner from Cúrate is Nightbell, housed in a large brick building with a first-floor reception area. Head upstairs and you’ll find a variety of dining options: couches in the comfy jewel-toned lounge, a seat at the long communal table or several private, romantic tables. Start with the steak tartare made with hand-cut Brasstown beef strip loin and topped with smoked horseradish cream. From the “small plates” section of the menu, try the shaved asparagus salad with peas, carrots, radishes, pea shoots and petite lettuces or the braised veal cheeks, which are cooked sous vide for 48 hours and served with a red wine bone marrow sauce, a smoked Yukon Gold potato purée and a hint of white truffle butter. Button hopes diners save room for pastry chef Carmen Vaquera’s impeccable desserts, such as the warm molten-center peanut butter cake that comes with chocolate sauce and a mandarin sorbet.
Button’s current life is about as far removed as possible from the neuroscientist’s path she had been on for so long, but she wouldn’t have it any other way. “I come from a long line of wonderful women cooks,” she says. “My mother was the first one to take it on as a career, running her own catering business. It was with her that I found my love of food and cooking. It just took me a little while to figure out that I wouldn’t be happy doing anything else professionally.”