The lights are on at the Tastee Diner hours before the sun comes up over West Asheville. The regulars wait patiently in their cars and pickups in the tiny parking lot. Just at 6 a.m., David Hinson unlocks the front door and the hungry customers amble in and head to their usual spots.
Charlie Raines, 87, and his son, David, 67, take the corner table in the dining room so David, a diabetic, can sit by the gas heater. They've been coming every day, Monday through Friday, for so long the waitresses know not only their names, but their orders. The plates are already hot on the table, fried eggs, grits, and homemade biscuits with brown gravy. They even know that David likes his bacon a little on the burnt side.
"It's just like being at home," David said.
When the doctor ordered him to lay off the cholesterol and eat more oatmeal, a big steaming bowl awaited him every morning for awhile. "The waitresses wouldn't even let me have bacon," David said.
"They were afraid you would die. Then they wouldn't have you coming every day," Charlie chuckled. "When I die is when I'll quit coming to the Tastee Diner," he added.
Welcome to the Tastee Diner, a West Asheville institution since 1946.
World War II had just ended and Harry Truman was president when Herman Brown turned half of an auto garage into a cafe. In 1952 their grill cook, Sam Evans, and his wife, Margaret, a waitress, took over the business.
Since 1989, Hinson has been carrying on that culinary tradition behind the same counters.
"Where else can you get two eggs, biscuits, sliced tomatoes, grits, and coffee for six bucks," said Jerry VeHaun, Buncombe County Emergency Services and mayor of Woodfin. He's been eating here since he was 16, working his first job up the street in West Asheville around 1958. "You know you were always going to get good food here."
VeHaun sidles up to a seat at the counter where he can give Hinson a good-naturedly hard time. "Look how he stirs the gravy backwards. I always call it his left-handed gravy."
Decades ago, Tastee Diner once had Haywood Road to itself for any place to eat out.
Now, the younger crowd who have popularized West Asheville and its Arts and Crafts bungalows, the bars, breweries and restaurants up and down Haywood has started coming and claiming the Tastee Diner as their own, Hinson said. But it's not just West Asheville that eats here. The diner gets customers driving in daily from Black Mountain, Mars Hill and Hendersonville.
Monday through Friday the Tastee Diner will see up to 500 customers for breakfast and lunch before Hinson locks up again around 3 p.m.
Little has changed, including the menu. "I believe we've had the vegetable beef stew since Day One," Hinson said.
And the diner isn't just a shrine to nostalgia. The front door is plastered with labels for all the major credit cards, unlike some mom-and-pop places. Kale, the trendiest of foodtopia items, has made its way onto Hinson's whiteboard of specials during the summer. A kale salad proved a popular seller with his loyalists last summer.
But everyone at Tastee Diner agrees it's hard to find an old-fashioned, family-friendly, Southern comfort food diner with local sausage and even livermush for your homemade biscuits to go.
Hinson had no cooking experience when he bought the business, having worked in steel fabrication before he tired of the repetitive work. He walked into the Tastee Diner for the first time just two weeks before he bought it.
Margaret Evans had wanted her diner to continue under local control. She stuck around to show Hinson the recipes and routines. "The customers were spoiled before I got here," he laughed.
Evans' daughter, Kim Lowe, is still around to do the late afternoon cooking for the next day's lunch.
The usual order
Bruce Hudgins is winding up his workday when he comes in with the first crowd. "I get off at six o'clock of the the morning," said the night watchman at the Asheville School.
Hudgins stops daily for his breakfast before driving home to Sandy Mush and bedtime. He's been trying the country special on the whiteboard: eggs, country ham and hash browns. "It's just the best restaurant in town, in my opinion."
Leslie Hines wanders in about 7 a..m., taking the counter seat that VeHaun had warmed up for him. He's been a regular since 1968 when he started work for the city of Asheville. Now a delivery driver for Lowes, Hines says, "I get hungry and my truck just pulls in here."
"It's always the same and they know you by name." Hines grins.
At the grill, Kimberly Sams stays busy, scraping her pair of flat spatulas corralling a fresh cracked egg into a scramble to top the next sausage biscuit. With her back to the room, Sams admits she knows most of her customers by their usual orders if not always their names.
She'll get slammed at lunchtime. "I can have 30 tickets all lined up. They all come in at once." But Sams doesn't mind, given the clientele. "They're good Southern people. They know manners. It's like home here, not like eating at a restaurant."
Cheryl Alwine stays busy, ferrying coffee and orders behind the counter out to the tables."We do this weird dance back here, especially at lunch. It's interesting how you learn each other's moves."
Then she's back at the register to ring up another take-out customer. "Soggy today, my dear," she brightly says.
Even on a rainy Wednesday, the mood of the regulars is like their egg orders – sunny side up.
"It's about time this place got the recognition it deserves," boasts Richard Bellflower. "I wanted to hold my daughter's wedding reception here, but I got overruled on that."
Bellflower points out to Haywood Road itself. "My great-grandfather used to take that dirt road to Asheville with a horse and wagon." Bellflower also remembers faster times down at the old New Asheville Speedway. He once raced at the storied third-mile short track along the French Broad River.
"David used to race down there himself. That was to give him some cred," jokes Bellflower, who served as the speedway's chaplin. Tastee Diner has its NASCAR legends, and not just plastered in posters on the wall. Hall of Famer Jack Ingram comes in twice a day for breakfast and lunch.
Time doesn't stand still even at the Tastee Diner.
Hinson was changing his menus in January. For the past decade, the menu has boasted at the bottom "more than 60 years of business." Hinson began to do the math and realized he needed to change the motto to 70 years.
Hinson's work day starts at 2 a.m., but he wouldn't trade it for the factory again. "It's hard work and you have to have a passion for it."
At 56, Hinson doesn't plan to work forever himself. He does want to see the Tastee Diner continue. "I can see this place in business for 100 years."
Full of eggs, biscuits and brown gravy, Charlie Raines with his cane and David in his windbreaker saunter to the counter to settle their daily bill.
"We'll see you tomorrow." Alwine smiles.
"See you, kid." Charlie heads out with his son into the first light of West Asheville.
