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Photo courtesy The History Press
Lost Restaurants of Asheville
Peterson’s Grill existed in this strip of businesses (above) on Asheville’s Pack Square.
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Lost Restaurants of Asheville
Consider the word delicatessen. It means “delicacies”: cooked meats, prepared salads, specialty dishes to eat in a restaurant or take home. Savor, then, the delicatessen-rich menu from the last day of business at Peterson’s Grill, an institution on North Pack Square for 30 years that closed on October 31, 1977.
Peterson’s Grill was a family business that epitomized the 20th-century immigrant experience and characterized the impact of Asheville’s close-knit Greek community on the city’s restaurant scene. At Peterson’s Grill, kosher meats and country ham got equal billing—just like America, all mixed up together, something for everyone.
Sandwiches? They numbered in the dozens, including goose liver with lettuce and tomato, beef tongue with mustard and pickle, deviled egg sandwich or stuffed olive sandwich, hot salami and egg sandwich, kosher or Italian salami sandwich and plain old peanut butter and jelly. Reportedly, hams were sometimes air-cured in an open window of the back kitchen.
Then there were “Peterson’s Famous Combinations,” mind-bending sandwiches like “Swiss Cheese, Goose Liver, Baked Ham, Salami,” or “Tongue and Swiss Cheese,” or “Sliced Chicken and Goose Liver,” or the Dr. Feldman Special, which consisted of “corned beef, smoked tongue, Swiss cheese, lettuce, and tomato.”
Almost a dozen different cold plates—Peterson’s Famous Cold Plates—were those same meats served with potato salad, sliced tomatoes, pickles and olives, rather than on bread.
There was more. Steaks and chops, roast chicken (with notorious bright yellow gravy), “knackwurst,” leg of lamb, roast turkey with dressing, veal, broiled calf liver, chicken giblets and other meat-and-two-vegetable entrées; stewed oysters or oysters in the shell, deviled crabs, fried scallops and clams; chicken liver omelets, oyster omelets, brain omelets, onion omelets and jelly omelets. The array of seafood cold platters hinted at the owners’ Greek heritage: choice of domestic or imported sardines, shrimp platter or tuna.
There was Greek salad or simply a serving of feta cheese. In 1977, a western T-bone steak topped out the price range at four dollars.
For drinkers, the taproom offered beer and wine, plus two sizes of sherry and two kinds of port. For non-drinkers, a half pint of “cream buttermilk” cost 25 cents. Dessert was noteworthy: half a dozen different pies, plus homemade strawberry shortcake and peach cobbler.
Peterson’s had it all, serving customers from 5:00 a.m. to midnight every day. The hard work and long hours—the faith and hope—that the owners devoted to their family enterprise were facts of life. “You Don’t Have to Be Rich to Eat at PETERSON’S,” read one early advertisement that described it simply as “Asheville’s Reasonably Priced Restaurant.”
The Peterson family wasn’t looking to get rich, necessarily, just seeking to join the American middle class. “They had to borrow money during the slow winter season and paid it back during the good summer trade with enough extra to call it a good living,” a newspaper account recalled.
In the 1950s, in a move to increase cash flow, Peterson’s Grill bid for the contract to feed Asheville’s prisoners housed in the jail nearby, losing one year’s bid by a penny a meal and another year splitting the contract with a competitor. For 35 cents a meal—two meals a day, since breakfast was black coffee at seven cents a cup—Peterson’s provided meat, vegetable sides and tea to drink.
Peterson’s Grill had its origins about two generations before it actually opened at 10 North Pack Square in 1947. Greek immigrants had begun settling around Asheville soon after 1900, when much of the downtown was still a “mud hole” with only rudimentary public services. Sidewalks were wooden planks laid over knee-deep mire. But demand for food was high, and working in cafés and restaurants quickly became a favored career. A stream of countrymen followed from the mountains of Greece, bringing with them a ferocious work ethic, deeply religious ways, devotion to family and a belief in American democracy—all valued traits in Western North Carolina.
In 1927, an immigrant named Gus Peterson opened the Asheville Lunch Room, or possibly Asheville Quick Lunch, on Patton Avenue. With his brother Nick, he then purchased Vick’s Grill at 66 Haywood Street. In a random twist of branding, the neon sign for Vick’s couldn’t be changed easily to Haywood Grill—the Petersons’ preferred name—because of shortages of neon gas. So Vick’s got changed to Nick’s.
The two Peterson brothers did well enough, and eventually each had two sons. The four younger Petersons left home to serve in World War II and came back hoping to become professionals in other fields. But the aging uncles needed them to continue the business for the family’s sake. So they stayed, in 1947 rebranding Nick’s Grill as Peterson’s Grill and moving it to the north Pack Square location.
Enter Akzona. By the mid-1970s, Asheville’s central commercial district, once so dynamic that crowds of shoppers spilled off the sidewalks, was cored out. Dead. The first suburban shopping mall had come to town in 1956, and after that, downtown slid into a desperate decline, exacerbated by the city’s near bankruptcy in 1930 and the travails that followed.
The Dutch textile firm Enka—for Eerste Nederlandsche Kunstzjidefabriek Arnhem—already operated a rayon factory west of Asheville and had brought with it progressive business practices. Enka was subsumed into Akzona Inc., and in 1977, when Akzona proposed building its new corporate headquarters in downtown Asheville, the reception was enthusiastic.
Enka wanted to buy an entire city block, consisting of six commercial buildings dating from the late 1800s. Peterson’s Grill occupied one of them. Those buildings were badly aged, and the Peterson cousins took Akzona’s buyout offer. The six buildings came down, and in their place rose the half-mirrored, ship-like structure commissioned from architect I.M. Pei.
Ironically, Akzona was soon out of business, but that modern anchor helped jump-start Asheville’s 21st century downtown renaissance anyway.
Since 1986, the building has housed Biltmore corporate headquarters. When Peterson’s Grill closed, its tribute included these words from the Asheville Citizen: “Peterson’s Grill presented the illusion that time had stopped there … It was a frozen specimen of time, too new to be historic, too old to be rescued from the inevitability of events.”
Reprinted with permission from Lost Restaurants of Asheville, by Nan Chase. Available from the publisher online at arcadiapublishing.com or by calling 888.313.2665.