West Asheville breakfast spot to be sold; Property for rent, Cascade Lounge hoping to stay

ASHEVILLE - Home Ground, a West Asheville breakfast coffee bar and cafe is up for sale, while the whole 219 Amboy Road location, including Cascade Lounge bar, has been placed up for rent. The owner of Cascade Lounge is hoping to stay.

Miki Loomis, owner of West Asheville's Home Ground, said the decision to sell comes from a desire to step back and spend more time with family. Loomis rents half of the Amboy Road location.

"I have so much going on," she said. "I need to slow down a little bit. Go to my kid's basketball games and have sleepovers."

Home Grown, a Merrimon Avenue restaurant also owned by Loomis, will not be impacted by the change, Loomis said.

Loomis would like to see another cafe and bar — like Home Ground — enter the location. The goal would be to sell the restaurant's equipment in the building to a new tenant.

"We've always had such great neighborhood support there," Loomis said of Home Ground. "I live in that neighborhood, and so it has always felt like a community neighborhood place."

"We're trying to sustain this until someone else is ready to come in," Loomis said.

Until the location is sold, Home Ground is open and serving coffee, grab-and-go food and pastries from 7:30 a.m. to 2 p.m. every day of the week.

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Put up for rent, Cascade Lounge hopes to remain in West Asheville

Nick Rutherford, the owner of Cascade Lounge, wasn't told the location had been placed up for rent until the Citizen Times had contacted the property owner, Dean Pistor, about the listing.

Though disappointed and surprised by the decision to publicly list the property, Rutherford hopes the bar is here to stay.

"It's a good place. It's a community center — a place to eat and drink and hang out," Rutherford told the Citizen Times. "I think there is so much potential there. Cascade Lounge is going to continue to endure."

For Cascade Lounge Bartender Julia Authier, the bar is more than just a place to grab a drink — it's family.

"My bother works there and my best friend of 20 years," Authier said. "It's basically one big, giant family that works there, and everyone who comes in daily we hear: 'We don't know where we'd be without you guys.'"

Authier hopes to bring a Home Ground replacement, with food, to the Amboy Road property.

"We are a big family and a huge part of the community," Authier said of Cascade. "If Cascade goes down, it will be devastating to West Asheville."

Food truck model 'didn't really work'

The two-tenant connected property had opened as the Asheville Food Park in 2015, where property owner Dean Pistor said the goal was to have rotating food trucks, alongside Cascade Lounge and, for a time, Edna's Coffee Bar.

While the coffee bar flipped to Home Grown West in 2018 and the food truck model "didn't really work for the rotation of certain trucks," Pistor said, "Cascade Lounge stuck."

The whole Amboy Road site has been placed up for rent. MLS services state the location will be leased for around $8,000 a month.

"I would like to see the whole facility get new life with one user," Pistor said.

While Pistor would prefer one tenant, he's open to other options. If Cascade Lounge were to stay, it would likely need a partner with food.

"But, also, I certainly wouldn't mind anybody coming in, running the Home Ground space and working with Cascade," Pistor said. "Either way, I'm happy."

Pistor noted the business dynamics from the two locations had posed a difficult question: how do you manage a location that focuses on nightlife when the food-focused location next door closes at 2 p.m.?

"The bar needs food at night, and [Miki] is only open til' two or three in the afternoon — that's where the catch is," Pistor said.

The building's unique shape also poses a problem, Pistor said. While the bar is on the side separate from Home Ground, the main kitchen is above Cascade Lounge; meaning both interact despite having separate leases.

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Will Hofmann is the Growth and Development Reporter for the Asheville Citizen Times, part of the USA Today Network. Got a tip? Email him at WHofmann@citizentimes.com. Please help support this type of journalism with a subscription to the Citizen Times.

This article originally appeared on Asheville Citizen Times: West Asheville breakfast spot to be sold; Cascade Lounge hopes to stay