More notes on Asheville: We finally made it over to the River Arts district. Talk about colorful. A whole street full of graffiti and wall murals, totally fun. And yes we did eat at 12 Bones, which was all it is cracked up to be. Very good ribs, and as an amazing plus, really great collards and pretty good potato salad. I usually find the collards served at BBQ joints are bitter and have too m:h sugar and too much salt and are cooked to death, but these were delicious. Great atmosphere, very friendly folks and nice outdoor tables. I appreciate places that are open for business mid-afternoon. Yummy.
On our way yesterday back to Atlanta we stopped in West Asheville for doughnuts at Hole. Okay, I've never had doughnuts like this. They use one yeasted dough with several different toppings: a glazed vanilla, a cinnamon something, and an almond sesame with a little bit of salt that is out of this world. Then they rotate a fourth flavor in that changes. Yesterday it was beignet. Really just their basic doughnut with a generous snow of confectioners sugar. Really really really good. All doughnuts are fried to order and come out to you hot. Coffee is simple black drip, excellent. The doughnuts are undeniably sweet and greasy and fabulous. They gave us a couple of free ones because we must have seemed old and stupid, since it took a while to figure out their system of ordering and payment, the kind of thing Gen Z does in their sleep. It takes about six times longer than stepping up to a human at a counter and finding some cash in your wallet, but so it goes. Clearly at least half the patrons were tourists, as they spent time taking pix of themselves in front of the an old Hole truck that appears not to be movable and in fact has a hole in it. The outdoor table next to us had a strange family dynamic. They had two preteen boys in bad moods and one of them asked, "Why are we here?" Everyone else in the parking lot slash outdoor tables knew the answer to that.
