The North Asheville Weekend Is Getting Busier, But Not Newer

The Hop has been scooping the same waffle cones on Merrimon Avenue since 1978, back when Ashley and Greg Garrison were still university students working the counter before they bought the place outright in 2008. Locals call the Merrimon location "the Mothership," the original outpost the rest of the chain grew from. It hasn't needed a relaunch, a rebrand, or a new concept to stay busy on a Saturday night.

Everything around it has been rewritten in the past year and a half. Within about a mile of that ice cream counter, three separate restaurant groups have opened new spots on Merrimon Avenue, and none of them are first-time operators testing an idea. They're proven Asheville names making a second, third, or fifth bet, and they're all making it on the same six or seven blocks. That's the part worth understanding if you already live here: North Asheville's dining scene isn't expanding because it's undiscovered. It's expanding because the people who already succeeded elsewhere in town have decided this corridor is where they want to try it again.

Same Corner, Third Restaurant for the Same Group

The building at 319 Merrimon Avenue used to be Musician's Workshop, a fixture that closed and left the address up for grabs. The Scheffer Group bought it, and the permit that eventually went up in the window described something specific: two connected buildings joined by a shared wall, one side becoming corporate offices, the other becoming a restaurant, as reported by Asheville Watchdog.

That restaurant turned out to be The Majestic, a Chinese American counter-service concept slated to open in late May, and it wasn't a leap into unfamiliar territory for the group behind it. Mountain Xpress reported that it's the fifth location from the Scheffer Group, which already runs Jettie Rae's Oyster House, Gan Shan, and two locations of Vinnie's Neighborhood Italian. By the time August rolled around, The Majestic had already worked through its opening season. This wasn't a young chef gambling on a first restaurant. It was an operator with four other track records deciding Merrimon Avenue deserved a fifth.

Down the Street, Two More Groups Are Running the Same Math

The Majestic isn't the only repeat bet on this stretch. Mountain Madre, the upscale Mexican kitchen known downtown for what it calls the largest agave bar in Western North Carolina, opened a second location at 791 Merrimon Avenue in the former Avenue M space, which had sat empty since Avenue M's closure. Ahead of the Build noted that the new spot sits roughly 200 yards from Ay Caramba Mexican Grill & Bar, close enough that the two are expected to compete for the same North Asheville diners looking for Mexican food on a weeknight. That's not the kind of proximity an operator accepts by accident. It's a sign the demand on this stretch is strong enough to support two players fighting over it.

Around the same time, a former Woodfin dive bar became Saffron India Barrel House under new ownership, adding an Indian kitchen to a building that used to be known for something else entirely. Reynolds Village, a short walk north near Beaver Lake, has its own version of the same pattern: Quench Wine Bistro, a collaboration between Metro Wines and Chef Sam Etheridge, was named Best Restaurant in Woodfin for 2025, and Little D's on Merrimon Avenue is run by Owen and Mindi McGlynn of Asheville Proper, another team with an existing reputation rather than a debut concept.

Worth noting: Reynolds Village technically sits over the line in Woodfin, not Asheville proper. For anyone who actually lives along this end of Merrimon, that distinction rarely matters. The walk from Beaver Lake to Reynolds Village and back is the same errand loop whether the address says Asheville or Woodfin.

The One Place That Never Needed a Second Act

Which brings the story back to The Hop. While three restaurant groups were signing leases and running renovation permits, the Mothership location kept doing exactly what it's done for almost fifty years: rotating flavors, selling milkshakes, staying open daily. It didn't need a repeat operator to prove it out, because it already proved itself out decades before any of the current wave existed. If you want a measure of how much this corridor has changed without actually changing, that's it. The newcomers are betting on Merrimon. The Hop never had to.

Saturday Still Starts in a Parking Lot at UNC Asheville

None of this restaurant activity has touched the neighborhood's actual Saturday morning anchor. The North Asheville Tailgate Market has run since 1980, and it still draws more than 70 vendors a week and more than 40,000 customers a year, according to the market's own season details. It sets up in UNC Asheville's Lot P34 during the academic year and shifts to Lot P28 from mid-May through mid-August, per its current listing with the Appalachian Sustainable Agriculture Project. The 2026 season runs from January 10 through December 19, with the main spring-through-fall hours holding at 8 a.m. to noon.

That's a market that's been going for forty-six years without needing a second location or a rebrand of its own. It's the fixed point the whole neighborhood's weekend still orbits around, no matter what's opening three blocks away.

The Lake That Almost Became a Strip Mall

The other fixed point sits just up the road. Beaver Lake Bird Sanctuary is an 8-acre preserve with a three-eighths-mile boardwalk through wetland and lake edge, managed by the Blue Ridge Audubon Society, a chapter of the National Audubon Society, according to details compiled by RomanticAsheville. It exists in its current form because Audubon led an effort in the mid-1980s to stop a strip mall from being built on the site. Every quiet walk around that lake today is a direct result of a fight that could have gone the other way forty years ago.

The sanctuary still runs guided bird walks on the first Saturday of every month, starting at 8 a.m. from April through September and 9 a.m. from October through March. It's free, and dogs aren't allowed inside the sanctuary itself, though the gravel path north toward the dam and spillway extends the walk for anyone who wants more distance. On September 28 at 5 p.m., Blue Ridge Audubon is dedicating a new Butterfly Trail station at the sanctuary, a partnership with Bee City USA-Asheville focused on the Summer Azure, one more small addition to a place that's been protected, not reinvented, for four decades.

Two Speeds, One Neighborhood

That's the real shape of a North Asheville weekend right now. The restaurant corridor is moving fast, filled with operators who already know how to run a kitchen and are betting Merrimon Avenue is where they want to run a second or third one. The market and the lake are moving at the same pace they always have, because neither one needed proving. A Saturday here can start at a farmers market that predates most of the neighborhood's current restaurants, run through a lineup of second-act kitchens that didn't exist eighteen months ago, and end with a quiet lap around a lake that only exists because the neighborhood once said no to exactly this kind of commercial growth.

If you're the kind of resident who tracks these shifts as they happen, Mills + Coin keeps an eye on corridors like this one across Asheville, not just downtown. We're always glad to talk through what's changing in the neighborhoods we watch closely, whether that's over coffee or during a visit to our showroom on Biltmore Avenue.