News

Raleigh N&O's 'Best Kept Secrets' features Hendersonville

By Bill Moss, Published: August 17, 2015

We’ve waited all summer long to read what the News&Observer would say about Hendersonville (if it would say anything) during its "Best Kept Secrets" travel series.
We made the state capital’s newspaper today.
“A half-hour’s drive south of the clipped lawns of George Vanderbilt’s mansion, out of the shadows of the towering deco relics of downtown Asheville, rests the town of Hendersonville, with many of the charms of its more-visited mountain neighbor minus the traffic,” N&O reporter Martha Quillin writes.
She makes an error of one letter in reporting on our most famous crop. She rendered a popular variety as “Roma Beauty.” It’s Rome Beauty. She says the county is home to 200 apple growers. The number is about 125.
But one bad apple (name) does not spoil the whole bunch.
Among the “best kept secrets” tourists should check out, Quillin writes, are Bullington Gardens, Jump Off Rock, Thomas Wolfe’s Angel, Western N.C. Air Museum, North Mills River Recreation Area and the Flat Rock Playhouse Downtown.
Among dining options, the N&O highlights McFarlan’s bakery and its “staggering array of 160 items daily,” Mountain Deli’s “pastrami Reuben on toasted marbled rye gooey with warm cheese,” and Postero, with its “loose interpretation of chicken and waffles and a play on shrimp and grits that instead features trout and a block of fried grits.”