Roy Jason - Biscuit head: new southern biscuits, breakfasts, and brunch

NEW SOUTHERN BISCUITS, BREAKFASTS, AND BRUNCH

JASON AND CAROLYN ROY

Were Jason and Carolyn Roy and we love biscuits. We also love Southern food, family traditions, the mountains of western North Carolina, and the city named Asheville that we call home.

While neither of us is native to our fair city, both of us come from families where food and the community it brings together are a big part of life. And lucky for us, we both had the crazy dream of opening a restaurant stuck in our heads before we met. Ever since we started dating, weve been working in restaurants. Between the two of us, weve worked just about every position front and back of house, and weve been part of many amazing restaurant families. At the end of the day, those families are what kept our dream alive.

Eventually, here in the beautiful, laid-back mountain town of Asheville, we decided to turn our dream into a reality. Our vision was this: a breakfast restaurant centered around Southern-style cathead biscuits. (These are just what they sound likebiscuits as big as a cats head!) It might sound simple, but we believe cathead biscuits are magical. They are humble but delicious, and they are wonderfully versatile as the base for a menu.

We wanted our restaurant to be welcoming, fun, and lighthearted just like us! We wanted it to draw on the community and be supplied as much as possible through local vendors. We wanted to treat our employees well and consider the environment toocomposting and recycling whenever possible. It was also important for the restaurant to be a place where we could spread the gospel not only of biscuits, but of gravies, jams, and all other manner of delicious breakfast foods.

So we took the plunge. With the help of our friends and family, we tore down wallpaper, pressure washed, and painted. We moved heavy equipment (crushing a few fingers along the way). We laid tile, built tables, and constructed our jam barthe idea for this came from salsa bars common in Mexican restaurants! Recipes were created and tested, and our staff was hired and trained. There were late nights and early mornings. There was laughter, arguments, and tearsnearly unbearable stress and unmatchable joy.

Then, on May 21, 2013, our doors were finally open. We knew it would be busy and we were prepared, but we still underestimated peoples love and excitement for biscuits! That first week was crazy. We never anticipated having a line out the door, but we did. We ran out of food and found ourselves making trips to the store in the middle of the day. We arrived hours before opening and stayed long after closing to prep food and reorganize. We learned a very important lesson: no matter how prepared you try to be, some things just cant be tweaked until after youve opened the doors.

But we retooled what we needed to in the kitchen to meet demand, optimized the front of house little by little, and pretty soon the restaurant was running like a dream. If the line wasnt out the door, around the corner, and down the block, our employees started to think it was slow! Chaos became the new normal, and we all learned to thrive in it.

Over that first year we watched our dreams come to life, and it was more fulfilling than we could have imagined. We were so tickled every time someone was converted to the bacon of the day or had that aha! moment when they discovered we did gravy flights. In fact, we had so much fun and the restaurant was still so dang busy that we decided we had to do it again. With the help of our family and friends, notably the Westers, we opened our second Biscuit Head a year later, just a few miles across town.

As we write this book, were just about ready to open our first location outside of Asheville in Greenville, South Carolina. And while there are no plans to keep building Biscuit Heads, you never know what the future holds! No matter what we decide to do, though, we will remain humble and true to our dream. Our very first customers, Fred and Justin, still stop by every week to eat and chat with the staff. We hope this book lives on in the same way and that you find yourself stopping by these pages over the years whenever you want a dang good breakfast.

Time to make the biscuits!

Jason and Carolyn Roy

SOUTHERN PANTRY MUST-HAVES

In the South, our pantries are our secret weapons whenever its time to create a great meal. Many people go beyond the basics, canning and preserving in season so that they have natures bounty at their fingertips year round. ( to find out more about canning if you choose to do the same.) In this section, well help you fill your pantry with some of our favorite staples and make sure you have everything you need to make the recipes in this bookand beyond. If it takes a little work to find a few of the more obscure ingredients, embrace the trip to a new store or the visit to a new website! Remember that the journey to finding a new food is often half the fun.