ASHEVILLE, N.C. (828newsNOW) — Chances are, Farm Burger is not the first Asheville restaurant you think of when heading out to eat for Sunday brunch. Farm Burger South Asheville wants to change that.
General Manager Megan Olsen and Kitchen Manager Zac Merrill are the visionaries behind a new, rotating menu of farm-fresh breakfast food at Farm Burger. The special brunch items are available from 11 a.m.–3 p.m. every Sunday at the South Asheville burger joint, 1831 Hendersonville Road.
“There’s something about a big, wonderful breakfast on a Sunday morning that just feels really, really good,” Olsen said. “I’ve always wanted to do something like that. It probably doesn’t make sense to do it at a burger place, but I think the mission of this place kind of allows us to get creative, and involve the community, and the farms and all that kind of stuff.”
The Sunday menu
Today, Sunday, July 27, the menu included a Farmers Market Chicken Biscuit, $10.50, made with a housemade buttermilk biscuit, southern fried chicken thigh, Round Mountain Creamery goat cheese, arugula, locally-sourced blueberry chutney and a balsalmic reduction, a Farm Goddess Bowl, $12.50, made with local sweet potato hash, kale, Hickory Nut Gap chorizo, two sunny-side-up eggs, feta cheese, Green Goddess sauce and housemade buttermilk biscuit and a Blueberry Bread Pudding, $10.50, topped with brown butter Greek yogurt and toasted walnuts, in addition to à la carte plain and chicken biscuits.
Each item on the brunch menu, which changes on a weekly basis, was a hearty, bountiful and delicious helping of farm-sourced ingredients. According to Merrill, the Sunday meal has given Farm Burger another way to work with community farms.
Helping farmers after Hurricane Helene
“We have a lot of access through our farmers to a lot of fruits and vegetables, but a lot of that stuff on burgers doesn’t necessarily translate very well,” Merrill explained. “This opened up an avenue for us to use more local produce and more meat from our local farmers to be able to offer something to people that’s local, fresh and seasonal.”
The bread pudding, for example, has been made of different things every week for the past three weeks, depending on what farmers had for sale at the farmers market.
“Whatever someone’s got for us, we can use that, so it can be an evolving menu to help our local farmers, especially after Helene,” Merrill said. “Everyone lost a lot of things, so being able to provide, you know, buying stuff from people, really helps out the community a lot, too.”
The plan to expand
While brunch is exclusive to Sundays for now, Olsen said there are plans to expand in the future.
“We’re trying to scale it a little bit smaller, because obviously we’re a burger place, and people are coming in here mostly for burgers and just kind of getting lucky if they’re in the mood to be a little adventurous,” Olsen said. “But we’re hoping that’ll it keep growing and we’ll be able to offer more. We want to do coffee and mimosas and stuff like that too, eventually.”
While there is no definitive date on the calendar yet, Farm Burger breakfast will soon be available on Saturdays. In the meantime, the Farm Burger Sunday brunch is succeeding as a big, wonderful breakfast.
For more information about Farm Burger, visit www.farmburger.com.