9 months after Helene, some NC businesses hang on by a thread while others close
Christina Kulak dragged a razor blade across a store window, chipping away at a swath of red paint that had spread past its intended target.
The gift shop, gutted by the 30-foot floodwaters that barreled down the Rocky Broad River last September, overlooks splintered homes still lodged in the riverbed ahead. But Kulak is undeterred by the wreckage, steadily repairing the building as she waits for the once-bustling village to reopen.
“A lot of stories live in these walls,” said Kulak, who’s been hired to manage the space’s new business. “Unless you saw the damage in person, it’s hard to describe.”
Chimney Rock Village is one of dozens of mountain communities ravaged by the remnants of Hurricane Helene, the deadliest tropical cyclone to strike the mainland U.S. in nearly two decades. The nation watched in horror as the storm tore through the Blue Ridge Mountains and parts of Asheville, a city whose tourism industry drives nearly $3 billion into the local economy each year.
But just beyond the borders of that beloved city, residents still live in makeshift sheds that sheltered them through the winter months. Roads remain impassable and houses sit crumpled in ravines with no plans for repair. The result is a tourism slowdown spanning all of Western North Carolina — a second blow for one of the region’s most vital economic engines and the people fighting to rebuild it.
“You still see so much damage and destruction,“ said Anthony Wilson, a restaurant owner in Swannanoa. “Even people that live in this area want to get away from it every once in a while.”
Nearly 40% of bars and restaurants in the greater Asheville area have shut their doors since the storm, according to Asheville Food and Beverage United, the city’s labor union, which has tracked both temporary and permanent shutdowns. And more than nine months later, closures are still routine.
“I’m just at the point where I’m not sugarcoating it anymore,” said Miranda Escalante, co-chair of the union. “Every couple weeks someone else announces that they’re closing. It’s almost like clockwork.”
Helene hit just before peak leaf season, derailing travel plans for the millions who typically flock to the mountains through November.
Between October and December, Buncombe County, home to Asheville, saw the steepest drop in year-over-year employment of any large county nationwide, shedding nearly 4,000 jobs in hospitality alone, according to the U.S. Department of Labor. Some businesses didn’t survive the blow, shuttering before summer arrived. Others are teetering on the brink of closure.
Escalante said customer traffic has become wildly unpredictable, leaving restaurants scrambling to staff appropriately as crowds arrive without warning, or not at all. Business remains erratic at Carmel’s, a downtown Asheville staple known for Southern comfort food, where servers are struggling to earn a week’s pay over the course of an entire month.
“We don’t know whether to dial it back or dial it up,” said Amber Bolich, a server at Carmel’s. “It’s so inconsistent that it’s hard to keep the business alive.”
Last week marked the first time the restaurant had been fully staffed since reopening in November. But on a recent Friday night, Bolich looked out at a mostly empty dining room, just days after a sudden Tuesday night rush left her scrambling to keep up.
That same uncertainty is rippling through Asheville’s lodging industry, where some hotel managers say most reservations are now made the day of. Visitors are booking “in the moment, for the moment,” said Michael Lusick, president of the Asheville Buncombe Hotel Association, a shift that’s forcing businesses to offer deals and discounts they normally wouldn’t.
“You price less aggressively when you see that the pace is so far behind where we should be,” said Lusick, who also serves as vice president of a local real estate firm. “We’re getting a considerably lower rate than we should be getting this time of year.”
But the day-to-day instability felt by restaurant workers and hotel managers often isn’t captured in traditional data, a gap that economic consultant Dan Gerlach says can obscure the strains of more vulnerable sectors. Commissioned by local tourism authorities to evaluate the storm’s impact on western communities, Gerlach said that industries like health care and finance have mostly stabilized, but their rebound masks the ongoing struggles of the hospitality sector.
Buncombe County, for example, absorbed more than half of the region’s total economic loss. Yet it’s fared better than most, said Gerlach, with sales tax collections holding steady earlier this year even as statewide figures dropped.
“I think Buncombe is going to come back,” said Gerlach. “The accommodation sector still hasn’t, but it’s strengthened by some of these other sectors helping it.”
He’s more concerned about counties without that cushion, the smaller towns where restaurants and bars make up the backbone of the local economy. Whether those areas recover, Gerlach said, will depend on the region’s ability to diversify and stabilize the hospitality industry.
“This is not a story of Asheville only,” he said.
Swannanoa still reeling
In Swannanoa, just a few miles from Asheville’s cobblestone streets and Black Mountain’s bustling breweries, piles of debris and ramshackle homes still line the roads. The damage is shocking to visitors driving through, offering tourists an unfiltered glimpse of the devastation Helene left behind.
Anthony Wilson, 38, says the time following the storm was a blur of fear and uncertainty. It took days after the rains stopped to reach his family’s restaurant on Patton Cove Road, where Wilson opened the door to a wall of water.
“Nothing in there was salvageable,” said Wilson, who started working at the family business as a teenager. “So we worked on a new place for three months and just made do with what we could.”
The new spot, renamed Athens Grille from its original Athens Pizza, sits feet from the old building and boasts the same menu Wilson’s parents spent decades developing. But area foot traffic has been scarce, and Wilson worries visitors have no reason to pass through town.
Wilson no longer serves customers on their way to the hardware store or post office, both of which were wiped away by the storm. Helene also leveled Swannanoa’s only grocery store, which once stood beside the restaurant, forcing residents to travel elsewhere for produce and daily essentials.
“You have to go outside of this area to get some of the main stuff that you need,” said Wilson. “By that time, they have all kinds of other options (for dining) to choose from.”
Locals are keeping their distance even when they’re not running errands in neighboring towns, said Wilson, who’s lost the business of regulars he served for years. These days, he said, they’d rather escape the town’s destruction than spend time in a community they barely recognize.
“No offense to Swannanoa, but it’s just depressing,” said Dano Holcomb, owner of Root Down Kitchen.
Holcomb launched his soul food spot inside Terra Nova Beer Company, around the corner from Athens Grille, after Helene destroyed his Asheville-based food truck last year. He said business this summer is a third of what it was at Salvage Station, and worse, some visitors come only to gawk at the wreckage.
“We’re not very grateful for the attitudes of entitlement,” said Ida DeZwaan, manager of Haus Heidelberg in Henderson County, where 31 businesses closed last month. “Don’t ask about our trauma because it’s not very fair to ask us to consistently relive that.”
DeZwaan said business at Haus Heidelberg, a Bavarian restaurant known for sausage samplers and oversized steins of beer, dropped 35% in May compared to the same time last year. The restaurant is “hanging on by a thread,” DeZwaan said as she motioned towards a painting on the wall, its smeared colors a lasting reminder of how high the floodwaters climbed.
Tourists provide a welcome boost in business, but DeZwaan credits her regulars for keeping the restaurant afloat. Even so, many can’t visit as frequently as they used to.
“Food costs are up higher, gas prices are higher, electricity is more expensive,” said DeZwaan. “They’re still waiting on money too.”
Even those not hit suffer
Misinformation began circulating on social media as soon as Helene struck, causing nationwide confusion about the storm’s path. Unaffected business owners scrambled to get the word out that they were open, but not before a wave of cancellations rolled in from people with little grasp of North Carolina’s geography.
“It’s always been tough for people that aren’t from the state to understand the geography of Western North Carolina,” said Scott Peacock, director of tourism marketing for Visit North Carolina. “It exacerbated the problem because of people being fearful that something was affected when it wasn’t.”
Towns untouched by the storm have seen tourists dwindle, furthering the false narrative of statewide damage. As a result, tourism leaders and industry workers say, visitors are avoiding entire towns that saw no damage at all.
“People weren’t going to the Outer Banks because they thought that area was affected,” said Escalante, who tends bar at Luminosa, an Italian restaurant tucked inside Asheville’s Flat Iron Hotel. “Helene impacted not just our area but our whole state.”
To mitigate any uncertainty, Visit North Carolina released a simple map within a week of the storm hitting, identifying which areas were impacted and which remained open. Since then, the agency has launched seasonal campaigns urging tourists not to cancel plans and guiding them toward open destinations.
Hope in Chimney Rock
Exactly nine months after Helene pummeled the region, Chimney Rock State Park reopened on June 27 with a ceremony led by Gov. Josh Stein, who signed a bill allocating $700 million in relief funding. Nearby restaurants were buzzing with cautious optimism that evening, each visitor that trickled in after a day of hiking a sign that busier days may be near.
“People have another reason to come up here,” said Paul Brock, who owns Lured Market and Grill with his wife, Cara. “Chimney Rock pulling people in is something to be excited about.”
Past the nearly empty Lake Lure, guests clapped along to live music as Brock moved through the crowd, greeting regulars by name and welcoming new faces. The restaurant is still recovering, and money is still tight. But, he said, the community gives him strength.
Down the road, Kulak and her family stood alone in Chimney Rock Village, scraping, painting and rebuilding as nightfall cast the town into darkness. But their work was punctuated with new optimism, hopeful the state park’s reopening will herald a renaissance for the village that shares its name.
“It feels like a privilege to go through something like this and survive it,” said Kulak. “If I have to scrape windows for days, that’s fine with me.”
This story was originally published July 3, 2025 at 5:00 AM with the headline "9 months after Helene, some NC businesses hang on by a thread while others close."
