The Southern Highland Reader

Every town worth its grinds needs a coffee magnate, and now Sylva has one.

John Bubacz, owner of Signature Brew Coffee Company and Bubacz’s Underground on Main Street has purchased the competition — Shot in the Dark Cafe — from Lucy Silverman and Justin Goble.

Silverman and Goble were recently married, and she has taken work in Durham. Goble’s departure will be felt on both ends of Main Street, as he is also a workhorse reporter for the Sylva Herald newspaper.

Bubacz, who roasts his own joe at Signature Brew, will reopen Thursday, January 21.

“I’ll move my coffee roaster up there in due time,” says Bubacz, “but we’ll immediately offer fresh pastries, organic fair trade coffee and espresso, snacks and grab-and-go lunch. We will be open 7am-6pm Monday-Thursday with weekend hours TBA.”

Bubacz opened Wha Cha Want Bodega on the WCU campus in 2001, and combined that business with Sylva’s Juice Junkie in 2002. He moved the whole shebang to its current location at the Underground in 2006.

Once, about ten years ago, I was having lunch at a Sylva restaurant called the Spring Street Cafe.

From my table I caught a quick glimpse down an unlikely sightline — framed just so by some plants and interior drapes, down a hallway, and through a cracked door — of a baker’s table. On the table was a wedding cake, and the cake was being carefully decorated by two hands. The hands were all I could see.

The owner of those baker’s hands would one day become my wife, and we would come to own a house across the street from the cafe, where we live today with our three girls.

Spring Street, which has been closed for nearly a year, will soon open again under the ownership of former employee Emily Elders, a Cullowhee native. One of her ideas for an advertisement is a group shot of kids that have sprung from the many friends that have surrounded the cafe for the past ten years. (It better be a big ad).

All along, Spring Street Cafe has held a particular niche in Sylva’s lively-for-a-small-town restaurant scene.

First, in the nineties, it was City Lights Cafe, a small eatery attached to the bookstore upstairs, and under the proprietorship of Joyce and Allen Moore.

About a decade ago it was expanded into it’s full service self by Faye Holliday, whose culinary flair traces at least a little of its lineage to Asheville’s Hector Diaz, owner of the eclectic and popular eateries Salsa’s, Zambra and others.

Holliday and her unusually loyal (for food service) crew built a strong following through wild explorations of fresh local and world cuisines, and Tuesday night old time jam sessions and Sunday brunches were de rigueur among a certain Sylva social set.

Faye’s slow food influence can now be felt in a number of kitchens in the southern mountains.

Holliday sold the place to Lisa Agee a few years back, and Agee, whose desserts were quite a calling card, closed her business last spring, a victim of the economic malaise.

Enter Ms. Elders. As a single mom, a student and director of the Jackson County Greenways Project, you’d think she might have enough on her plate to worry about what’s on everybody else’s, but she’s game. She and a band of volunteers have been sprucing the place up in preparation for a January 26 opening.

“I’m very much inspired by Faye’s ideals,” Elders says. “We’ll be as local and as organic as we can be. My goal right away is to keep price points down, and bring back a lot of the items people remember and love.”

Elders has assembled a crew of former employees and a front-of-the-house manager that’ll be familiar to Sylva folks: Michael Redmon has been a longtime employee of Annie’s Bakery.

Several of the specifics that fans of the place remember will return, sushi Wednesdays and Sunday brunch among them. In addition, Elders and new City Lights Bookstore owner Chris Wilcox hope to develop a more symbiotic relationship than the two businesses have shared before. The cafe’s hours will be much closer to those of the bookstore, and the bookstore will open on Sunday afternoons.

Spring Street will hit the ground running, events-wise. Elders will host a Chamber of Commerce business after hours on January 28th, and will open for business the next day.

Book-signings and an art opening are already on the schedule for February.

MURPHY–Dwight Otwell, staff writer for the Cherokee Scout in Murphy, reported recently about efforts made by mountain farmers to diversify and to profit from niche crops.

Agriculture has dwindled rapidly in the mountains, where farmers face not only the standard competition from industrial farming, but the added challenge of a lack of flat land.

Otwell’s lead:

Farmers who make their entire livelihood from working the land are almost a relic from the past in Cherokee County.

As the number of large farms has steadily dwindled, a new type of farmer has emerged, one who can forge a living from an acre or two growing for a specialty market.

He goes on to interview a vintner, a dairy farmer and vegetable farmers, all of whom are using innovative methods to make their famrs work.

Another excerpt:

A new type of market is using the Internet to sell products to high-end restaurants or consumers. The main market for this area is Atlanta.

The idea is that a chef gets the fresh produce he wants the next day, Wood said. The chef knows the farm the produce comes from and he trusts it. A person with as little as a half acre of land willing to grow specialty crops can make $20,000 to $30,000 an acre.

Read Otwell’s story in the Scout here.

DILLSBORO–This story, in which Constance Richards writes up Barry Kennon’s tiki bar party spot outside his house on the Tuckasegee near Dillsboro, first ran in the August edition of swanky WNC Magazine.

It’s been posted online since, so, given that party journalism pieces are few and far between in the mountains, it obviously needed sharing.

Kennon, a championship kayaker, modeled his tiki bar after one he knew in Costa Rica, and built it around his boat takeout.

Here’s an excerpt:

As more decorations go up, including tiki totems and palm leaves, Dieter Kuhn, Sylva’s resident brewmeister and owner of Heinzelmännchen Brewery, takes the B.Y.O.B. standard to a master’s level and taps a keg of his seasonal Hoppy Gnome. The set-up crew continues their work with golden pints in hand.

“If you only eat your own food and drink your own beer, you’re selling yourself short,” says Kuhn. “We have so many great venues in this little area—people really come together and like to share what they have to offer.”

In the kitchen, [former Spring St. Cafe chef Karl] Engelmann is crisping slices of fresh ciabatta bread and sesame-covered filone from Annie’s Naturally Bakery in the oven, which will be served with a panoply of cheeses. For the early guests, he sends out a platter of thick triangles of farmstead cheeses from Yellow Branch Pottery & Cheese, globes of Dark Cove goat cheese covered in chopped chives, and crudités.

Moving on to the trout, he blends pork sausage from Nantahala Meats and Poultry in Franklin, chopped croutons, garlic, and herbs, and spoons the mixture into the whole trout before wrapping each with bright green banana leaves and tying them with string. “This will literally steam the fish, keep the moisture in, and enhance the flavors,” Engelmann says. He has another trick in mind, too. Shells from the boiled peanuts he’s serving with the Cobb salad will go into the grill flames to add a nutty flavor.

Read the whole story here.

Michael Pollan is author of In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto and The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, along with many other books and essays. His new book is called “Food Rules”.

He says “If you follow these rules, you will be purchasing and eating real, whole food most of the time.”

1. Don’t buy anything your great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food. Like anything orange that isn’t salmon, a carrot or an orange.
2. Avoid products containing ingredients that can’t be found in an ordinary pantry. Even better, avoid anything that has more than five ingredients. Better still, if you can’t pronounce most of the ingredients, you don’t want to eat them.
3. Don’t buy anything that lists sugar in its first three ingredients. And NO HIGH FRUCTOSE CORN SYRUP! Not even a little.
4. Shop the peripheries of the supermarket and stay away from the middle–that’s where most processed food is shelved.
5. If it came from a plant, buy it (and eat a lot of it). If it was made in a plant, pass it by.
6. If it says lite, low-fat, or non-fat on the package, put it down. You’ll be more satisfied if you eat a little bit of the real thing.
7. Avoid food that is pretending to be something that it is not. This includes soy-based mock meats.
8. Food making health claims on the package is not food you want to buy. Don’t take the silence of the yams as a sign they have nothing valuable to say about your health.
9. Avoid food that is advertised on television. And remember, if it is delivered through the window of a car, it is not food.
10. Get out of the supermarket. Look to farmer’s markets for the majority of your food and snacks.

Pollan collected more rules from readers of the New York Times Magazine, which can be read here.

MT. HOLLY–It’s been three decades since the place was burnt to make room for a warehouse, but my memories of my grandparents’ farmhouse in the rolling hills near Mt. Holly are all emotion and texture.

The kitchen is at the heart of it, of course, as with all house recollections, so when Tipper at the Blind Pig and the Acorn wrote about cornmeal mush recently I took a second to close my eyes.

The large kitchen had west-facing windows, and coffee in a percolator. There was a breakfast porch for when the weather was right, and giant pin oak trees, a row of stone outbuildings and jumbled blankets of ivy right outside.

Inside there was little breakfast table where my pa-pa rolled his cigarettes. The wall lamp had a rooster shade, and the plate on the light switch said “outen the light”.

My grandmother made cornmeal mush here, although not without complaint. She said it took too much stirring.

BALSAM–Hiking in the leaf-strewn woods feels colorful and messy, like a kid’s taped-together scrapbook. I am inspired to play the I Spy game. Spying the work of an industrious sapsucker drilled neatly into the bark of a tall tulip tree, I ask Sam (my six year old son) what made the neat line of bark holes.

Contributor Blair Ogburn is Senior Naturalist at Balsam Mountain Preserve. She, her husband Jon and son Sam live in Addie Community

“Woodpeckers” he says and I explain that a woodpecker did indeed tap out these little caverns. From the holes, tree sap will flow and provide nourishment to animals via sticky goo. Sapsuckers, other birds, and insects will come to the tree café and enjoy lapping some sap.

Sam takes a turn at I Spy and delights me with “I spy a tree’s nose”. I look around for a nose, perhaps nostril holes or a slimy fungus, but my eyes find only twigs and vines. Then I notice a wooden wedge pushed forth from furrowed bark of a dead standing tree (or snag). The growth Sam spied is actually a fungal shelf, appearing like a big black nose on the face of a dying tree. We take a closer look and find a pulsing web of life on the mossy shelf nose. There are beetles, scarlet colored mites, and dark spiders in webs from underneath.

Shelf fungi

Shelf fungi form dense anchors and send fungal fingers through snags and logs to weaken them. The wood then begins to rot and decompose. Wood munching insects and other recyclers move into softened wood to take advantage of a food source. Mother nature is on the job to create ‘new’ soil from old wood.

Peeking from a little nature nook in the snag, Sam and I find a golden mouse, our last discovery in today’s game of I Spy. The mouse’s fluffy fibrous nest is tucked inside the safe haven of the rotting tree. Thanks to decomposers like the shelf fungi, a mouse can find warmth and shelter from cold, wind and rain. As Sam and I are done spying on nature for the day, we turn back home to seek shelter of our own.

NATIONAL–Slate Magazine’s “Green Lantern” provides “illuminating answers to environmental questions” in a Q-n-A format.

The current question? “I know you can buy local or buy organic, but I’ve heard that some crops are simply more resource-intensive than others, regardless of how or where they are grown. So what’s the key to picking foods that have the smallest environmental footprint?”

Here’s an excerpt from the Lantern’s answer:

Certain crops require loads of phosphate fertilizer, for example, which is mined from the ground and can eventually cause stream-choking algal growth. Other fruits and veggies are grown with heavy doses of pesticides, fungicides, and other chemicals that can pollute waterways and cause reproductive problems in animals. So how do you know which crops are best to eat? Here’s the Lantern’s rule of thumb: Try to keep your more extravagant fruit cravings in check, but don’t sweat the low-impact calories that come with your carbs.

Read the piece here.

Sylva’s McDonald’s restaurant — the oldest franchise in town — will close for three months in early 2010 to replace its current structure. The local owners will completely remove the current building and replace it with another.

An upshot of the closure is that McDonald’s will be required to come into compliance with Sylva’s sign ordinance. The owners will have to remove the current, large, 80’s-era arches and replace them with a much smaller “monument” style sign.

Franchise owners approached the Sylva town board recently asking to keep their current sign. They expressed concern that their considerable setback from business 23, combined with the impact of a smaller sign, would hurt business. The circumstances disqualified McDonald’s from consideration for a variance, however, and the town asked the restaurant to come into compliance.

While the McDonald’s sign change requirement is tied to the length of the store closure, Sylva residents could see other sign changes soon. The ordinance prevents updates to current oversized signs; owners may not spruce them up without coming into compliance. As a result, current big signs such as those at Wendy’s restaurant and Ingle’s grocery store are likely to become gradually more dilapidated before they are ultimately replaced.

STATEWIDE–We noted last week that The Center for Science in the Public Interest thinks it’s a good idea to tax soda pop.

Along the same lines, the Raleigh News and Observer noted over the weekend that the NC Medical Society might recommend taxation of nutritionally worthless foodstuffs.
An excerpt from the story:

“Obesity is our number one health issue, as far as chronic issues are concerned,” said Scott Donaldson, a Hendersonville urologist who supports the resolution. The resolution includes a series of “whereases” that discuss the rise of obesity in the state (rank – 12th in a recent report), the costs of treating it and its link to various ailments such as heart disease, type 2 diabetes and cancer.

The N&O adds that the NC Medical Society resolution is expected to be discussed in committee on Saturday, Oct. 31. If the committee sends it to the society’s House of Delegates, they’ll vote the next day.

More reading:

Read the N&O blog post here.
Report on obesity (mentioned in excerpt above) from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

NATIONAL–The Center for Science in the Public Interest has compiled a list of foods most likely to make you sick.

Here’s a quote from the authors of the report:

“A globalized food system, archaic food safety laws, and the rise of large-scale production and processing have combined to create a perfect storm of unsafe food,’’ the C.S.P.I. writes. “Unfortunately, the hazards now come from all areas of the food supply: not only high-risk products, like meat and dairy, but also the must-eat components of a healthy diet, like fruits and vegetables.’’

Here’s the top ten:

1. Leafy greens
2. Eggs
3. Tuna
4. Oysters
5. Potatoes
6. Cheese
7. Ice cream
8. Tomatoes
9. Sprouts
10. Berries

Of course, these items will make you sick right now. Items that’ll make you sick on down the road come at it from a different angle, and the Center has some thoughts about those foods, too. They think we should tax the hell out of soda pop, for example.

Michael Jacobson, executive director of the Center, says this: “Soda is dirt cheap and promotes expensive and debilitating diseases, which in turn run up healthcare costs at all levels of government.”

More reading:

From the New York Times
From CNN
From the Washington Post

REGIONAL–Tipper at the Blind Pig and the Acorn posts today about fall gardens.

Our relatively mild climate will allow for some light-frost-tolerant crops well into autumn.

An excerpt from Tipper’s piece:

Look for veggies that can tolerate a light frost-like you do in the early spring. Often here in western NC our first frost of the fall will be light and another frost won’t occur for several weeks.

Radishes, swiss chard, mustard greens, carrots, broccoli, cauliflower, spinach, turnips, and lettuces, are all considered good choices for planting in the fall.

Read the post here.

The Nourished Kitchen with an overview of the five top problems associated with vitamin D deficiency.

A recent study showed that an amazing 70% of US kids don’t get enough, and adult rates are dropping, too.

Vitamin D is critically important to overall health and, sadly, most of the population suffer from deficient or suboptimal vitamin D levels.  Indeed, a recent study indicated that a whopping 70% percent of US children (no, folks, that’s not a type-o) suffer from deficient or insufficient vitamin D levels1.   Similarly, adult men and women average suboptimal vitamin D levels and these average levels seem to be decreasing year by year2.  Remember: the terms “average” and “normal” do not necessarily equal “optimal.”

Chalk the deficiency up to poor eating habits and lack of sunshine, yet, regardless of the reason behind this epidemic-level vitamin deficiency, the general health of the public is suffering.  Vitamin D deficiency and insufficiency is associated with many and varied diseases as well as increased overall mortality.  Conversely, researchers in human aging have found an association between optimal vitamin D levels and increased longevity.

SYLVA–A ten-year-old mainstay of the Sylva food scene announced its closing yesterday.

Spring Street Cafe owner Lisa Agee said times had become too lean to continue operation, and closed her doors.

Spring St. Cafe and City Lights Bookstore

Agee bought the restaurant three years ago from founder Faye Holliday. Holliday opened in 2000 in a space previously occupied by City Lights Cafe, beneath City Lights Bookstore in Sylva. Holliday had been an employee of City Lights Cafe owners Joyce and Allen Moore for most of the nineties, and had learned her trade in part under Hector Diaz, founder of two famous Asheville restaurants, “Zambra” and “Salsas”.

Holliday’s idiosyncratic culinary flair and long-term staff members were a staple of the downtown Sylva scene through the early 2000’s, and during that time the Cafe’s Sunday brunches and Tuesday night old time music jams were central to the routines of many area residents.

One of Holliday’s employees, Jen Pearson, went on to open Guadalupe Cafe, on Main St., in 2005.

Agee, a baker, moved from Virginia and bought the restaurant in 2006.

FRANKLIN-On Saturday July 25th at the height of the summer season, The Land Trust for the Little Tennessee (LTLT) will hold its first annual “Local Food Gala” at Cave Creek in the Lower Burningtown area of Franklin. This fundraising event will include an open-air evening of music and entertainment with a multi-course dinner prepared by local chefs using exclusively foods grown locally. This event is part of LTLT’s strategic goal to directly align with local food production with the intention of bringing awareness to the value of locally produced food and fiber. Not only do local foods reward our sense of taste, but locally produced food nourishes and strengthens our families and communities, sustains our mountain farming traditions, and protects our natural resources through productive land conservation practices.

LTLT has received generous enthusiasm from growers in its entire six county program region. Gala guests can look forward to a delicious menu artfully prepared by chefs Lisa Thordarson of the Frog and Owl Mountain Bistro in Franklin, Rodney Sanders of Big Mountain Bar-b-Que and Mill Creek Country Club; Jeff Southerland from Riverblaze Bakery, and others. Guest will be entertained by Singer/Song writer Tom Quigley and special guest North Carolina Poet Laureate, Kathryn Stripling Byer.

Please join LTLT in supporting your local growers – buy from their farms, their stands, their booths at the farmers market, and purchase tickets to attend the Local Food Gala to support LTLT in conserving productive land to keep farmland available for future generations. Gala tickets are available for sale at the Franklin Chamber of Commerce, Jackson County Chamber of Commerce in Sylva, Swain County Chamber of Commerce in Bryson City, and through the LTLT office in Franklin or web site www.ltlt.org

LTLT thanks local growers for their support and enthusiasm for our local food gala and recognizes their sponsors: United Community Bank; Macon Bank; RBC Bank; Farm Bureau in Jackson, Clay and Swain Counties; the Smoky Mountain News; Sylva Herald; and Macon Printing.

Since 1999 the Franklin based Land Trust for the Little Tennessee (LTLT) has conserved over 12,000 acres including 1,000 acres on working farms in Macon and Cherokee Counties. LTLT serves the six far western counties of North Carolina – Jackson, Macon, Swain, Graham, Clay and Cherokee.

REGIONAL–The food blog Nourished Kitchen offers up a post called “Get the Most From your Farmers Market: 10 Tips from a Market Manager.”

The author’s lead:

Together, my husband and I run our local farmers market – coordinating with the town, recruiting vendors, connecting with customers and devising eccentric activities that keep the customers returning to the market even after their shopping is done. In the three years since the market began, I’ve garnered a little wisdom and want to share a few tips with you that can enhance your farmers marketing experience.

Tip number one:

Go Early, but Not Too Early

The best stuff goes fast. A farmer may only have a single flat of ripe, juicy blackberries or a couple of pounds of fresh green peas, so arrive early to make sure you get the best pick of the market’s wares. Take care, though, not to go too early. Some markets disallow sales prior to the official hour and the sale you ask the farmer to make early may very well slow down set-up thus reducing the sales she or he can make later.

Read the other nine tips here.

REGIONAL-As Asheville writer Stewart David wraps up his column in the most recent Mountain Xpress, he argues this:

There are definitely good reasons to support local farms. It’s great to do business with our neighbors, keep more money and jobs in our community, minimize “food miles,” eat fresher and tastier food, preserve local farmland and avoid supporting corporate agribusiness. And local farms are generally far less cruel than their industrial counterparts when it comes to raising animals.

But let’s not serve up their products with a side of greenwash. Plant-based agriculture is clearly much healthier for the earth, and thinking locally is only part of the equation: We also need to act globally. Nostalgic calls for a return to the perceived quaintness of days gone by are unrealistic, given the population explosion we’ve experienced.

David was responding, in part, to the notion that locally-raised meat is “green”. He argues, generally, that no meat is particularly green, and that that includes locally raised and consumed meats.

Another excerpt:

Compared with factory farms, family farms do employ some environmentally beneficial practices. Yet in some ways they’re actually less eco-friendly.

Animals allowed to move around expend more calories and thus consume more resources than those crammed into tiny crates and cages. Chickens not pumped full of antibiotics and genetically manipulated to reach optimal slaughter weight at 6-1/2 weeks take longer to raise — and consume more food in the process. Cows raised on pasture produce more methane (a greenhouse gas 25 times more potent than carbon dioxide) than those crammed into feedlots.

The column sparked a lively argument online, worth reading. Here’s the link again.

HIGHLANDS–It’s been a couple of decades since I spent a summer in Highlands, waiting tables at the Old Edwards Inn and having many meals at the restaurants roundabout.

Old Edwards Inn and Spa

The Old Edwards — and its Central House Restaurant — was under different ownership at the time, but the dining room served fresh seafood imaginatively done and was wall-to-wall most nights. It has since gone ultra high-end.

The Lakeside Restaurant I remember as unassuming but very nice — one of those special places where ownership had struck just the right balance between the surroundings, service and food.

Hot off the presses, then, are these reviews in the foodie blog of a Manhattan couple who just happened to spend the Independence Day weekend up the mountain in Highlands.

Many of us take our surroundings for granted, and its easy to put insular Highlands out-of-sight, out-of-mind, but the authors of winedanddined.com remind us that the town is a world class food and wine destination.

An excerpt:

For those of you who haven’t heard of Highlands, it’s a mountain town in the Southern Appalachains and located in the Nantahala National Forest. It’s truly a one-of-a-kind place. There are beautiful golf courses, fantastic restaurants, wine and cheese shops, waterfalls, hiking trails, boutique craft shops and more. What most people probably don’t know is that Highlands is a world-class food and wine destination with 6 restaurants that have received the Wine Spectator Award of Excellence. Needless to say, we’ve been doing some intensive ‘wining & dining’ around Highlands over the past few days. Here’s a taste of where we’ve been…

SYLVA–While it goes without saying that we all spend too much time reminiscing about the North Carolina heyday of the Winn-Dixie grocery chain, it’s a also a sad truth that few of us take time to document our passion.

Well, the anonymous blogger “J.T.” does, in his site that is as well read and written as it is, well, odd.

I came across Georgia Retail Memories when its author posted a few pictures of an old Winn-Dixie supermarket in Franklin, and marveled that its was “a perfectly preserved specimen of a 70’s-style Winn-Dixie …”

The author, who has been at it with his blog for going on three years, also gives a breakdown of the fate of the much-lamented Del Taco fast food chain.

An excerpt:

In 1992, after only 12 years, every single (Georgia) Del Taco closed … meaning lots of vacant restaurants and an end to an era where Georgians were offered an alternative to Taco Bell for fast-food Mexican.

Oh, the humanity.

Georgia Retail Memories has a sister site, Peach State Roads, which looks unlikely to have legs, but which, to my eye, got off to a good start. J.T. wrote first about a bypassed section of US 441 near Tallulah Falls, GA, with some spectacular depression-era bridges.

Spring St. Cafe
Sylva’s Spring St. Cafe has a new Executive Chef. Gabriel Finnegan replaces Karl Engelmann, who moved on after a two-year run. Spring St. has reopened for lunches and Tuesday dinners, and has modified its menu slightly, adding a rack of lamb in the evenings. The cafe has operated for just shy of a decade, beneath City Lights Bookstore downtown.

Guadalupe Cafe
What goes around comes around on the small town restaurant scene; Guadalupe Cafe, opened five years ago by Jen Pearson, who once cooked for Faye Holliday when Holliday opened Spring St. Cafe (which she has since sold), has grown popular locally and got a nice tip-of-the-hat last year from Gourmet Magazine. Pearson is taking a few months off to become a mom, and who’s standing in? Holliday.

Heinzelmannchen Brewery
Sylva’s five-year-old Heinzelmannchen Brewery is celebrating both an anniversary and two medal wins at the recent Hickory Hops brewers festival. Heinzelmannchen’s Anniversary celebration beer, Big Amber Gnome, won a Gold Medal and one of its original beers, Black Forest Stout won a bronze.

Brewer Dieter Kuhn said “I continue to brew beer because of my passion.  Getting compliments from those who enjoy our beers is the best reward, however bringing home a gold and bronze for doing something you love, certainly sweetens the pot!”

223 beers from 43 breweries were represented at Hickory.

Downtown Sylva Association
Sylva’s DSA is organizing its first annual “Taste of Downtown Sylva” event, planned for June 13th. The afternoon culinary walking tour will include 10 restaurants and a fresh fish market. Tickets $15 each. A limited number of tickets are available, but all the info you want is at www.downtownsylva.org.