Halfway down the 469 miles of the Blue Ridge Parkway, nestled among the mountains and fog, sits The Bluffs Restaurant. Green and white checkered tiles fill the space, framed by a ceiling of A-frame timbers. The swivel counter stools are warm leather, high-backed, and built for lingering. At Milepost 241, in Laurel Springs, North Carolina, this mountain eatery has been brought back to life, and stepping through the door feels like coming home to Grandma’s house.

“You met family, you met friends there, you met relatives there,” says Jim Halsey, a long-time guest of the restaurant. “It was a common meeting place.”

True to its roots as a community gathering spot, The Bluffs partnered with the Blue Ridge Music Center to host the inaugural Fiddle & Fork Festival in June. Bringing together musicians, chefs, farmers, storytellers, and artisans, the festival celebrated Blue Ridge Mountain music, foodways, and crafts in collaboration with the Smithsonian Folklife Festival’s Of the People programming.

The Friday night kick-off dinner at The Bluffs opened with a conversation between musician, luthier, and NEA National Heritage Fellow Wayne Henderson and chef Sheri Castle as they discussed the crisscrossing of music, food, and cultural traditions in the region. For The Bluffs program director Kim Lawson, the festival was a reminder of how deeply food is tied to place.

“The music, the arts and crafts, and the food are such a direct result of the land—its remoteness and the weather—and how that shapes the Appalachian lifestyle,” she says.

In 1949, The Bluffs opened as the first dining establishment on the parkway, which connects Shenandoah National Park in Virginia and Great Smoky Mountains National Park in North Carolina. Over the next sixty-one years, locals gathered, travelers stopped by for hot meals, and the parking lot was always full. In need of repairs, the restaurant closed in 2010, but with the support of the Blue Ridge Parkway Foundation, it once again set out its menus in 2021.

“[The reopening] was primarily because there were generations of families that remembered going there, and those memories were passed down,” says Rita Larkin, the foundation’s chief communications officer. “A lot of people held that memory close.”

Jim and Barbara Halsey are among the families who consider the parkway home. Local to Sparta, North Carolina, the Halseys live in one of the many towns and communities that make up the constellation of resources, histories, and cultural producers in the region.

“I had a grandmother on the north end of the parkway and a grandmother on the south end of the parkway, and so I was in the middle, with The Bluffs,” Barbara recounts.

The Bluffs served cooking similar to her grandmother’s, making such food available beyond the home. For decades, she and other diners have enjoyed comfort meals of pintos, country ham biscuits, baked apples, chicken and dumplings, and fried chicken.

Fiddle & Fork’s Sunday afternoon Foodways Fair celebrated food, recipes, and the exchange of stories. Guests gathered on the lawn of The Bluffs, discussing how their families cooked throughout their childhoods.

“It was about the ingredients,” Larkin said of the experience. “It was about the stories connecting to the mountains.”

Inspired by regional heritage and memory, Lawson crafted a new menu for The Bluffs: fried chicken, sweet potato pancakes, mountain trout, cathead biscuits, and pimento cheese dip. She noticed that people craved slow food.

Traditional Southern Appalachian cooking is diligent work. Lawson teaches this food history to her staff, which primarily consists of local high school students. She connects the traditional food preservation techniques of smoking, pickling, and utilizing mountain creeks to their modern menu items. Eating the pickled succotash served with smoked trout at The Bluffs offers a taste of tradition.

“Not everybody cooks those slow foods anymore because it’s labor intensive,” Lawson says. “So, I like being able to give folks that little trip down memory lane.”

Meals at The Bluffs are served from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. These intentional hours are kept in honor of the Appalachian practice of eating “dinner,” the main meal of the day. Leftovers from this meal are then eaten at supper in the evening. Guests of The Bluffs engage with the region’s food culture, right down to the hours they choose to dine.

The historical necessity of slow methods in mountain foodways is seen through the practice of canning, drying, and foraging, writes Lucy Long, director of the Center for Food and Culture. What started as a necessity in the landscape resulted in a more sustainable, healthy, and delicious way of living. Foodways became a way for individuals to “carry the mountains with them wherever they go,” she says.

The landscape of the Blue Ridge Mountains has shaped the culture of the parkway. Beyond the food, the slow crafts of the region are their own forms of art. Beekeeping and shingle splinting, both demonstrated at the Foodways Fair, offered time for visitors to slow down and consider what life is like in the mountains.

“The mountains change from season to season, from week to week, from hour to hour,” Halsey says. Discovering the spots along the road that overlook the intertwining farmland, homes, and forest forge a special appreciation for the mountains even as the landscape and time pass.

“Unlike some parks that are very isolated and are just a destination, the parkway takes you through these communities,” Larkin continues. “The communities and mountains come together to create this incredible park.”

Ninety years ago, the Blue Ridge Parkway opened under the management of the National Park Service. This 1936 authorization from Congress declared the highway a resource of national merit. Likewise, thirty miles of mountain trails, sweeping overlook views, free bluegrass and folk concerts, and irresistible made-from-scratch biscuits make The Bluffs more than a stop for a quick meal—it is a gathering place. It celebrates the traditions of the people who call the Blue Ridge Mountains home.

“I want all the folks in those twenty-nine counties to be proud of being part of such a special ecosystem and community,” Lawson says. “And I want people to respect that and to experience the beauty of it all.”

Lawson shared that growing up in a rural community not too far from the Blue Ridge Mountains, she was not always proud of her accent. But the more time she has spent working at The Bluffs, the more invaluable her childhood has become to her. Now, she wants locals, especially the youth, to experience for themselves the area’s rich cultural and natural heritage.

Barbara and Jim Halsey exemplify this regional pride. They had their first date at The Bluffs. Now they watch as grandparents bring their own grandchildren through the door, an intergenerational legacy the restaurant continues to amplify with every meal it serves. For the Halseys, the food is both nostalgic and instructive, an enduring lesson in the food culture of Southern Appalachia.

“We’re keeping that way of life alive for all of these young people coming through,” Barbara says. “The parkway is home. I cannot imagine this place without it, and it is our greatest resource.”

The Bluffs is an act of stewardship for the Blue Ridge Mountains. It is a restaurant restored by and for the people who love this landscape. It is both a public space and a destination, where the drive becomes part of the meal itself. More than a restaurant, The Bluffs is a living home for Southern Appalachian food culture.

Lilly Brower is an intern with the Folklife Storytellers Workshop. She recently graduated from Brigham Young University with a bachelor’s degree in communications and minors in history, sociology, and global women’s studies.