Holding the Line
Chef Ashleigh Shanti’s soul good food comes from her indomitable spirit
By ariel blanchard
Good Hot Fish chef-owner Ashleigh Shanti approaches life in the spirit of a Ghanaian proverb, specifically a word derived from it—sankofa (SAHN-koh-fah), meaning “go back and get it.” “I think in life there’s always going to be something that has the capability of stealing that joy if you let it,” Shanti says.
Sankofa means she keeps moving forward, learning from the past and reaching back to forge ahead, even as she faces the realities of opening a restaurant as a minority in a community that still has a lot of progress to make.
A 2020 James Beard Award finalist for her role in Asheville’s Benne on Eagle and Bravo Top Chef Season 9 alum, Shanti operated Good Hot Fish first as a celebrated pop-up. Her brick-and-mortar restaurant was much anticipated long before its January 2024 opening.
Since moving to Asheville eight years ago, Shanti has been a proponent of highlighting food origins. For her, that means merging Southern and African American cuisines, while also paying homage to her familial food culture—cooking fish on Sundays with the family matriarchs in coastal Virginia.
Opening Good Hot Fish, a blending of all of her influences, in Asheville’s South Slope District was no accident. Now known as the epicenter of Asheville’s brewery scene, the South Slope was historically a Black neighborhood with businesses not dissimilar to hers.
Two weeks after opening, Good Hot Fish, which she runs with her wife, Meaghan, was the target of a racial incident, the perpetrators making it clear a Black-owned business wasn’t welcome. “The goal was to make me feel unsafe,” she says. The immediate social media response by other restaurant and small business owners called the community to action and support. “The community showed up and showed us a lot of love and kept me going,” Shanti says.
Sankofa helped her usually pessimistic self recognize how her community came through in the midst of such a dark time and to go back and cherish those moments. In hindsight, she would have reacted the same. “I’m going to keep running my restaurant like I intended to,” she says.
In October 2024, Shanti’s first cookbook, Our South: Black Food Through My Lens, was published by Union Square & Co.
That means providing a happy work environment, certified livable wage for her staff, and a rotating menu of whatever is freshest that day in the style of a fish camp. “I have the heart of a line cook,” she says, which translates to deep empathy for her staff and a unique perspective as a business owner in an often ego-dominated industry. “I had this naiveté that the challenge was perfecting the crispiest fried fish,” Shanti says. “That’s the easy part. The hard part is leading people and leading them properly.”
The challenge is worth it, though, she believes, when patrons come in with teary eyes, grateful for the return of good hot fish to the neighborhood.
Photography by Paul Mehaffey; this story appears in our Summer 2024 issue.