Every dish that lands on the table at Luminosa, a restaurant tucked within the Flat Iron Hotel in downtown Asheville, feels like a revelation in the way it marries the freshest local ingredients to Appalachian and Italian influences. Think: a lovely mix of radicchio, muscadine, black walnut, and eighteen-month pecorino, or a lemony pizza with smoked mozzarella, ricotta, and fennel. And anything—even a cocktail—is liable to come with something pickled riding atop it, be it ramp, shallot, radish, or peppers.
Graham House and Sean McMullen, the two chefs and native Western North Carolinians behind the ever-changing menu, love working together, and it shows. House brings positivity and inspiration, while McMullen brings precision and the pickles. (“It’s easy to make up dishes when you have a dude that’s so passionate about what he does he’s stacking weird pickles and vinegars all year,” House says).
Together they source from farms and foragers and let the seasons dictate their creations. (For example, when some early chanterelles popped up, House took a zucchini with the blossom still on, stuffed them with charred spring onion and ricotta, and finished it with sumac, Parmesan, and the mushrooms.) The menu is, therefore, always in flux, but one dish has stuck as much as House and McMullen will let anything stick: a riff on classic pork and beans. “It’s a play on Appalachian soup beans,” McMullen says of his agnolotti masterpiece, “inspired by a pot of beans cooked with ham hocks and served with cornbread on the side.”
The agnolotti arrives in perfect pillows, swimming in a braising liquid and surrounded by beans (whatever is in season, be they creamer or black-eyed peas or cranberry beans), with crunch provided by dried skillet cornbread crumbs. Naturally, pickled shallots crown the dish. Each pillow is decadent, smoky, rich, but still bright and leaves the diner wondering how in the world they’re eating an upscale pasta dish that has all the nostalgia of their Southern grandma’s cooking.
Get the answer to that question below. And if you’re motivated to try the dish yourself, here’s a tip: After dinner, sneak down into Red Ribbon Society, the hotel’s speakeasy, where food and beverage director Sarah Charles Hereford—a master of hospitality and a purveyor of delightful seasonal ingredients like spruce tips—is working her own magic on cocktails.
Inspiration
House: We had so much olive marinade left over because we go through so many olives, and we had a lot of pig feet lying around, and we wanted to do something more than just throw it into a stock. We’d been open for a month or so, and we were wanting another filled pasta on the menu. We were standing in the walk-in, looking at a bunch of pig feet and looking at a bunch of olive brine, and we also had some green peas. The light switched on for Sean then. It ended up being his love letter to Appalachia.
Execution
McMullen: When we get in our whole hog each week, we take the trotters off and some of the leg. And we have marinated olives on the menu all the time, so instead of just dumping the brine out, we use the olive brine to cure the hocks for about a week. Then it comes out of the brine and we roast it in the pizza oven to get some char on it, and then it goes into a braise with onions and carrots. After it’s braised for about three hours, we pick all the meat out of the braise and reduce the liquid down. We grind the pork and then add the braising liquid back into it as a binding element and to give it a nice texture. That’s the filling for the agnolotti. And then we use some of that braising liquid to glaze the pasta with our beans. We finish it with cornbread crumble and pickled shallots.
Flavor
House: It’s a hearty, stick-to-your-ribs kind of dish. It definitely makes you think of pork and beans, and everybody that’s had that knows it’s delicious. The braising liquid reminds you of a pot of collard greens, too.
McMullen: It’s rich; the pork flavor’s got the umami element going on. The cornbread crumble is a nod to the inspiration. And we thought the pickled shallot would just add a little bit of brightness to help round out all the flavors.
Get It While You Can
McMullen: It may change—we changed [the pasta filling] over the summer to make it more seasonal. We took corn and used a pudding stick, which is a traditional tool for taking corn off the cob and turning it into corn pudding, and roasted the corn in the pizza oven until it got most of the moisture cooked out and a little bit of smoke into it, then added a little bit of ricotta and our house Aleppo. We used corn stock to make a Calabrian butter glaze and added a little sour corn to that and finished it with some fresh blackberries. But from now through winter and spring, it’s the pork.
See all the dishes in our One Perfect Bite series.
