Today we’d like to introduce you to Erica & Matt Farr . They and their team shared their story with us below:
Red Fiddle Vittles is a catering and private chef company in Asheville, NC. We also operate a small gourmet grocery featuring weekly take-home dinners and products local to Asheville and Appalachia. Our menus rotate seasonally based on what’s available regionally; we feature unique ingredients grown, foraged, or produced in the mountains of Western North Carolina.
Red Fiddle will be celebrating its 5-year anniversary next month (Sept 2023). It has been a wild ride that included a global pandemic, a search for a kitchen home, running a business while starting a family, and navigating the complex nature of a rapidly evolving foodservice industry. The past five years have been joyful and stressful, fun and infuriating, fulfilling and challenging. It’s a bizarre and sometimes conflicting sensation to be a small business owner, but we wouldn’t trade it for anything.
We met in 2017 while Matt was working at MANNA FoodBank in Asheville, NC. Erica was in the process of moving to Asheville after a wildly successful culinary career in Austin, TX. Erica came to volunteer at an event for the food bank, and Matt asked her out on date shortly thereafter. A few months later, Matt was tasked with coordinating a volunteer appreciation event for MANNA’s 250+ volunteers. We decided we’d take it upon ourselves to cater this event. Upon executing an exceptional event with mostly donated ingredients, we figured we were pretty good at this whole catering thing and decided to launch a catering company. Red Fiddle Vittles was created in September 2018, and Matt quit his 10+ year non-profit career a few months later.
About a year later, the coronavirus pandemic sprang up and turned the world upside down. Many of the events and weddings that Red Fiddle booked were forced to cancel, and we had to get creative to keep Red Fiddle alive. Around this time, we also were married and gave birth to our first child. The timing was strange, but it worked…while the world was figuring out how to survive a pandemic, we were at home with our baby and reveling in the blissful exhaustion of being new parents.
Slowly but surely, people started figuring out how to gather safely. Small events, reunions, and family gatherings began booking with Red Fiddle again later in 2020, and we really focused on our private chef side of the business. Our business grew, and we knew we needed to find a permanent home to sustain the growth.
For the first few years, we had been renting a shared-use kitchen on the weekends located in a church in downtown Asheville. We were grateful for the space, but it was a grind…schlepping ingredients and equipment in and out every weekend and working with the limitations of a kitchen we couldn’t call our own. Our search for a new space was long and hard. We were sure that there would be plenty of commercial kitchen space available given the impacts of the pandemic on restaurants and food businesses. We were wrong, and it took us nearly two years to find a spot that was affordable and located in an area that made sense for our commute and business growth.
What we found was an abandoned Little Caesars. It had good bones, having been renovated just prior to covid, but it still needed a lot of work…a hood vent, electrical work, gas line installation, along with purchasing and moving in all of the kitchen equipment we would need. This was 2022, and the world was still reeling from supply chain issues and labor shortages. It took more than six months to complete the build-out…a timeframe we weren’t prepared for. This was probably the most stressful time for our company… having our own space leased and a major company milestone in sight but feeling hamstrung and helpless. These were the dark days, and boy are we glad we got through them.
We opened our doors on February 11, 2022, and then the hard work really began. The previous tenant, a Little Caesars pizza shop, had a small retail area in the front of the space, which we decided to convert into a small gourmet grocery where we could sell take-and-heat meals, grab-and-go snacks, as well as other local products. This decision was based on a couple factors. One, having slogged through the challenges of staying afloat during a pandemic, we knew we needed a business model that was nimble and fluid…one that had multiple revenue streams where we could direct resources toward one stream or another based on market conditions. The other factor was that we were growing our family at home and needed to create ways to make money that allowed us to be great parents in addition to being great business owners. Event caterers work long hours away from home, and while we wanted to continue catering some events, we also wanted some nights at home to be together as a family.
We’re still working on finding balance and sustainability, but we take each day as it comes and try to grow our business and our family in ways that allow us to find joy in making great food for others, supporting local farms, and being present for our kiddo.
We’ve been impressed with Red Fiddle Vittles, but for folks who might not be as familiar, what can you share with them about what you do and what sets you apart from others?
We’re a values-based business. We seek to grow local economies by sourcing from local farmers. We pay a living wage to our small staff, which is a hard thing to make happen sustainably in the food industry. We support local non-profits in significant ways. We know that doing the right things by our community and by our staff shines through to our customers who want to feel good about where and how they spend their money. When you treat employees well, invest in the community, and are willing to pay for premium, locally produced ingredients, then the resulting items that we produce end up being intentional and unique. We’ve grown a solid reputation for creating high-quality, delicious food and these three points — paying people well to do great work, investing in community, and supporting local farmers — are the three greatest contributors to our successful brand.
We’d love to hear about how you think about risk-taking.
These days, almost everything feels risky. There’s just so much uncertainty in today’s world that it can often be hard to easily identify a clear path forward. Sometimes you just have to trust your principles and know that if you do the right things, then good things will happen. It doesn’t always work that way, but even when it doesn’t, we know that we can be at peace with ourselves and with our decisions because we know we’re doing good by our staff and by our community. It’s definitely been a process, but we’ve really tried to embrace the uncertainty and trust ourselves to make good decisions.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.redfiddlevittles.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/redfiddlevittles/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/RedFiddleVittles
