William Dissen is the chef and owner of The Market Place in downtown Asheville, North Carolina, serving hyper-local and regionally sourced meals with a high attention to quality, flavor, story, and heart. Beginning his chef career at the age of 15, he took over The Market Place from Mark Rosenstein in 2009, and has helped grow Asheville’s local food and farm connections. The Market Place is one of the restaurants selected for Appalachian Farms Feeding Families, one of ASAP’s post-Helene programs aimed at supporting restaurants and strengthening market outlets for farms.
How does this program help to uphold the mutually beneficial relationship between restaurants and farms?
I feel ASAP is one of the most undervalued nonprofits here in the region. Our food scene certainly wouldn’t be as robust as it is without all the great work ASAP has done over the years.
We decided to partner with Sunburst Trout Farms for the mini grant. I’ve known the Eason family since I moved here and they are such kind-hearted good people—they put so much care into the fish that they are growing. Having a third generation rainbow trout farm just 20 miles from Asheville is really special. If you’re going down 215 from the Blue Ridge Parkway, it’s like the first civilization that the granite-filtered mountain water hits. So, it’s ice cold, super clean, and with high minerality—that’s part of why the fish are so good. It’s both the care that is going into raising the fish and the location. Being able to have Sunburst Trout in our backyard, the fish is swimming in the morning and on the table by night—talk about fresh! People come into our restaurant thinking that they don’t like trout, and they are blown away.
I got to this area before Asheville really took off, and I feel like we’ve been a part of it’s growth, especially its food community. Some friends told me to visit Asheville and when I came up for the Lake Eden Arts Festival. I stopped by Earth Fare and there was a stack of ASAP’s Local Food Guide. I picked up one and thought, “Wow, this is all the stuff I grew up doing in Virginia with my grandparents on their farm.” It was clear to me that Asheville had an amazing local food scene and this guide is a resource to find all the great ingredients I would need. It was so much easier than earlier in my career when I was spending so much time tracking down all these different local ingredients I wanted to cook with. That’s when I thought I should start looking at Asheville to start my own restaurant.
What role do restaurants play as a part of Helene Recovery in our region?
Restaurants are the lifeblood of our local economy. We are a tourism- and service-based economy in Western North Carolina. One-third of the population here works directly in tourism or a service-based job. Coming out of Helene, obviously tourism has been down because of the devastation, but we are reopen and ready to invite people back. It’s good for people to realize what the greater effect of restaurants are on our community. They’re a great place to come together to celebrate, to mourn, to have a meeting, or to just have a great meal—restaurants are like a great escape where you can choose your own adventure.
Restaurants like ours have a powerful impact on the local economy. We have quantified that over the years and we spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on local ingredients. We quantify that there’s almost a five-time return to the local economy. As a small business, that’s the kind of powerful impact we can make. Imagine if everyone sourced that way, how robust of a local food and farm economy we would have.
What is your favorite thing to cook?
It depends. I have two wonderful children and I cook a lot at home. We love to eat fresh vegetables and with having kids I try to sneak them in whenever I can. I do a lot of stir frys, but my favorite thing to cook right now is chicken cacciatore. I’ll go to the market and get a whole chicken, break it into eight pieces, and brown it off. I’ll grab some local mushrooms from Black Trumpet Farm along with onions and garlic scapes and sauté those and the first tomatoes of the season. Add white wine and cook that down until it’s super aromatic, then braise the chicken in it. I like to serve that with some butter noodles or jasmine rice. I’ll sprinkle some Spinning Spider goat cheese on the top. It’s a fresh but also hearty dish. It’s great when you’ve been running around outside and you have two kids ready to eat you out of house and home.