CHEF PROFILES | ASHEVILLE

Rakim Gaines Learned to Cook Before He Was Old Enough to Reach the Stove

By Eric Barton | July 16, 2026

AUTHOR BIO: Eric Barton is editor of The Adventurist and a freelance journalist who has reviewed restaurants for more than two decades. Email him here.

Rakim Gaines was 9 years old when somebody handed him a chance most kids don't get.

A family friend worked the hibachi at Yoshida Express in Asheville and started letting him spend afternoons in the kitchen. Gaines wasn't there to play around. He watched every movement, every knife cut, every plate headed for the dining room. The cooks trusted him enough to let him help.

"They gave me a chance and I was only 9 years old," Gaines says. "I wasn't just watching—I was paying attention to every detail."

One moment still stays with him decades later. Customers smiling over food that had just left the kitchen. "Even as a kid, I could see that food had the power to bring people happiness and create an experience."

Today Gaines is the executive chef at Capella on 9, the rooftop restaurant atop Asheville's AC Hotel, where mountain views compete with colorful small plates shaped by Spanish tapas, French technique, and the Southern food he grew up eating. But the story starts several miles east of downtown, where family dinners mattered more than restaurant meals.

Chef Rakim Gaines Capella on 9 AC Hotel Asheville North Carolina

Growing up in East Asheville, Gaines remembers a neighborhood where people still stopped to talk on front porches and gardens filled backyards every summer. Dinner wasn't an event. It was simply what families did together. "We ate a lot of Southern and Appalachian foods... beans, cornbread, greens, fried pork chops, mac and cheese, and whatever vegetables were in season."

Money wasn't always easy to come by. Both of his parents worked, and Gaines says watching them stretch every dollar shaped him as much as anything he learned in a professional kitchen.

"My family showed me that success isn't just about money—it's about taking care of the people you love."

Chef Rakim Gaines Capella on 9 AC Hotel Asheville

The first cook he studied wasn't a celebrity chef. It was his mother. He watched her make dinner every night, then began recreating those meals himself. By around age 9 she trusted him enough to cook for the family, while his afternoons at Yoshida Express gave him an early education in restaurant kitchens. At home he watched Great Chefs of the World, frantically copying recipes into a notebook before trying them himself. By then, becoming a chef already felt less like a dream than a plan.

Chef Rakim Gaines Capella on 9 AC Hotel Asheville North Carolina Salmon Rillettes

That plan led him to the culinary program at Asheville-Buncombe Technical Community College. But life had different timing. His son was born before Gaines finished school, and supporting a family mattered more than finishing an internship. "Leaving culinary school wasn't an easy decision," he says. "Becoming a father meant stepping up and doing what was necessary to support my son."

Chef Rakim Gaines Capella on 9 Asheville North Carolina

He landed at The Lobster Trap shucking oysters before working his way onto the line, eventually becoming sous chef under chef Mike McCarty. Wanting to master breakfast, he picked up shifts at Corner Kitchen, learning the precision of eggs, omelets, and fast-paced morning service before moving to the new AC Hotel as sous chef in 2018. Just months later, when the restaurant needed a new executive chef, Gaines was handed the executive chef position at only 27 years old.

Capella on 9 opened as a Spanish tapas restaurant, but Gaines has gradually made the menu feel unmistakably his own. The short rib recalls the pot roasts his mother made. Seasonal vegetables from Western North Carolina brighten plates that begin with Spanish technique and often end somewhere closer to East Asheville than Barcelona. Color matters to him almost as much as flavor. He told me, "My background, my family, and the food I grew up eating are a big part of who I am, so those influences naturally find their way into my cooking."

Chef Rakim Gaines Capella on 9 AC Hotel Asheville North Carolina Cake

That balance is what he's chasing now. The rooftop draws people upstairs with one of Asheville's best views. Gaines hopes they leave talking about something else.

"What I'm really trying to build at Capella goes beyond the food and beyond the view," he says. "The rooftop view is what catches people's attention, but I want the hospitality and overall experience to be what they remember."

For a chef who started in a neighborhood hibachi kitchen before he was old enough to drive, that's still the same lesson he learned at 9 years old: people rarely remember every ingredient on the plate. They remember how the meal made them feel.