ASHEVILLE | NORTH CAROLINA

Xico Review: Asheville’s Ambitious Mexican Spot Turns Up the Heat

★★★★★

XICO | $$$$$ | MAP | INSTAGRAM

Article and photos by Eric Barton | Nov. 20, 2025

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.

Before leading us to our table, the hostess at the new Asheville restaurant Xico began with a tour past a table by the entrance covered in dried chiles, jars of huitlacoche, and other mysterious preserved things, like a still life of a Mexican abuela’s pantry. Then she steers us over to a chef’s counter looking toward a giant Josper, the charcoal-and-wood grill raging hot in the open kitchen, where sous vide steaks are lined up on racks, waiting to be seared into submission. Somewhere between the chiles and the fire, it hits me: the tour is not a gimmick. It is orientation. Xico is built around that flame.

Xico (pronounced shee-ko) calls itself a cocina de fuego and marisqueria, and for once the branding is not overpromising. Chef Scott Linquist, who spent decades doing high-end Mexican in New York and Miami, has landed in downtown Asheville with a restaurant that feels like the city’s most ambitious opening in years. Everything points back to the fire and to Mexico: the Josper running at blast-furnace temperatures, the comal turning out heirloom-masa tortillas, the agave-forward bar program in the back, packed even when we arrived on the early side.

The restaurant feels more like a city twice Asheville’s size. It’s a big space, full of tables and booths, the bar lit up and lively, nearly every table taken by the time our first drink arrived. Rows of agave plants divide the space, and tall Mexican-style chairs face in toward comfortable booth seating. It’s the kind of place designed to look like a host to the food it’s serving.

We started with the tuna tostadita, which is “-ita” in name only. It arrives on a crisp base piled high with strips of tuna dressed just enough so that no flavor dominated the fresh fish, layered over roasted sweet potato crema, with tomatillo pico de gallo, avocado, and pickled serrano scattered over the top. The dish hits every texture at once: the crunch of the tostada, the cool richness of the fish, and a bright, sneaky sting from the serrano. It is the rare first bite at a new restaurant that makes you stop mid-conversation and take inventory of what else is coming.

Tuna tostadita.

The Caesar begins when a server wheels up a wooden cart and builds the dressing in front of you, following the century-old recipe from Tijuana. There’s garlic, anchovy, egg, acid, oil, the familiar ritual, but the hot sauce that’s folded in lifts up final salad. When it’s ready, the server drapes white anchovies across the top before setting it down, salty little punctuation marks on a salad that earns the tableside show.

Tableside caesar

Huitlacoche quesadilla

The huitlacoche quesadilla is where Linquist flexes his knowledge of Mexican ingredients. The so-called “Mexican corn truffles” are folded in with mushrooms, serrano salsa, crema, and queso mixto, and the whole thing is griddled until the tortillas turn spotty and crisp. It is earthy and lush, the kind of dish that makes you briefly consider if you really want to share. Like the tostadita, it feels engineered around contrast: soft and crisp, bright and dark, clean heat and deep umami from the fungi.

Xico Restaurant Asheville Bone-in ribeye seared

Pre-sliced ribeye

For the main event, we split the bone-in Angus ribeye, which is treated more like a side project than a steak. It’s cooked first in the sous vide, then gets a hard sear in the Josper until the exterior turns blackened and crusty. Then it’s finished in the oven to a dead-on medium rare. It comes sliced, ready to be tucked into fresh tortillas, and the server drops off a very spicy salsa built from huitlacoche and black garlic on the side. The meat is rich and decadent, the fat rendered but still present enough to remind you this is exactly what you signed up for. Wrapped in warm tortillas with that dark, funky, high-heat salsa, it becomes something closer to a steak-night taco ritual than a standard big-ticket entree.

Xico Restaurant Asheville Bone-in ribeye

The sleeper hit of the savory side of the menu is the calabasa. It sounds polite — roasted squash with yogurt sauce and sundried cherries — but it arrives as this deeply flavorful, almost dessert-adjacent side that works well with the steak. Yogurt gives it tang and lift, and the cherries bring just enough sweetness and chew. I spent a few bites mentally reverse-engineering it for Thanksgiving, which is always the sign a side dish has earned permanent real estate in your brain.

Sliced bone-in ribeye

Dessert is not subtle: Churros arrive hot, crisp outside and tender inside, dusted generously and meant to be dragged through a lush caramel sauce. They come with a stein of Mexican hot chocolate that is almost comically overfilled with whipped cream. It is rich and warming and very chocolatey, the sort of final note that quiets the table for a moment.

Calabasa

Churros and hot chocolate

What Xico is attempting is not small. This is a big room with a serious build-out, a chef with a national résumé, and prices that ask Asheville diners to treat modern Mexican as destination dining rather than taco-night filler. The tour that seemed unnecessary turned out to be the thesis statement, each stop foreshadowing something that would show up later on the table. The fire, the masa, the attention to detail, the ambition of the menu — it all adds up to the rare new place that feels fully formed from night one, a restaurant betting big on Asheville and paying it off in every course.