ASHEVILLE | NORTH CAROLINA

At Palmar, Asheville Gets a Modern Latin Restaurant That's Ready for Michelin

★★★★★

PALMAR | $$$$$ | MAP | INSTAGRAM

By Eric Barton | April 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.

My wife and I took the two bar seats in the front window of Palmar restaurant the other night, facing out to one of the better dinner views in Asheville, not a mountain or a sunset but Biltmore Avenue. We were a couple storefronts north of Cúrate on a bright spring afternoon, with people hurrying to happy hour, dogs tugging owners down the sidewalk, and that easy breeze slipping in. It already felt like a good place to spend an hour or two before the first plates landed. Then the food started arriving, and the night got even better.

There really isn’t much else like Palmar around here. Asheville has its tapas, its tacos, its comfort-food versions of Latin America filtered through American appetites. What Palmar is doing is different: a polished, modern Latin menu that still feels grounded in tradition, with enough ambition to stand out in a city that’s suddenly become aware of who might be walking in with a Michelin notebook. Asheville is already in Michelin’s American South guide, and Palmar feels like the kind of place that could make a serious push the next time inspectors come back through.

Palmar at Brü

The chef is Carlos Torres, who was born in Colombia and built his career in New York, then in Miami. He’s worked with heavyweights like Douglas Rodriguez, Michelle Bernstein, and Michael Mina, and he ran the kitchen at Laurent Tourondel’s restaurant at The Betsy Hotel. That background shows here. The food has enough technique to feel deliberate, recipes likely worked out for that future restaurant of his own.

Palmar has taken over the gastropub Brü as a dinner pop-up, and it fits the space well. One wall carries a big graffiti-style mural. Twinkly lights dangle from the high ceilings. There are rows of tables down one side, high-tops on the other, a bar in back, wall planters softening the edges. It looks like a place built for a Saturday night regular habit, but it never tips into too-too-fancy-for-the-mountains territory.

Palmar Latin Kitchen Asheville Restaurant Review Cheese bread

The menu is tiny, which I appreciate, because tiny menus usually mean somebody cared about every single thing. We started with the pandebonos, Colombian cheese bread with a guava butter, and the bread had that tender, warm pull. The butter added enough earth and salt to make the whole thing feel complicated.

Pandebonos

Palmar Latin Kitchen Asheville Restaurant Review Ceviche

Then came the Peruvian corvina ceviche, which on paper sounds familiar enough: lightly cured fish, red onion, sweet potato. But an aji amarillo sauce brought a deeper, rounder note than I expected, a little punch beneath the brightness, and suddenly the dish had more weight to it.

Corvina ceviche

Pollo criollo

We split the pollo criollo, a roasted chicken marinated for 36 hours, with most of the bones removed and the skin cooked to a shattering crisp that suggested somebody had put some serious thought into pressure and heat. Underneath was that aji amarillo again, which I was glad to see come back, because it tied the menu together instead of leaving each dish to wander around on its own. Over the top came a generous scattering of mustard seeds, bringing crunch and a tart little jolt that cut through the richness exactly when it needed it.

Palmar Latin Kitchen Asheville Restaurant Review Coconut rice

Arroz con coco

On the side, the coconut rice was fluffy and tender and covered in toasted shaved coconut, simple enough to sound modest and good enough to keep stealing forkfuls of between bites of everything else. The plantains were even better. My wife, who does not hand out plantain praise casually, declared them the best she’d ever had. The reason was obvious: chive sour cream, queso fresco, cilantro, and enough balance between sweetness, fat, and freshness to make the whole plate disappear much faster than seemed decent.

Palmar Latin Kitchen Asheville Restaurant Review Plantains

Sweet plantains

Service helped seal it. Our server came around outside so we didn’t have to keep twisting in those window seats. A manager stopped by. Courses arrived with the kind of pacing that suggested they care how the evening felt, not just whether plates hit the table. You could tell the people here were behind the place, and that matters more than restaurants sometimes realize.

By the time we looked back out onto Biltmore Avenue, the parade was still going. Same dogs, same clusters of people, same spring light fading over one of downtown’s busiest blocks. But Palmar had changed the view a little. It had turned that front window into a reminder of how Asheville punches far above its restaurant weight, and where dinner can make a pretty street look even better.