NORTH CAROLINA
Review: The Silo Cookhouse is Refined Dining That Feels Like a Mini Vacation in the Country
★★★★★
$$$$$ | MAP | WEBSITE | INSTAGRAM
By Eric Barton | Nov. 2, 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.
The turn into The Horse Shoe Farm is a break in the fence line just outside Hendersonville, NC, where the road narrows and the air, somehow, already smells like woodsmoke. You pass through the gate and onto a long drive with rolling hills on both sides. Trees giving their last performance of late fall are all reds, golds, and that stubborn last green. Out ahead is the horse barn, now a spa, and guest houses scattered in the fields. At the center, the farmhouse, twinkly lights pointing the way.
The farmhouse is now The Silo Cookhouse restaurant, and the name is not cute branding. The old silo is still there, turned into a bar at the bottom and a meditation room at the top of a spiral staircase. Inside, the restaurant is a collection of communal tables, and we sat on the closed-in porch, a sunroom with views of the farm and, just off to the right, the fire pit where they bring in live music on weekends. It looks like a place where somebody proposes under string lights. It also looks like a place where you could just sit and drink whiskey until you forget what day it is.
Here’s the thing about The Silo Cookhouse, and about Brett Suess, its chef: this is not just a nice dinner at a pretty farm. Suess is building something here that is genuinely regional without leaning on clichés about Appalachian tradition, and he’s doing it on a property where you can eat, stay, get a massage in the old horse barn, and feel like you’ve left town without actually leaving town. This is a serious kitchen in a place that could have coasted on vibes alone.
Our dinner starts casual, with warm olives and chips with smoked onion dip and it’s exactly what you want it to be—thick, rich, a little sweet from the caramelized onions, a little campfire from the smoke. It’s the kind of thing you think you’ll just taste and then you look down and the chips are gone.
The charred carrots come next, and they’re the sleeper hit of the night. They arrive burnished and blistered, laid over pistachio and dukkah, which gives this toasted, nutty crunch and spice. Carrots are in every chef menu in America right now, most of them aggressively over-sweet and needing “story.” These don’t need a story. They just taste like carrots that someone paid attention to.
The PEI mussels show up in a wide bowl, swimming in a white wine chimichurri broth that manages to hit garlic, acid, herbs, and salt without drowning the mussels themselves. The broth is so good you start treating the shellfish like an excuse to eat it. They send it out with hunks of sourdough floating like islands that are basically engineered for dragging through the bottom of the bowl.
For mains, my wife ordered the Joyce Farms roasted chicken. This is one of those dishes that sounds like something your grandmother made and then lands like something out of a test kitchen. The meat is tender in that “did they brine this for a week?” way, with creamed greens spiked with hits of black garlic that goes deep and sweet. It eats like comfort, but sharpened.
I got the trout, because you should get the trout here. The skin is perfectly crisp that gives the entire dish a depth of texture, and underneath is a spring onion soubise that’s earthy and just a bit rich. It pools around local mushrooms that are nearly as meaty as the fish. If you’re the kind of person who orders steak out of habit, this trout should make you rethink that.
The potatoes we had as a side could’ve been a main by themselves, tender inside, crackly exterior, a deep umami from the anchovy dressing and snowstorm of Parmesan. It’s hard to argue that the potato side was the highlight an otherwise excellent meal, but it just might’ve been.
We ended with a brown butter caramel cookie that comes warm, almost underbaked in the middle, the caramel stretching in long threads when we pulled it into quarters. It’s childish and grown-up at the same time, like the world’s best bake sale item got sent to finishing school.
What stays with you isn’t just the plates. It’s the way the night unfolds. You make that drive in under the last of the fall leaves, you sit in a farmhouse where the floors still creak, you eat trout that tastes like the river isn’t far. For a couple of hours, you’re not in Hendersonville or Asheville or anywhere with traffic and errands and group texts going off. You’re at a long table on a quiet piece of Carolina pasture, being fed by a kitchen that could easily be somewhere louder and more self-impressed but chose, instead, to be here. The Silo Cookhouse is dinner, yes. But it’s also the feeling that you managed, just for one night, to slip away.
The Best Restaurants in Fort Lauderdale: Where Chefs Finally Took Over
Fort Lauderdale finally has a dining scene that rivals Miami. Here are 14 spots that define America's Venice.