With Sylva’s annual street festival Greening Up the Mountains right around the corner, town commissioners had a somewhat unusual decision land on their doorstep last week: risk a lawsuit or pay a licensing fee to a music industry group.

Apparently, you can’t just show up with a guitar at a town event and play “American Pie” anymore.

Sylva’s attorney, Eric Ridenour, advised the board not to pay $305 to the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers, because he believed paying the fee could set a precedent that would allow other licensing companies to gouge the town.

Ridenour based his advice on an experience with a representative of another licensing company, SESAC Inc., last year. The sales representative harassed Ridenour for weeks.

“It became more of a marketing tactic than a legal issue and it wasn’t hard to see through that,” Ridenour said.

Ridenour believes the town could win a lawsuit in the event that they are sued over a copyright violation during a town-sponsored event, in part, because the licensing companies don’t guarantee which artists’ songs are covered by their fees.

ASCAP, BMI, and SESAC are performing rights organizations. Effectively, they all do the same thing, issuing blanket licenses to music broadcasters, like television and radio stations and music performance venues.

By paying the blanket license fees, towns like Sylva are ensured that they can’t be sued if an artist at their festival plays a song without the permission of its author. It sounds ridiculous at face value, since most part-time musicians regularly play cover songs without permission, but if you don’t pay licensing fees, you are potentially liable.

“Potentially liable means it’s a gray area and you could probably write a dissertation on it,” Ridenour said.

Towns like Maggie Valley and Franklin, which have long-standing festivals that include music, pay the licensing fees. Ridenour said if Sylva was really concerned about the liability, it could get the musicians to sign a waiver saying they accepted responsibility for any copyright violations.

Mayor Maurice Moody didn’t like that idea.

“I would really be opposed to that,” Moody said. “Too many local musicians have day jobs. They’re part-time and they play for pleasure. I wouldn’t want to shift that burden on to them.”

The performing rights organizations aren’t boogey men. The licenses sold by ASCAP, BMI and SESAC pay royalties on copyrighted music. Royalties pay the songwriters. But Ridenour’s point is that the town could end up forking over $300 per year to each of the organizations, and over time the amount adds up.

Moody said he would rather pay the fee than face the possibility of a costly lawsuit.

“I don’t think it’s worth the risk,” Moody said. “Even though from a legal standpoint he’s probably right.”

Music rights will be an issue at Greening Up the Mountains, but they’ll be even more central to the town’s ability to hold its Friday night music events throughout the summer.

Commissioner Stacy Knotts also voted against passing the buck to the artists and said she didn’t mind the town paying the licensing fees.

“It might just be a part of doing business –– part of the joy of having music downtown,” Knotts said. “I definitely want to keep having music in the town.”

The commissioners voted 3 to 2 to pay the ASCAP fee. Cue up the Don Henley.

Last month, officials from the Tuckaseigee Water and Sewer Authority and the Town of Sylva clashed over who was responsible for fixing a clogged town sewer line.

The issue has since been resolved, with TWASA’s board voting 4-1 to reimburse Sylva for the cost of the repair after all. But the larger issue of what to do with “orphan” sewer lines that don’t appear on TWASA’s maps remains.

A committee representing all of the entities that formed the TWASA two decades ago has been convened to examine and interpret TWASA’s charter, according to Board Chairman Randall Turpin

At stake is whether TWASA is responsible for maintaining and repairing lines that weren’t on the original maps back when the newly formed private enterprise took over Sylva’s water and sewer system in the early ‘90s.

“How do we categorize the lines that weren’t identified at that time?” Turpin said.

TWASA’s has a policy not to repair small lines that didn’t appear on the original maps.

Sylva Mayor Maurice Moody doesn’t understand how such a policy could be in place.

“From my perspective, when TWASA was formed in 1992, they accepted the entire sewer system in existence at the time,” Moody said. “Therefore, I feel they have the responsibility to maintain it.”

But while TWASA’s charter document clearly gives the authority the responsibility to operate and maintain the entire system, it also gives it broad discretion to determine how and when to repair, upgrade and maintain the sewer lines.

The TWASA board felt it was important to pay Sylva back for the clog in order to move forward with a more productive discussion, according to TWASA Executive Director Joe Cline.

But they also wanted the municipalities to understand the planning process that goes into upgrades and maintenance of the system.

Turpin said TWASA relies on a regimented capital improvement plan that goes through its Water and Sewer Projects Committee, a system set up in the charter document.

Turpin said the authority has to be able to budget for maintenance and upgrades each year based on projected revenues. Spur of the moment repairs on unmapped lines present a problem.

“If there’s lines that are identified out there that we can get to the WASP committee and into the capital improvement plan, then that’s a positive outcome,” Turpin said.

TWASA already has a board made up of representatives from Jackson County, Dillsboro and Sylva. But Turpin wanted to get other people into the discussion, so he asked the municipalities to appoint members.

Jackson County commissioners refused to make an appointment, saying that County Chairman Brian McMahan could represent the county through the seat he already has on the TWASA board.

The committee will include Brad Moses, Larry Phillips, Chuck Wooten and Brian McMahan from the existing TWASA board; Maurice Moody and Chris Matheson from Sylva; and Mike Fitzgerald and Wade Wilson from Dillsboro. The subcommittee will meet for the first time at 5:30 p.m. on Thursday, April 8, at TWASA’s main office.

Matheson said she was happy to serve on the committee, but she was still slightly confused about why she was needed.

“If going into the meeting, the idea is that the forming document is valid and binding and we just have to make sure everybody is on the same page, I’m fine with that,” Matheson said.

But she said Sylva’s board hasn’t changed its position that TWASA needs to repair broken lines when they cause problems.

Turpin said the meeting would provide a unique opportunity to talk through the issue of orphan lines and capital improvement planning.

“We have annual meetings with all the forming entities but this is the first time since I’ve been on the board that all of the entities have come together over a common concern,” Turpin said.

When Daniel Allison III learned last May that General Motors wouldn’t renew his franchise agreement, he couldn’t believe it.

“Shock,” Allison said. “I think you go through being angry and then, once I got through all my feelings, I worried about how it would affect my customers.”

The letter stated that GM would discontinue Allison’s dealership franchise in October 2010. Ever since, Allison has been working hard to fight the decision and to find a backup plan.

He traveled to Washington, D.C., at the invitation of Congressman Heath Shuler to testify about the impact of the recession on small businesses in rural areas. He urged them to help small car dealers, particularly in light of the auto bailout for the big guys.

“It concerns me how this recession has affected small business,” Allison said. “A lot of the small rural dealers are just one group of casualties.”

When Congress ordered that GM grant arbitration hearings to its discontinued dealerships, Allison preserved hope and fought for a reprieve.

But in late March his last chance for survival as a GM dealer evaporated when Allison’s Chevy wasn’t selected by the automaker as one of 600 dealers nationwide to receive reinstatement letters.

“Prior to the arbitration, we’d been pursuing what our Plan Bs would be in order to keep as many employees as possible and keep the operation as similar as it could be,” Allison said. “We’re excited with what we’ve come up with.”

Last Monday, Allison opened a co-branded Meineke Service and EconoLube automotive garage to replace the GM service center once housed at the dealership. Meanwhile, he will sell a wide range of certified used vehicles on his lot, with a focus on offering varying price points.

“This has opened us up to a whole range of makes and models we haven’t serviced before,” Allison said.

The GM label may be gone, but the Allison name will remain a part of Sylva’s automotive landscape. Allison’s grandfather, Dan Allison, Sr., started the business in 1935 and since then, Allison’s has been selling GM cars in Sylva.

When the recession hit, Allison was confident he could weather the storm. But GM’s bankruptcy proceedings led to the auto giant announcing that it would close over 1,000 dealers. Allison’s fate as a GM dealer was out of his hands. In December, he began laying off staff.

“We basically held on as long as we could in case we could be reinstated,” Allison said.

In 2008, Allison’s Chevy had 17 employees. Today the number is down to eight, but Allison said he hopes to grow the business back as the economy strengthens. In the meantime, there’s the process of rebuilding a third-generation family business.

“It’s been a wild adventure trying to reinvent it,” Allison said. “I don’t think there’s any way you can realize ahead of time how many challenges there are.”

“Barbecue is all about slow and low,” said Blackrock BBQ owner and pit master James Aust. “The secret’s in the rub, and I can’t share that.”

Barbecue, as a food, lends itself to mysterious discourse, in part, because it’s so simple. Pork shoulder butt (or whole pig) cooked in a smoker until it’s poised to fall apart. For purists, the nuance of flavoring with smokes and rubs is where the art is.

Sylva has a new repository for that art thanks to Aust and his partner in crime Chef Jay Horton. Aust recently purchased the building that used to be Lee’s Barbecue on NC 107, renovated it, and started a whole new kind of shop.

“It just kind of fell into my lap. Lee was looking to get down to one restaurant, so I talked to him about it and thought I’d give it a try,” Aust said.

Horton and Aust met in the kitchen at the Cedar Creek Racquet Club in Cashiers where they worked last summer. Horton, raised in Canton, has 21 years of experience in fine dining and got his start cooking at Ghost Town when he was 16.

“The only other thing I’ve found I’m good at is putting money into the cash registers at a convenience store,” Horton said.

Aust, an Army brat who’s spent the last 16 years of his life in Sylva, was going to school to become a teacher when he decided to take over Lee’s. Blackrock BBQ and Grill has been open for less than a month now, but it’s already packed during the lunch hour with a mix of Lee’s loyalists, WCU students and staff, professionals from the hospital complex and members of local law enforcement agencies.

The barbecue is Eastern North Carolina style pulled pork and they serve it with both vinegar and hot pepper sauce and sweet tomato-based sauce on the table.

Aust cooks the dry rubbed cuts of pork for 15 hours in a smoker, and the result is delicious. Barbecue in the mountains, unless you’re at someone’s house, is often a dicey proposition. The economies of scale that make for barbecue meccas in places like Lexington don’t exist, and the result is often meat that is rushed or over-sauced.

The pork at Blackrock is spot on. The dry rub adds a distinctive signature that isn’t distracting, and the smoke flavor doesn’t overpower the meat. One of the great things about whole pig barbecue is the crispy bits of skin on the outer layer and the strands of pork underneath coated in the rendered fat. When the meat is pulled, it yields a range of textures from crisp to succulent and fatty.

“Slow and low” sounds easy, but getting the right seal on the pork is crucial and you can tell Aust know his work, because the meat pulls right and arrives on your plate in a neat little mound of crispy-edged hunks.

Horton prepares all the sides and a la carte items, like collard greens and hand-cut potato wedges, from scratch and to order. The pulled pork platter comes with two sides and hush puppies for $7.50. The beans were the second star of the show, tangy and sweet with the same distinctive spice signature as the rub.

Another huge upgrade to the Lee’s experience is the total interior renovation that Aust’s father, Jim, contributed to the project. Jim has transformed the kitchen into a clean, efficient stainless steel commercial space and the front room into a rustic, hand-worked wood parlor with four spacious booths and five two-tops.

“We wanted to make it a rustic clean place to sit down for a good meal,” said Aust. “ Everything in here is hand-made, just like the food.”

Aust and Horton plan to add Memphis-style spare ribs and catering to the operation in the near future. They also cure their own bacon for their BLT’s and burgers. Mmmmm, bacon.

The two partners are happy to be out of the fine dining world and confident in their product.

“It’s the kind of food we love to fix,” Aust said. “Just good old Southern food.”

Find them on Facebook or call 828.586.3490.

Sylva resident Susannah Patty thought her trip to Chile would be an adventure, but she didn’t count on living through the fifth biggest earthquake of the century.

In her late 20s now and no stranger to travel, Patty says she has a knack for going places the moment “things go bizarre.”

She was in Paris when large-scale riots between police and teenagers broke out on the north side of the city. She was in Cameroon during a political upheaval that paralyzed the country. Then she was in Chile, in a club in the wee hours of the morning celebrating with friends, and the world was shaking.

“There were no screams, only a few who ran outside, and no massively loud noises where I was. I was instructed to hold on, but there was no time to think about where one should go or what one should do,” Patty wrote in a travel log she kept in the days after the quake.

Fortunately, Patty’s host in Chile, Maqui Ortiz, lives in the northern port town of Valparaiso, far from the earthquake’s epicenter near Concepcion. Ortiz was previously living in Chapel Hill when the two met through mutual friends in Asheville.

When Ortiz decided to go back to Chile to explore her roots, Patty jumped at the chance to visit. The quake registered 8.8 on the Richter scale near its epicenter and 7.8 in Valparaiso.

“It was really over before I realized what was happening, but if I could equate the feeling to anything, it would be the strongest turbulence I’ve felt on an airplane,” Patty said after she arrived safely in Sylva on Monday.

Patty speaks French, not Spanish, so she relied on Ortiz and her network of friends to help her get around in Chile. When the quake struck, she’d already been in Valparaiso for six days.

In her journal, she described the town in a way that makes it easier to feel what the quake must have been like there.

“During the day, the vista looks impossible — multi-story houses of all styles and colors built at the turn of the century are perched on cliffs, within a block there are at least ten rooflines, and the labyrinthine roads approach 45 degree angles. At night, which is when the 7.8 earthquake hit, the hills are cloaked with an enigmatic net of yellow lights that cradle the bay.”

The disorientation of being a stranger in a strange land turned on its head for Patty that night. While the terremoto didn’t level Valparaiso, it did damage nearly every building and knocked out its electricity.

“Chileans are used to earthquakes, so when I was with new friends on the second story of a large building and the shocks began, I looked toward faces that were for the most part calm, albeit a bit stunned. Afterwards, I found out that if you look at glasses on the table, you know you will be fine if they rock and sway, indicating a side-to-side motion that is better absorbed by structures. If they rattle up and down, apparently, you know you are dead.”

After the quake, the town’s residents emptied into the darkened streets, and Patty followed the crowd to safety.

“After a minute and a half, the building slowed its rocking; singing and cheering collided, and the lights flickered, going out completely within a few minutes. Once out on the street, following the tambourines of friends, the city no longer existed in a recognizable state. It was not unrecognizable because of destruction — there was minimal damage comparatively — but because the lights had been extinguished.”

Patty described how in the darkness she was led by the hand of a relative stranger to a safe place away from the buildings then to another apartment to sleep. Her host, who had lived through a massive earthquake in 1985, could not sleep.

In the days after the quake, Patty said the people exhibited a combination of joyful gratitude, relief and fear.

“Relief was so entwined with apprehension, about what was to be found, or not, elsewhere, about gas explosions, about tsunamis, about another quake and temblores that there was no way to compartmentalize the emotions or the sensation which was expressed through a remarkable efficiency of action. Tones of angst only came out in retrospective discussions focused on piecing together fragments of information: where individuals were, what it was like, what kind of damage their houses sustained, if and when they had heard from family members in the south and in Santiago,” she wrote.

The plaster walls in the apartment Patty was staying in were damaged, and the shelves emptied by the quake. She and Ortiz didn’t want to stay indoors the day after, so they went to the beach. There wasn’t a soul there except a group of itinerant clowns. All of the boats in the port were stowed away. The emptiness, she said, was terrifying.

She was originally scheduled to return from Chile a week ago, but Chile’s main airport terminal was destroyed by the quake, and the roads connecting Valparaiso to the capital, Santiago, were closed.

Patty stayed with Ortiz and her friends and watched Chile try to get back to normal. She raised $300 online to donate groceries for people who needed food. She watched her friends throw together an impromptu performance of larger than life marionettes to raise spirits. She noticed how the graffiti on the walls turned positive: “Chile ayuda a Chile.” “Chile help Chile.”

In the end, Patty’s journey to Chile opened up a new realm of experience for her. It wasn’t that she was disconnected from the horror Americans saw on the news, it was that she was connected to it in a way that made it harder to compartmentalize.

That message is clear in one of the searching passages of her journal.

“When there is a sudden transformation of the world or our part of it, there also exists a crucial time-space before anyone can gauge the shift or build up a framework of memories and images that situate the extent of the change; in this space, people intuit what is necessary,” she wrote.

But the quake certainly left its mark on Susannah Patty, and her experience of the moment it hit evokes the fates of the people in Concepcion who were not as lucky as she was.

“You instinctively know that for moments, and possibly forever, your situation chooses you, you do not choose it,” she wrote.

The Town of Sylva finalized an agreement with the N.C. Department of Transportation last week that clears the way for a continuous sidewalk to Dillsboro.

The town will pitch in $83,000 to build the missing link and maintain the sidewalk, and N.C. DOT will cover the remaining costs.

The sidewalk extension has been a goal for the town board since 2008 and pre-dated Sylva’s pedestrian planning process. But it’s a success story that motivates Town Commissioner Sarah Graham to create similar partnerships in the future.

“You’ll be able to walk from Dillsboro to Webster on the sidewalk, and it just shows how easy it is to partner on projects like this,” Graham said.

When the 4,000-foot extension is completed this summer, it will connect Sylva’s sidewalks to Dillsboro’s by filling in a gap along West Main Street between Mark Watson Park and Jackson Village. The pedestrian planning process initiated in November was intended to lay a blueprint for similar pedestrian improvement projects in the future and to provide a platform for partnering with Jackson County and the DOT.

“I think everyone understands that the money to buy a bunch of sidewalks is not there right now,” Graham said. “But we wanted to hear from the community whether they shared the town board’s ideas about making the town more friendly to pedestrians.”

The town used a $20,000 N.C. DOT grant to hire Donald Kostelec, a consultant from the Asheville office of The Louis Berger Group, to oversee the process and provide technical input. The steering committee –– which includes Graham, Emily Elders, the county’s greenways coordinator, and Ryan Sherby of the Southwestern Commission –– began meeting in early November to develop a vision for the plan.

Last month, residents from a range of Sylva communities gathered for focus groups and offered input that would ultimately shape the plan’s direction.

The focus groups confirmed that the pedestrian plan would zero in on solutions for three primary areas –– Skyland Drive, Mill Street in the downtown district and the N.C. 107 commercial corridor.

Graham said the meetings helped create a consensus about how to focus the planning effort by bringing together residents from distinct neighborhoods.

Both Mill Street and N.C. 107 are commercial corridors that are currently dangerous for pedestrians because of their high-volume traffic and noticeable lack of safe crosswalks.

Kostelec said his intent with the focus groups was to zero in on the physical challenges presented by the areas that need improvement.

“We wanted to get down to identifying on the map where exactly people walk then figure out where those patterns will move in the future,” Kostelec said.

The town used a pedestrian survey to get input from residents. The survey asks people where they walk, how often, and where they would like to be able to walk in the future.

Kostelec said each of the three areas pegged for improvement comes with its own set of challenges. Skyland Drive is an area in need of new sidewalks, which are costly. The goal is to connect Sylva’s downtown with the Harris Regional Hospital campus and Skyland’s commercial district.

“Doing that type of project in one chunk is not going to be possible for a town of Sylva’s size,” Kostelec said.

Kostelec said he is still working on pinning down the right of way restrictions on Skyland, an old state highway route, to see if there is room for a separated sidewalk between the road and train tracks.

N.C. 107 is a heavily trafficked part of town that is cursed by a narrow right of way. Kostelec said any plan to improve the sidewalks would involve getting easements from neighboring property owners.

Mill Street is an area that could see marked improvement at a relatively modest price point because it’s not a terribly long stretch to tackle. But because the road is maintained by the DOT, any work there is contingent on good cooperation between the town and the department, Graham said.

“The implementation will have a lot to do with cooperation from DOT, because Mill Street is a DOT road,” Graham said. “I’m hoping if we have a plan in hand and we’ve been through the process and we know what we want, that those negotiations will be a lot easier.”

The Pedestrian Plan will be showcased at an open house during the Greening Up the Mountains Festival on April 24. Sylva’s Pedestrian Plan Survey is available at www.townofsylva.org.

Community Table, Sylva’s nonprofit community kitchen, has outgrown its existing facility and is targeting a move to the town’s now-vacant senior center.

The county built a new senior center, freeing up space in the old one, which is owned by the town. The building is located downtown adjacent to the town pool and playground.

Last month the Community Table’s executive director, Amy Grimes, asked the Sylva town board if it would support the move so the organization could move forward with concrete fundraising goals for the building switch.

The board voted unanimously to “bless” the project.

Grimes said the Community Table served an average of 120 meals per night in January for a monthly total of 2,076 meals, triple last January’s number.

“We’ve got a lot of new faces every week,” Grimes said.

Community Table –– which serves meals four nights per week and operates a food pantry by appointment –– turned 10 years old last August. The Sylva Church of Christ has donated the current space to operate the kitchen, but Grimes said the Community Table needs more room to accommodate a surge in demand for services.

“We’re busting at the seams,” Grimes said.

Grimes said the Sylva board’s vote cleared the way for Community Table to get cost estimates for the move and undertake a fundraising drive. Grimes expects to get a building inspector’s estimate on the necessary renovations to the building next month.

“We are hoping the town, the county and the community will come together to help us, and we’ve always had tremendous support,” Grimes said.

Community Table serves warm, home-cooked meals to anyone who wants them from Monday through Friday every week.

Sylva Mayor Maurice Moody said the senior center had always been a building devoted to community service. If the Community Table could raise the money to make the move a success, the town would support it.

“What the board did was basically bless the idea if they want to move forward with it,” Moody said.

The Sylva Town Board opposes the construction of a 195-foot-high cellular communications tower on the main commercial drag of N.C. 107, but a state law passed in August may allow the tower to go up anyway.

The cell tower, planned by Pegasus Tower Company of Cedar Bluff, Va., would dominate the ridgeline next to the unfinished Comfort Inn adjacent to Andy Shaw Ford.

Pegasus originally received a building permit for the tower in June 2008, but because construction did not begin within six months, the permit expired.

Sylva amended its cell tower ordinance in November 2008 to conform to Jackson County’s ordinance. The ordinance stipulates a maximum height of 120 feet, which would rule out the tower Pegasus plans to build.

The Sylva board met in closed session last month to discuss legal matters concerning the issue and determined they had grounds to deny Pegasus a new permit.

“We think we’re on firm legal ground to deny it,” Sylva Mayor Maurice Moody said.

Moody said the board considered the tower a safety issue because a “fall zone” had not been included in its design plans.

But Pegasus believes the North Carolina Permit Extension Act of 2009, a state law intended to offset onerous permitting requirements during the down economy, applies to cell tower construction. The company plans to build the tower without a new permit from the town of Sylva.

David Owens, professor at UNC Chapel Hill’s Institute of Government, said Pegasus’ permit is likely still valid.

“If that permit was valid at any time during that last three years, then it’s still valid,” Owens said.

Companies forced to put construction projects on hold during the recession would typically see their permits lapse. The state bill was intended to save developers from having to go through the permit process over again when they were finally ready to proceed.

Owens said the Permit Extension Act defines development so broadly that the construction of cell towers is included. The statute essentially delays the mandatory start period for development projects initiated between January 2008 and December 2010.

Following the logic of the bill, Pegasus would have six months from December 2010 to start work on the tower under the terms of its current permit.

Sylva board member Chris Matheson said she and her fellow board members felt strongly that the tower shouldn’t be constructed in the proposed location.

“I don’t know how much there is to say other than that the town is vehemently opposed to it,” Matheson said.

Matheson also said the town is working with Pegasus to see if both parties can agree on an alternative site for the tower.

“We’re working with Pegasus to see if we could provide a location that would be attractive to them but more in line with that the community needs,” Matheson said.

Sylva Town Manager Adrienne Isenhower confirmed that the town’s attorney, Eric Ridenour, has engaged in discussions with lawyers from Pegasus to resolve the issue.

If Pegasus and the town cannot come to an amicable resolution on the issue, Owens believes Sylva must have grounds other than an expired permit to prevent the project from going forward.

Armed with an e-newsletter and an indefatigable entrepreneurial spirit, Eric Hendrix is determined to bring the fruits of the ocean to the mountains of Western North Carolina.

“The goal is to consistently provide fresh fish in the mountains, because you just can’t get it,” Hendrix said, who runs the aptly named Eric’s Fresh Fish Market on Back Street in Sylva.

But the real magic of Hendrix’s business is the way he has grown the project from an idea into an icon on a shoestring budget.

“The idea came to me when I was walking one day, and it was a full year and a half before anything happened,” Hendrix said.

Hendrix started the fish market in 2008 as a side venture to complement his salary teaching composition at Western Carolina University. When his contract wasn’t renewed last year, he decided to go all in selling fish.

“Necessity is a great motivator,” Hendrix said, laughing.

These days, Eric’s Fresh Fish Market is open Wednesday through Saturday. Hendrix gets deliveries from Inland Seafood in Atlanta twice a week.

His mission may be simple, but the reward it provides is varied. On a Wednesday afternoon Hendrix may have Scottish Salmon, Rain Forest Tilapia, Dover Sole, Costa Rican Mahi Mahi, Gulf shrimp, Virginia select oysters, and Maine Mussels.

Hendrix constantly preaches a mantra of freshness, quality and variety.

“You can eat beef, pork, chicken. Or chicken, pork, and beef, and there’s only three possibilities,” Hendrix said. “When you go into the ocean there’s thousands of possibilities.”

Inland Seafood has been a key to his ability to supply restaurant quality fish in a variety you don’t get at the grocery store. Once he identified a niche market for fresh seafood in the mountains, Hendrix hounded Inland to let him serve as a local distributor. Inland is a gigantic wholesale distributor that covers 12 states by truck. It serves the region’s best restaurants and specialty markets 90,000 pounds of fresh fish each week.

Mike Hulsey, Inland Seafood’s retail division sales manager in Atlanta, is a huge fan of Eric’s.

“I can’t even remember how he found us,” Hulsey said. “But he’s an enterprising individual, and I love the guy. He’s just interested in doing a better job than what the grocery stores are doing in providing fresh seafood with the real information customers need.”

Hulsey, who describes himself as a fish lover, said Inland sells to Hendrix because they believe in what he’s doing.

“It’s a breath of fresh air,” Hulsey said. “If a consumer calls from that area –– and this happens all the time –– and says, ‘Where can I get fresh fish?,’ I like having someone I’m confident sending them where I know I would buy the fish.”

For Hendrix, the distribution model is simple. Get the freshest fish you can and get rid of it as soon as you can.

“The fish you get from me is delivered to Inland the day before it’s delivered to me,” Hendrix said. “There is no middle man, and without the middle man the freshness is guaranteed.”

But Hendrix didn’t have the luxury of buying a fancy new space and filling it chock full of fresh seafood on giant beds of ice. He has employed a pay-as-you-go business model and grown the business slowly.

His greatest tool in that regard has been his weekly e-newsletter, which contains information about what’s fresh as well as the community business news of other downtown Sylva merchants. Hendrix has harnessed his skills as a networker and communicator to become a reliable source of what’s happening about town, and he’s growing his business at the same time.

“Networking is really crucial in any economy and in today’s economy particularly,” Hendrix said. “One of the goals with the newsletter is to market downtown Sylva as a real destination.”

With over 1,000 registered subscribers, Hendrix’ e-mail has turned into a marketing tool that drives the business forward. Sure, Gmail made him upgrade to a bulk account, but that’s good news, right?

Customers read his “Catch of the Week” email and reply with their orders. Hendrix knows how much to order from Inland and what people really want to buy, so seafood doesn’t languish in his shop.

David Liberman, a regular customer who reserves fish via email, raves about the market.

“I lived in Miami for years and used to eat fish there all the time, but fish in the mountains is a problem,” Liberman said. “I think of him as a blessing to the community.”

Liberman says he now eats fish once a week and looks forward to his stops at the market. Having grown up in Brooklyn, he likens the experience at Eric’s to the experience of grocery shopping in his youth –– a meet-and-greet transaction with food.

When you visit Eric’s Fresh Fish Market, Hendrix’s energy is evident. He greets all the customers by name. In the space of 30 minutes, you’ll see him cut up a salmon, tap notes on his newsletter, and sell a handful of Dover sole filets all while carrying on a conversation.

Hendrix isn’t an easy person to categorize. Raised as a military brat, he later spent four years in the U.S. Army. In the mid-‘80s he moved to Franklin from Kansas City, Mo., and started the first Mexican restaurant west of Waynesville.

After a divorce, Hendrix used his GI Bill credit to go back to school at Western Carolina University. A writer and songwriter, Hendrix got a master’s degree in English and Creative Writing from WCU in 2006 and looked forward to a long run as an assistant professor until his life took yet another new turn.

Sue Lipton is a vegetarian but she visits the market every week to shop for her husband, who favors its sea scallops and Scottish salmon.

Lipton said her loyalty to Eric’s is based as much on the business’s vibe as its product.

“I really, really appreciate the way he interacts with everyone,” Lipton said. “He always has time for everyone. The community is so important to him.”

Cooking with wine is familiar. Cajun chef Justin Wilson, one of television’s first real food celebrities, liberally tipped Chablis into his etouffe (who-wee), and Julia Child introduced America to the French style of cooking, deglazing and saucing with wine in the late 1960s.

But if beer is the new wine in Western North Carolina, then Heinzelmannchen’s beer-focused cookbook is set to open up a new conversation about the way the region’s signature beverage pairs with food.

“One of the en vogue things in the craft brewing circuit is to brew a beer that goes along with the food you eat,” said Heinzelmannchen’s brewmeister Dieter Kuhn. “And that’s been the style of beer we’ve brewed all along. It goes back to early times in Germany when you didn’t drink the water, you made beer out of it. And it was always on the table.”

Dieter and Sheryl Rudd are married and they run Heinzelmannchen together as business partners. Naturally their beer found its way from the brewery into the kitchen. Sheryl explained the genesis of their cookbook.

“We found ourselves pouring a little beer in everything, and my mother saw it and said,‘You really ought to start writing this down,’” Sheryl said.

Sheryl’s mother, Elizabeth Rudd, may not have known what she was getting into when she offered a word of advice in her daughter’s kitchen, but the task of organizing and editing the Heinzelmannchen cookbook eventually fell to her.

An experienced editor, it was Elizabeth who took on the challenge of turning Dieter and Sheryl’s collective effort into a published product. Along the way, the three of them found out there is a lot more to making a cookbook than cooking with a pen and an index card on the counter.

“One of the things we wanted to do is to make it more than just a cookbook,” Elizabeth said.

The result of Dieter, Sheryl, and Elizabeth’s work is a book that incorporates cooking techniques, recipes, and anecdotes into a kind of beer and food field guide. For example, the qualities of beer are dealt with in a succinct section called “Cooking with beer.”

“Hops add bitterness and acidity. Malt adds a subtle sweetness. Yeast produces a light fluffy texture, especially in batters. Yeast can also help to tenderize tougher cuts of meat,” one part reads.

That type of matter of fact, practical information helps you think about the possibilities of cooking with beer. But the cookbook also includes recipes that are tried and true, and the book is spiral bound so it can lie flat next to your stove as you try them out.

I tried the simplest recipe first, one for Mexican Cheese Dip, and I ate it during the Super Bowl and thought about all the delicious beer-infused “queso” that runs like a river through Austin, Tex. The Heinzelmannchen recipe yielded the perfect consistency. I tipped in a little more hot sauce and used the Ancient Days Blonde ale to my taste.

The stories that punctuate the book are fun and disarming, like the one about Dieter using the myth of the Henizelmannchen (German house gnomes) to defraud his little sister of her allowance for two years when he was growing up in Heidelsheim.

But the focus of the book is the recipes, which were generated around a nexus of popular favorites that Dieter and Sheryl cooked for their friends and family over the years. Naturally bratwurst and sauerkraut are on the list, and Dieter’s favorite birthday cake, Schwarzwalder Kirschtorte — a mouthful that turns into Black Forest Cherry Torte in English.

This is comfort food, which is really what beer is great for, and much of it has a distinctly German flavor.

“It’s not that it’s a German cookbook. It’s just stuff that we like to eat, cooked with the beer that we like to drink,” Dieter said.

Not all of the food is German-inspired. For example Dieter’s favorite dish — and the last to go in the cookbook — is the paella. The story behind the recipe exemplifies what Dieter and Sheryl are all about. They are community-focused, small business owners who love what they do.

Eric Hendrix of Eric’s Fish Market, their neighbor on Back Street, had a pile of beautiful shellfish for Dieter’s birthday meal and recommended they turn it into paella. Ross Lorenz, chef/owner of 553 West Main restaurant, said he’d help put it together. So the whole lot of them crowded into Dieter and Sheryl’s kitchen and produced the best paella this side of Valencia.

“They kept saying this has got to go in the cookbook,” Elizabeth said. “And I said it won’t make the deadline. And they said well just write it down now.”

Needless to say, it made the book. Dieter and Sheryl were anxious that the book be produced responsibly, and it was. Using 100 percent recycled materials, Rich Kilby of the Barefoot Press in Raleigh worked hand-in-hand with Elizabeth to design and produce a locally made product that’s friendly to the environment and chefs both.

The cookbook is available at Heinzelmannchen Brewery and City Lights Books in Sylva and may be available at Osondu/Blue Ridge Books in Waynesville and Malaprops Books in Asheville in the near future.