Nathan picked me up early from work today and we headed down 75 to my favorite place on earth: Asheville. So thankful it’s only a little over four hours away.

We decided to stop by Biltmore Village on the way into town. With the art fair going on this weekend, we thought it might be a little crazy on Saturday. It was a good decision.

The Corner Kitchen has always been one of our favorite places to eat in town. (Although, in all fairness, I don’t know that we’ve ever eaten anywhere here that I wouldn’t call “one of our favorites”, but that’s neither here nor there.) We hadn’t eaten dinner here before so we decided to give it a shot.

Okay. So it is a Friday night. And it is summer tourist season. We were expecting a wait. Imagine our surprise when we were given two options: wait 45 minutes for a table or sit here without a wait.

I loved our seating arrangements. It was like Take the Cake but a busier kitchen. They gave us the disclaimer that language may get “colorful” in the kitchen. We laughed and we got right to work with the menus.

The drinks:

I went for the Lavender Lemon Drop. Let me just tell you, friends. This drink is dangerous. Amazing. I could have drank all night. But I only had one.

The choice for dinner was a hard one to make. I loved that we had the view of the kitchen to see things as they were coming out. I decided on the shrimp curry and Nate ordered the pork.

First things first, though. These little crab salad bites. Wow. I could have eaten about a million of these.

And if I’d have brought my Go-Go-Gadget arm, I might have done just that.

I got really excited here. I knew that was my curry in the back and Nathan’s pork up front.

Hello pork for Nathan! I had a bite of the pork and it was perfectly cooked. The sauce was sweet and spicy. Really really good.

And shrimp curry for me. This dish was amazing. Flavorful but not too much heat. The textures of the avocado and the cashews were really nice. Just a really really good dish.

We intended to save room for dessert, but that just didn’t happen.

I took a few more pictures while they were processing our check.

The guy on the left is Matt, our server. He was fantastic as well. Lots of love to the Matt-ster.

I love that we have mastered the arms-length shot.

We meandered around for a little while and decided it was time for dessert after all.

Yum gelato from Gianni Panini. I had half a scoop each of coffee and double chocolate. Perfect on a steamy evening.

Nathan was very full. He decided that he could see his pork chop protruding from his belly. He pointed this out to me.

Then it was time to check into our favorite bed and breakfast.

The Dogwood room was waiting to welcome us back. (Which we got on an awesome special that we knew about because of Facebook. See, it’s good for something!)

Also waiting to welcome us back? The porch. And Bear and Patti. And some wine.

How can you not relax when this is your view?

And you’ve got this in your hand?

Four hours in Asheville and I feel like I’ve escaped from everything. I like this. I like it here.

And we’ve still got the rest of the weekend.