The fatal slaw.

• Author: Spence, Annette
• Position: Stanley's Barbeque & Bluegrass, Asheville, North Carolina - Company profile

THE FATAL SLAW

This is a relatively nice story about something bad that happened to a restaurant in Asheville. Bill Stanley, the previous owner and a current Buncombe County commissioner, is about the nicest guy you could meet. The new owners, Barbara and Bob Kohler, aren't quite as open, but they're as likable as any newcomers to North Carolina have any business being.

But most of all, it's about the importance of good will to a business - and not the kind found at the bottom of a balance sheet. The public hasn't forgotten this particular incident, but people seem amazingly sympathetic and supportive.

There's nothing nice about hepatitis A. This disease, spread through tainted food or water, can cause a bad bout of sickness for a person, not to mention the business that's linked to the illness.

As for the 77 people who contracted hepatitis from a contaminated bowl of coleslaw almost two years ago, they've long since recovered. But Stanley's Barbeque & Bluegrass restaurant still has progress to make.

Not that the place is doing badly. It's jumping on Saturday nights, and the Kohlers, who took over only a year after the hepatitis incident, say they're encouraged by last year's revenues and customer turnout. (They wouldn't talk specifics.)

But business would be better, they say, if the public would just let the memory die. Every time a magazine or newspaper reviews the restaurant, "they do a whole paragraph on 'the hepatitis episode,'" says Barbara Kohler, president of Barbo Corp., an acronym for her and her husband's first names.

"There's no need to keep bringing it up. It's over and done with," Vice President Bob Kohler agrees. The stigma hasn't worn off, he says, and that's why the numbers aren't up to where they were in 1987, when the restaurant brought in $987,000, its best year ever.

Bill Stanley, who owned it back then, is awfully proud of 1987, as well as the years that precede it. Sitting in his office on the second floor of the courthouse, so close to the restaurant you can smell the pig cooking, the 61-year-old commissioner doesn't try to mask the joy that Stanley's Barbeque & Bluegrass gave him - or the grief.

"It started out when I was principal at Asheville High," he says. "It was spitting snow here in March '79, and I was out at the airport going to Raleigh because at that time I was on the state competency-board test committee." Stanley ran into his friend Wallace Hyde, an insurance broker with offices in Asheville and Raleigh, who showed him a 1935 postcard of the brick Hayes & Hopson building in downtown Asheville.

"Wallace said he and [builder] Jack Bryant had bought the building, and they were talking about putting in some offices and a restaurant that has bluegrass music and clogging all year round. I said, "That sounds like a good idea. You need a partner?' And he said, 'Yeah, we need a managing partner.'" For the next three hours, Stanley and Hyde whiled away plane delays with cup after cup of coffee and dreams of a new business.

Stanley, with 24 years of education under his belt as a teacher, coach and principal, had never before considered early retirement. But retire he did at the end of the school year, and with his $34,000 in savings, he bought into the partnership and became president of the newly created H&H Foods Corp. (named after the building).

That summer, he set out to remodel a 10,700-square-foot space and to put together a menu with his new consultant, Buddy Smothers of Buddy's Barbecue in Knoxville, Tenn. ("Filet mignon and chateaubriand didn't go with bluegrass, but barbecue sounded good.") Soon, the house band and workers were hired, clogging teams from local schools and studios were invited to dance, and Hyde and Bryant insisted the restaurant be named after...