About Liz Button
May 27th, 2009 by HHG
Liz Button (mother) – When Katie and I first started discussing opening a restaurant together, I thought, ¨It‘s about time that the women in our family finally created a restaurant after so many generations of excellent cooks.¨ To this day I reference my mother’s recipe for butter cookies, among many others (I still can’t get her fudge recipe to taste as good as she made it!) and my grandmother’s recipe for Thousand Island dressing. My career in the food industry started with Godfather’s Pizza in Augusta, Georgia where I started as Assistant Manager and within months worked my way up to District Manager. From there I worked in a small, but very well known, catering business in South Carolina and helped open and manage Cottage Cuisine, a lunch spot created for the Garden Club in Falls Cottage on the Reedy River in Greenville, SC. When our family moved up north to New Jersey, I created Elizabeth Button Catering which I ran for 10 years, cooking, creating, and organizing parties and weddings for up to 200 guests. It all began with a yacht party for the Chairman of Monster.com. Circumstances changed and I decided to take some time off to help Ted (my husband) with his growing business in private aviation and chartering.
After Katie went off to college and Ted and I moved into New York City, I really began to miss cooking. Suddenly we were living in the wonderful city with fabulous exciting restaurants which reignited my passion for food and the drive I had felt early on running my own catering business. But when I came home to the apartment, I saw a kitchen where you could fit two people comfortably, but three became crowded. The oven and the refrigerator backed up into each other so you could not open both at the same time, basically a nightmare for entertaining. Katie and I did manage to serve quite a few Thanksgiving dinners out of that kitchen, but I knew deep down that I wanted space, professional space. Knowing that my dream had always been to open my own restaurant, I finally decided that now was the moment, and when Katie decided that she wanted food and cooking to be her career path as well, I was thrilled. With so many big corporations taking over the food and beverage industry, I thought, ¨What could be better than a mother-daughter business? ¨ So I went back to school. I completed the course Opening and Managing a Restaurant at the French Culinary Institute, continued on with a Professional Culinary degree and graduated with honors on the same day I completed the Wine Spirit Education Trust degree with honors.
After FCI, I went to work at Park Avenue Cafe in New York City to really test my skills and went from Garde Manger to Hot Apps in a little over a month. I loved the speed and adrenaline of working on the line. During all of this, Katie, Felix, and I began to solidify our plans for a restaurant and decided upon Asheville, NC as the location. On June 1, 2009, I packed up the apartment in New York and made the move to Asheville. This project is the biggest, most exciting, and at the same time most terrifying endeavor of our lives, but here we come with knowledge, ambition, and thrilled to be in Asheville, knowing there is so much to learn. The journey continues…
Posted in Uncategorized | Comments (2)
August 24th, 2010 at 7:43 pm
Congratulations and Best Wishes to Heirloom Hospitality. The talent and creative expertise combined with your intuitive sense of style will be a smashing success! I only wish I could be a regular customer knowing how delicious your special touch transforms anything you endeavor to cook!
August 26th, 2010 at 9:18 am
Thank you for the kind words and best wishes. We hope you’ll visit Asheville and Cúrate often!