ASHEVILLE, N.C. (828newsNOW) — Movies have the Oscars. Music has the Grammys. Food in Asheville has the Stoobie Awards.
Stu Helm is a local Asheville food writer, tour guide, blogger and social media personality. He has been writing about food in Asheville for 12 years, championing his favorite meals out of hundreds of yearly restaurant experiences.
Helm is passionate about introducing foodies to their next favorite bite to eat, especially through his job at Asheville Food Tours, a walking food tour company Helm has been part of since 2016.
An important thing to note about Helm’s cuisine commentary is that he isn’t going to spit on or spit out a meal he didn’t like. Instead, he wants to be a force of positive food recommendations for his community – an online base of 20,000 social media followers and his friends all over Asheville.
“Everything I write about is something I enjoyed and recommend,” Helm explained. “I just eat something good and I feel this deep need to tell people about it.”
On his blog, “Eating Everything with Stu Helm the Food Fan,” Helm helms an annual award ceremony, the Food Fan Awards: AKA the Stoobies. The Stoobies are a collection of 24 categories that Helm divides his food recommendations into from the establishments he visited the year prior.
In 2024, that number was 212 “restaurants, cafes, bars, food trucks, food carts, caterers, ghost kitchens, market places, food events and food makers of all sorts,” Helm wrote.
Helm ran the Asheville restaurant gamut from A to Z, hitting everything from All Souls Pizza to Zambra tapas bar.
For the 12th annual awards, the winners of which will be announced “sometime before midnight” tomorrow, Friday, Jan. 31, Helm nominated food in categories as ubiquitous as Sandwich of the Year to specific as Deep Fried Thing of the Year.
Helm is particularly proud of devising the latter. Previous winners include Ukiah Japanese Smokehouse for their “blooming enoki mushroom, a beautiful deep-fried thing,” but even a state fair deep-fried Oreo could take home the top prize.
“If I ate one that was the best deep-fried thing of the year, it could totally win. Anything that’s deep-fried,” Helm said, affecting a vocal fry.
The food fan’s taste is unpretentious. It’s all about merit – not price tag.
“I have categories where the nominees include a diner and a James Beard nominee,” Helm said. “My enjoyment levels of the whole experience do matter, but I can enjoy myself just as much at a diner as I might at Cúrate. I take it into consideration, but it’s not that I have different tiers of, well, I better have these restaurants in this high-up category and these others in this mid-range.”
To Helm, the name on the door is not as important as the food on the plate.
“Nah, to me, it’s just all food and experience,” Helm summarized.
When Helm announces the winners, the lucky lunches – or dinners, breakfasts and “hunks of meat”; there are a lot of categories – will be shouted out on his website.
“I also print stickers for the restaurants. I make them a nice window sticker that’s sticky on the front and then I make another sticker they can put on their cash register or wall that’s sticky on the back,” Helm said.
In the future, the prizes may grow more elaborate.
“I would love to have a statuette, that’s for sure,” Helm joked. “Of my logo. My logo is a cartoon hot dog eating a donut.”
However, the core of the Stoobie Awards will always remain the same: One man on a mission to share good food.
Check out the winners of the Stoobie Awards on www.stuhelmfoodfan.com.
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1.5 oz bourbon
.5 oz green chartreuse
.5 oz black lime & bay leaf shrub
.5 oz brown sugar simple syrup
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