ASHEVILLE, N.C. — A 2020 Southern Living ranking lists Asheville, N.C. as the sixth "Best City in the South."

The magazine also rated the city as the South’s sixth "Best Food City."

When asking who may have helped shape the constantly evolving and diversifying food scene in Asheville, we found most people attributed it to self-taught chef Meherwan Irani.

He has a list of accomplishments and awards, including four James Beard Award nominations for "Best Chef in the Southeast." Irani also owns five restaurants. His restaurants have been featured in big name publications, including The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Food & Wine, and USA Today.

"The food route has been sort of a passion for my entire life, but it was just a passion and a hobby," Irani says.

Pursuing it as a career was never in his original plan.

Born in London and raised in India, the chef came to America for graduate school. Most of his early years in the country were spent out West.

But in 2005, Irani found himself and his family moving to Asheville. 

"We decided we wanted to move to a place that gave us, you know, the quality of life that was family friendly, and we discovered Asheville," Irani says.

He was in real estate development then, until the economy crashed in 2008. The crash had a big impact on his industry, and Irani says it pretty much wiped it out.

"That's when I realized that if there was ever a moment to make a shift, and to do something I really want to do, the time it was right to do it now," Irani says.

In 2009, he opened his first restaurant, Chai Pani. He calls it a passion project.

"I was really obsessed with this idea that somebody needed to change the way the average American viewed Indian food," Irani says. "I just never thought that I'd be the guy that would actually make that happen.”

He knew it was a risk and was afraid he would fail.

"Somebody told me, you're on the wrong side of town, that location is cursed because four or five restaurants that failed over there," Irani says. "And nobody's going to come to Asheville to eat Indian street food, you know, they're here for barbecue or beer or whatever else have you.”

Despite the naysayers, his opening was a huge success.

Irani opened to a line of people down the street waiting to eat his Indian street food. They ran out of food by mid-day.

The way the community accepted him and his family when he first moved there made him think opening Chai Pani could work.

"Even though Asheville may not be diverse when it comes to race, your skin color, just because of its location and where it is, it's extremely diverse and cosmopolitan in just attitudes and the way people, you know, embrace and accept something that's different and new and that's really what's made Asheville, Asheville," Irani says.

He felt like he could succeed in Asheville way more than he thought he could succeed opening an Indian restaurant in San Fransisco or New York.

Irani says the city emboldens people to pursue their dreams, but he never realized Chai Pani was just the beginning for the diverse food culture.

"Very shortly after that, Cúrate followed, you know, this incredible Spanish tapas restaurant with a chef that had trained in one of the finest restaurants in the world in Spain," Irani says. "Cucina24 with Brian Canipelli doing just mind-blowing Italian food, married with a Southern sensibility. It was sort of like the floodgates opened."

He doesn't like to take credit for it, but he says restauranteurs have come up and thanked him for being one of the few to lead the way to show something like this is possible.

Now, the city has more than 250 independent restaurants, including authentic options like Chinese dim-sum, Mediterranean, Brazilian, Caribbean, Hawaiian, and Ethiopian restaurants.

"It is community over competition," Irani says.

Irani also owns Nani's Rotisserie Chicken, Buxton Hall Barbecue, and Spicewalla (a spice shop), all located in Asheville. He also owns a Chai Pani in Decatur, Georgia and Botiwalla in Atlanta, Georgia and Charlotte, North Carolina.

He's also involved in a new project, the S&W Market, as a culinary consultant. The project will be a food hall and event space and is scheduled to open in June.

To learn more about him and his restaurants, click here.