Over the last 10 to 12 years when I travel for work, I've been staying almost exclusively in Hilton properties. What that has gotten me is a Hilton Honors Lifetime Diamond Member status with the chain of hotels and a nice cache of points that my boss allows me to use for vacations. While we were in North Carolina, we decided to stay in Asheville for a few days. For an on-line search, I found the Hilton Garden Inn - Asheville Downtown at the City Centre that appeared to be walking distance to the downtown area and I booked that hotel for our stay.
The City Centre complex in Asheville is located on the east side of the downtown area and houses the BB&T Bank offices in Asheville, as well as the Roberts and Stevens law offices, along with other professional offices and the Hilton Garden Inn. The 2.4 acre plot of land also has a car deck/garage for the facility and it appeared that there was some retail space openings at the street level across from the hotel. There are also some condo's that can be rented monthly, weekly or daily in the complex. The City Centre complex has been open for almost one year now.
Getting to the Hilton Garden Inn - Asheville Downtown located at College and Charleston streets in Asheville (see map) was sort of an adventure. Getting off Interstate 240 at Charleston and heading south, we could easily see the hotel sitting on the corner. However, College Street westbound doesn't allow for left hand turns into the hotel's lot. We went south on Charleston past the hotel and ended up taking some side streets - one of which emptied into the Buncombe County Jail and a lane that is used for prisoner pick-up and drop-off. Once I finally got through that, I was able to take a left, then a right to come to the entrance off College for the hotel. (I found out later on that there is a roundabout one block west on College Street that would have allowed us to do a quick turnaround to the eastbound lane and get us easily to the hotel.)
The Hilton Garden Inn - Asheville Downtown consists of a main floor, four floors of rooms and a rooftop bar/restaurant on the sixth floor. The lobby was very nice, comfy and decorated with a number of paintings from artists who had galleries in Asheville's River Arts District. There was an outdoor pool off to the side of the lobby area in front of the building.
As a Hilton Honors Lifetime Diamond member for Hilton, I have the option of being able to select my room on-line if reservations are made more than 24 hours in advance. The day before we went to Asheville, a reminder came up for me to pick my room. I took a high floor room and sort of guessed if it would have any type of a view. When we came up to the counter to check in, we were greeted by a friendly young guy by the name of Michiah - he turned out to be stellar for us for our whole visit giving us directions, helping us with the hotel shuttle, and giving us restaurant and brewpub suggestions. Michiah saw that I was a Lifetime Diamond member and he said, "We don't get many of you guys here! But, then again, we've only been open for about 9 months."
Michiah had told us that the hotel was owned by Quality Hospitality, a subsidiary of Quality Oil Company based out of Winston-Salem. Quality Oil Company began in 1929 and has provided gasoline, diesel, propane and home heating oil to people from Virginia down to Florida. Quality Oil operates a number of Shell full-service stations as well as a number of GOGAS, Quality Mart and Quality Plus gas station/convenience stores across North Carolina. Michiah told me that Quality Hospitality - which owns seven other hotel properties in five states in the Southeast - sunk a lot of money into the Hilton Garden Inn - Asheville Downtown. "They put in something like $33 million dollars into this property," he said. "It's a very nice place." (It also turned out that the Hilton Garden Inn - Asheville Downtown was the 700th Hilton Garden Inn property to open in the chain.)
I told him that I had done an e-check in and he said, "Oh, we put you in one of our deluxe rooms since we had it open and you're a Lifetime Diamond member. It's a southwest corner room on the 5th floor with a great view of both the mountains and the city." When we went up to the room and opened the drapes, the south window had this somewhat nice view of the Blue Ridge Mountains with the highest peak - Mount Pisgah - easily discernible in the distance. However, the west view windows toward downtown Asheville offered really nothing more than a great view of the City Centre building as well as a great view of the Buncombe County lock-up facility. Still, the room was spacious with a king bed, some furniture and a lot of space to fan out during our stay.
The first thing we had to do was to go up to the sixth floor and check out Pillar, the indoor/outdoor bar/restaurant. The bar had just opened at 4 p.m. and there were already a few people in the bar when we got up there. Even if it were on ground level, it would have been a great bar/restaurant.
The Pillar bar and outdoor patio is located on the north end of the hotel so the views of the Blue Ridge Mountains aren't quite as good as they were from our room a floor below and on the south side of the hotel. And there was still the Buncombe County Jail prominently in front of us as we looked toward downtown Asheville to the west. Still, it was a nice outdoor space with a number of metal tables and chairs on top of a rubberized indoor/outdoor flooring that my wife would love to have in our four-season porch back home. While we wanted to go explore the downtown area and didn't get a drink on our first visit to Pillar, we did go up and have drinks on the deck later in our stay, both during the late afternoon and for a nightcap in the evening after we returned from a restaurant. It was a great place to unwind and hang out.
One of the things the Hilton Garden Inn - Asheville Downtown's web site said was that it was a short walk to downtown stores, restaurants and bars. Well, a short walk is about 10 minutes - and it's nearly all uphill as Asheville is a very hilly city. However, the Hilton Garden Inn provides a free shuttle service to and from the downtown area for guests - and will even go pick up people who would like to come from the downtown area and go up to the Pillar bar for drinks or dinner. We used the shuttle a handful of times to take us downtown, but the walk back to the hotel was rather easy as most of it was all downhill.
When we were there, the Hilton Garden Inn - Asheville Downtown partnered with a Greensboro restaurant - the Iron Hen Cafe - to provide breakfast and lunch on the premises to guests and others who were looking for a place to eat on the east end of downtown. The Iron Hen Cafe is part of the Fresh.Local.Good restaurant group based in Greensboro that oversaw the ownership of nine restaurants mainly in the Greensboro area. All of the restaurants had menus that focused on locally and sustainably-raised products for their foods.
The restaurant was very nice with high quality wood floors, a nice bar area with Edison lamps hanging from the ceiling, intricate stone pillars, and a full service menu. It was a nice place to get something to eat.
We ate there a couple three days while we stayed at the hotel and each day I had the same thing - the housemade corned beef hash covered with two sunny-side up eggs with whole wheat toast. It also came with some grape jelly that was obviously homemade - it was actually closer to jam than jelly because it was sort of chunky, but had a very sweet taste to it - and it was absolutely outstanding. It was some of the best I'd ever had. But the corned beef hash was equally outstanding. It featured big chunks of housemade corned beef with fried potatoes mixed in. I tried to eat the corned beef separate from the eggs, but the mixture of the egg yolk with the corned beef was a great taste sensation, as well.
However, we noticed some changes going on in the restaurant while we were staying there. One morning, they were putting signs up that the restaurant would be closed after breakfast for the next couple of days. I asked Michiah at the front desk what was up with that and he said, "Oh, we're breaking our affiliation with the Iron Hen Cafe after today." He said that things weren't working out with the parent companies and Quality Hospitality was going to run both the Pillar rooftop bar and restaurant and the new Pillar Cafe that took the place of the Iron Hen Cafe. "The menu is going to be similar, if not the same," he told us. "But there will be a few additions going on, as well."
I don't write about hotels all that much, but I felt it was necessary to write about the Hilton Garden Inn - Asheville Downtown. It may have been the finest Hilton Garden Inn I've stayed at in terms of accommodations, amenities and service. And I stay in a lot of Hilton Garden Inns in my travels. But the one near Asheville's downtown may have topped them all - and may have topped many other upscale places I've stayed at over the years. We can't even begin to express how well we were treated in all aspects during our stay at the Hilton Garden Inn - Asheville Downtown.
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