At his Waynesville restaurant, Singletree Heritage Kitchen, founder and Head Chef Josh Weeks puts in the work. Take his steak dinner: Weeks chargrills a peppered prime New York strip to order and serves it over whipped North Carolina sweet potatoes alongside local French beans, smoked tomato-infused butter, and a house steak sauce.

The sauce alone takes four days to make. Weeks starts by creating a bone stock, which is cooked down into a demi-glace and further processed into a cuisson, infused with stone fruits, fresh herbs, and a red wine from Singletree’s meticulously curated selection.

McRae Davis & Josh Weeks photograph by Stacey Van Berkel

“We go the hard route every time,” Weeks says with a laugh. “But it works. We really care about the end result and the quality. We care so much about the experience people are going to have.”

The work doesn’t stop there. If you’re enjoying supper at the bar, the single slab of black walnut beneath your plate was also harvested, crafted, and installed by Weeks and his wife, Singletree co-owner McRae Davis. If you’re in the dining room, the wormy chestnut table you’re seated at is also a Weeks original, made from local reclaimed barnwood. Oh, and the dining room itself — with its large windows overlooking Singletree’s gardens and the Smoky Mountain peaks beyond — was designed by Weeks, who’s spent more than 30 years training, cooking, and dreaming of this restaurant.

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Weeks has long been smitten with western North Carolina. As a child growing up in a farming family in Fayetteville, he often visited the mountains for hiking trips in the summer and skiing getaways in the winter. Back home, Weeks loved spending time in his mother’s and grandmothers’ kitchens, where he’d watch them make everything from scratch. He’d help pick and preserve muscadines and harvest and bake cherries for a warm fruit pudding, now a dessert staple at Singletree.

In her later years, his paternal grandmother traveled around the world and brought culinary techniques and recipes back to her grandson. “She was flambéing shrimp and making all these soufflés and beautiful food that I’d never seen before,” Weeks says. “These three women are the reason I cook. They all cooked and hosted in their own different ways, and I felt like that’s what I should do.”

Singletree’s skillet-seared scallops are served with a hash of sweet potatoes, pork belly, and spring onions; a lemon-chive beurre blanc; and a green tomato relish based on Weeks’s grandmother’s recipe. photograph by Stacey Van Berkel

While driving through Waynesville one day, he and Davis passed by Walker Service — the almost century-old auto shop in the middle of town — and noticed a dumpster sitting out front. The Cathey family had owned the shop since the 1920s. The third generation to run it, Clayton Cathey and his wife, Grace — a local artist — had sectioned off part of the space for a gallery to display Grace’s metal sculptures, some of which featured old car parts from the station.

The couple were looking to retire and sold the property to relatives who were preparing the building to be rented. Davis took in the station from the road and said something that would change their lives: “That would make a cool restaurant.”

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Today, the old service station catches everyone’s eye. The restaurant is surrounded by handmade garden beds filled with native plants, many of which were propagated by Davis, a horticulturist. In 2023, she left her job as head gardener at The Swag hotel to join Weeks full-time at Singletree, where she runs the front of house and can often be found behind the bar, mixing cocktails and chatting with visitors.

“She’s really the culture builder here,” Weeks says. “She’s the one who makes everybody happy.”

Order a Brambling Lady: gin, blackberry, mint, cucumber, and lime. photograph by Stacey Van Berkel

Standing over the goldenrod, echinacea, and foxglove beside the parking lot, the branches of a metal tree reach up toward the spring sky. The Grace Cathey original stood in this very spot when Haywood County motorists still came here to get their oil changed. Now, whenever the Catheys come in for dinner, they’re reminded of their family’s legacy in this place.

Weeks keeps a few of Grace’s sculptures inside the restaurant, too, in addition to work from other local artists and some of his antiques. His proudest piece hangs over the bar: a singletree, or metal bar, that was once used to balance the pull of a plow in the days when horses and mules drew them. When Weeks looks at the singletree, he’s reminded of the hard work his family sowed into their eastern North Carolina soil for generations.

Enjoy the cool mountain air on Singletree’s patio. photograph by Stacey Van Berkel

After Weeks and Davis settled on the restaurant’s name, Weeks’s mother, Mackie, gifted him the singletree her father and grandfather used to plow their fields. Mackie and her husband, Mayon, were known in Fayetteville for their dedication to local arts and culture and for always welcoming neighbors and friends into their home. For two years after Singletree opened, Mackie made the restaurant’s muscadine jelly from scratch until she was no longer able. She died in January 2025, but her spirit of hospitality lives on. “She’s always been my biggest fan,” Weeks says. “She’s a lot of the reason why all of this has worked out.”

Weeks and Davis plan to rehang the singletree over the patio to welcome everyone into their restaurant built on hard work, where North Carolina food and farming are celebrated and where family legacies live on.

Singletree Heritage Kitchen
136 Depot Street, No. 101
Waynesville, NC 28786
(828) 246-9760
singletreekitchen.com