Katie Button’s Recipe for Resilience Through Crisis and Competition

From biomedical engineering to the high-stakes kitchen of “America’s Culinary Cup,” chef Katie Button has spent 15 years building Cúrate into an Asheville icon. In this episode, she breaks down the systems that sustain a decade-plus legacy, the reality of Asheville’s recovery, and a critical "operator’s warning" on the gaps in business interruption insurance. We explore how her scientific background fuels her culinary precision and why she believes restaurants remain the most beautiful—and vulnerable—cornerstones of our economy.