About Us

Laurey’s is a café, serving what we call “Gourmet Comfort Food.”  As you will see as you wander around our site, we believe in real food and we believe that the best tastes come from local ingredients.  We are friends with many of our farmers and we think that makes it all the better. Close is good, we think.  Come taste what we mean.

Laurey’s is a casual catering company, operating in downtown Asheville. We make boxed lunches for groups of 20 to multiple hundreds.  We serve simple, drop-off meals for business meetings, book groups, ladies’ lunches, family dinners and more.

Laurey’s is a full-service catering company. Yes, we also provide full service, delivering and serving elegant events on mountain tops, in barns, and, on occasion, inside! We can take care of rentals, beer and wine, set up, service, clean up, and wonderful food. 

Laurey’s cares for the Earth:

  • We are committed to making a positive contribution to our community.
  • We recycle ALL our glass, paper, plastic and cans.
  • All our to-go packaging is Earth-friendly.
  • We do not use plastic grocery bags.
  • Our bottled water is from a local spring, and is in biodegradable plastic. 
  • We collect ALL our compostable materials and take them to local farms, saving tons (really) from our landfills each year.
  • Our used cooking oil is transformed into bio-fuels.
  • We are aware of our carbon footprint and do what we can to make it as small as possible.
  • We also offer health insurance to our full time staff.

Laurey is the youngest daughter of Elsie and John Masterton who founded Blueberry Hill Inn, in Goshen, Vermont and who authored The Blueberry Hill Cookbooks.

After an interesting stint in New York, where she worked as a lighting designer off and on Broadway, Laurey visited Asheville for the first time in 1984 to take a course with the North Carolina Outward Bound School.  In 1987 she moved to Asheville to work with that school and also started cooking in her tiny walk-up apartment.

Laurey has been cooking on Biltmore Avenue, since 1990, first alone and now with a regular bevy of cooks, shopsters, office mavens and delivery folks.  This staff of “talented and interesting individuals” makes wonderful food, with a whole lot of fresh, local products and keeps life interesting with music, dancing, art, sport, and hilarity around the place.

Laurey is a practicing beekeeper, a hobby glassblower, and a long distance bike rider.  She believes in the power of service to others and in being an active member of her community.  Her current focus is getting a Chef in each of the 30 elementary schools in the  Asheville area as a part of Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move, a project to eliminate childhood obesity by 2015.  Among other things Laurey serves on the board of the national organization: Women Chefs and Restaurateurs.

Laurey is the author of Elsie’s Biscuits, simple stories of me, my mother, and food and is currently working on a book about bees and honey.