Growing up in Gainesville, Florida, Amelia Brashear was immersed in a family culture that embraced the preparation and sharing of good food as an act of love. At the same time, 500 miles away in the mountains of North Carolina, young Kip Lindsey was watching and helping his talented and well-known father, Larc Lindsey, excel in the kitchen of the Highland Lake Inn Restaurant in Flat Rock.

At the time, they had no way of knowing that their formative childhood experiences would play such an important role in their lives - ultimately resulting in a marriage and partnership that launched them on a decades-long adventure exploring their passion for exceptional food, gracious hospitality, and shared community.
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Amelia and Kip Lindsey have owned and operated Budy Finch Catering based in Flat Rock since 2014. In December of 2021, they entered into discussions with Starr Teel, owner of Campfire Grill, and agreed to help out at the restaurant as refinements were made to the menu and operations and it continued to emerge from the travails of the pandemic.

Kip and Amelia thought a few months in the restaurant would be a good way to further expand their knowledge of the food scene in Henderson County. In addition, they would be helping Starr, a person they’d known and respected for a long time. It would be, they thought, a productive collaboration before they dove back into their catering business full-time. “We agreed to work with Campfire through May of 2022,” recalls Kip with a wry smile.

Then a funny thing happened on the way back to their previous career path. “We got to know the amazing team at Campfire,” explains Amelia. “It is so easy collaborating with Starr and he shares so many of the values that are important to me and Kip.”  And, as the mother of a four-year-old, she admits there are logistical advantages in the new arrangement.  “We don’t have to pack every meal into a car a drive it across western North Carolina. It feels healthier for our young family”

And, as the many happy patrons of Campfire have realized during the past several months, this new partnership has been a deliciously fortuitous circumstance for anyone looking for good food in Flat Rock.
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Amelia’s earliest memories are of food - really good food prepared by her mother and the women in her extended family; including her mother, her grandma Budy and her many aunts and great-aunts. “They were southern women who cooked everything from scratch in large quantities. My aunt Janet still cooks a huge Sunday lunch with six different side dishes and a different theme each week.”

Watching the buzz of activity in the kitchens of her childhood, Amelia felt the same draw as her family. “I always loved it. I wanted to be in the kitchen.” She also was inspired by Martha Stewart’s shows on TV. “It was the most magical thing I had ever seen. A world where everything was beautiful and she was making everything. I wanted to do that.”

Her interest in cooking was so strong that for her high school graduation, Amelia requested a Kitchen Aide mixer. For her college graduation, she asked for and received a Cuisinart. Her eyes light up when she adds, “I still have them both. They’ve taken a lot of beatings but they still work!”

Family influence was so important, that when it came time to name the new catering company many years later, she chose to honor her Grandma Budy (pronounced boo-dee). Budy grew up on a farm in southern Illinois and was a teacher at a one-room schoolhouse starting at age 17. She went on to teach school her entire life and she also was a prolific cook.  “She got up every morning before school,” Amelia explains, “and would cook full breakfasts with homemade biscuits and bacon and eggs and grits and gravy and fruit and just everything.” There must have been a secret in all that good food as Budy lived to be 105.

Kip’s childhood was spent sharing time between his mother Sandy’s home in Asheville during the week and weekends in Flat Rock helping out his father Larc at the restaurant. Larc Lindsey lived a free-wheeling and sometimes chaotic lifestyle centered in the food service industry - running restaurants, operating catering services, and spending weekends exploring the food preferences of patrons at local farmers' markets.

Like his brother Cole, who owns Barnhouse Kitchen in Flat Rock, Kip spent a lot of his youth helping out his father at the Highland Lake Inn Restaurant. Although he didn’t always want to be there, it was in his father’s kitchen that Kip laid the foundation for a successful career as a chef.  

Although he didn’t care for working on Friday and Saturday nights when his teenage friends were out on the town, it wasn’t an entirely unsatisfactory experience. “As a kid, I did enjoy the Sunday buffet,” says Kip. “There was endless ice cream and they let me do the brandy peach topping that I got to light on fire.”  Ice cream and fire - the dreams of a young boy.

Kip also realizes now that his experience in the kitchen with his dad opened a lot of doors when he was finding his own way in the world. “I really learned a lot there. I was able to get jobs in my early 20s because I had so much experience in the kitchen. I could at least look like I knew what I was doing.”

The Finch of Budy Finch is in honor of Kip’s grandfather, Harold Finch, who taught Kip a lot about being a good host. “He was very civilized. He was a good entertainer and an excellent host. There are elements of how he entertained his guests that we still use in our business today.”
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In the early 1990s, Amelia was part of a group of girls from Gainesville that attended Camp Ton-A-Wandah in Flat Rock each summer. She was quickly hooked on the camp experience and attended Ton-A-Wandah from age 12 to 17. She and her friends loved camp so much that one summer when their July session ended they begged to be allowed to stay for another month. The camp agreed - on the condition that they wash dishes in the camp kitchen. It was Amelia’s first experience in a commercial kitchen. The hours were long, the work hard and hot … and she loved it. “There was something about being in the kitchen as opposed to in the dining hall that I loved.  it felt very comfortable. I felt very at home.”  More than just fascinated, Amelia was hooked.

Amelia later attended Vanderbilt University where she describes her academic career as something less than stellar. “I was not really the best student,” she laughs. But the energy she didn’t give to academics she channeled into a continuing exploration of cooking. She cooked for roommates and friends with mixed results but her friends were always happy to eat and she nourished her passion.  When she admitted to her parents that she was more interested in cooking than school, they insisted she complete her degree. “They told me that I had to finish my liberal arts degree first. And then I could be a starving artist if I wanted to.”

While Amelia was exploring her interests in food in Nashville, Kip was bouncing between stints at college and summers spent helping his father with restaurants and catering jobs.  His academic experience at Appalachian State was similar to Amelia’s. “I was kind of a loose kid. I did just enough to stay in school.’

After college, Amelia returned to Ton-A-Wandah as Program Director and it was on this return trip to Henderson County that she was introduced to Kip through mutual camp friends. Although not a full-blown romance initially, the couple would cross paths occasionally and when they did they would gravitate to each other and would spend hours talking. Amelia definitely caught Kip’s eye, "I was impressed with her as a person. She was a really put-together young woman.”

After her job at camp wrapped up, Amelia’s first restaurant job was working the cash register at Cafe Laurie in Hendersonville. With a foot in the door, Amelia found herself working with Laurie Bakke and Robin Pharris - two mentors that taught the budding restaurateur the essentials of a successful enterprise. More importantly, she saw firsthand the necessity for the staff to work as a team. “There was a really cool team of women. We worked six days a week and got really close.”  She also had a benchmark for future jobs in food service. “Cafe Laurie set a really high standard. What I saw and what I learned -  I never wanted anything less than that.”

In a bit of synchronicity, Laurie Bakke had started her career as an intern with the Highland Lake Inn’s restaurant owned by Larc and Kerry Lindsey. Indirectly, Amelia was also learning from Kip’s father through Laurie.

During this time, Kip invited Amelia to help him prepare food for a mini-festival organized by Kip and his friends. It was that experience of cooking together that really made an impression on Amelia. “We made apple butternut squash soup. He was so relaxed and cool in the kitchen. It was magical.”  As their relationship grew and blossomed into a full-on romance, Amelia found herself helping Kip and Larc on catering jobs and the young couple took their first steps down the path of their shared culinary careers.
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Kip and Amelia married in 2006 and shortly thereafter took the next step in their careers. They moved to Durham where they spent the next seven years and it was during this time that the couple truly created their own identity in the food service industry.

Amelia worked at Southern Season - an emporium store in Chapel Hill that contained a cooking school, restaurant, and card and flower shop. The retail store also offered free daily gourmet food tastings to walk-in customers.  “It was the hub of the local food scene and just a wealth of education about the industry,” says Amelia.

Kip also worked at Southern Seasons as the store chef and was tasked with making cold foods for the refrigerator cases and stocking the store’s hotline every day. Mostly, they let Kip stretch his culinary wings.  “They let me make whatever I wanted for a year. Anything that didn’t sell quickly in the store would come to me and we would turn it into a dish. It’s a great way to learn.”

Amelia also worked for Karen Baker at the iconic Magnolia Grill in Durham. The restaurant garnered national awards and helped put Durham on the map for foodies around the country. “It was an unbelievable experience. They were just masters and total pioneers of the ‘Farm to Table’ movement.”  She also worked as the manager of Geer Street Garden in Durham where she learned many of the skills she now brings to Campfire Grill. “I learned it was the people part, as much of the food, that makes a successful restaurant. I really loved helping the staff achieve and being that support person on the human side of the work.”

Meanwhile, Kip took a position at Piedmont Restaurant, another award-winning restaurant in Durham. It was there that Kip met Drew Brown. Brown had previously worked for Thomas Keller who is the only American chef to have been awarded simultaneous three-star Michelin ratings for two different restaurants. The experience was eye-opening for Kip. “It was set up like a French kitchen and we made everything from scratch. We made our own mayonnaise, all the sauces, everything was made from scratch every day.”

The years in Durham were highly formative for both Kip and Amelia and the sum of all these experiences would be eventually brought to the table - literally and figuratively - at Campfire Grill.
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As much as they enjoyed the food scene in Durham, the call of Kip’s mountain home was too much to resist and he convinced Amelia it was time to return to Henderson County. Although she thought that the next step might be a bigger market like New Orleans, she shared Kip’s affinity for western NC and agreed to the move.

After short stints at Grove Park Inn and Ben’s Tune-up in Asheville for Kip and Amelia respectively, the young couple pulled the trigger on the dream of starting their own business and created Budy Finch Catering in 2014.

 Their years of experience had taught the couple valuable lessons about what customers most enjoyed when eating out. “We had gone to a ton of weddings and recognized that people really enjoyed themselves more when it was comfortable versus when it was fancy,” says Amelia. “We wanted to make food that made people feel good”

“Comfortable food” at Budy Finch, however, did not mean lesser quality. Just the opposite in fact. The new enterprise was dedicated to using high-quality ingredients and employed many techniques learned through the years to make the presentation of food as compelling as the taste. Clients appreciated their skills and the business grew quickly.

Budy Finch also picked up work preparing lunches for private and charter schools as well as recurring contracts with local non-profits. Caroline Long at St. Gerard House convinced them to even do some teaching. “We started teaching there twice a week,” explains Amelia.  “We had no idea what we were getting into, but that was one of the most joyous experiences of our life.”
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By 2018, Budy Finch was flourishing and the couple had firmly entrenched themselves in the local culinary scene. But changes were on the horizon. In August of 2018, their son Auguste was born and what can be a complicated and hectic lifestyle/career became even more so. Then 18 months later, COVID hit and everything changed.

As the once frenetic pace of their work slowed considerably, Kip and Amelia had more time to think about how they envisioned their future. Then in December of 2021, Budy Finch was catering a Christmas party and the couple crossed paths with Starr. A conversation ensued and the couple left that event seriously thinking about the idea of returning to a restaurant work environment - eventually.  

“After saying ‘no”, Amelia recalls with a laugh, “We stopped and thought it might be nice to remember what it’s like to work in a restaurant. To reconnect with that part of the industry.” They agreed to a short-term stint at Campfire to help reorganize and refine the menu as the relatively new restaurant prepared for the new normal of the post-pandemic world.
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Starr Teel has known Kip’s family for years and his Hubba Hubba Smokehouse often referred catering clients to Budy Finch - knowing that the customers would have an exceptional experience.  He also felt that Kip and Amelia would dovetail with his business philosophies.   “We run an operation that is based on hospitality first,” says Starr. “You do that by hiring great people that believe in the concept. People that understand that everyone - from the dishwasher to the Executive Chef - has a stake in the prosperity of the business. Kip and Amelia get that.”

One year into the collaboration, Starr is even more confident in the decisions to bring the Lindseys on board. “A great guest experience starts with your staff. They have to look forward to coming to work. That is how Amelia operates. I don’t have to explain it to her.”

He also points to Kip’s skills as both a chef and a teacher/mentor to the youngest member of the Campfire team. “Kip has done an incredible  job in the kitchen and he is willing to teach the young people who come in with little experience and to help them professionalize themselves.” Indeed, after the first year, Kip is most proud that nearly the entire staff has been retained.
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Their first year at Campfire has been a learning experience for everyone involved in the collaboration. But it has been a year that has shown steady and positive growth. Kip and Amelia were delighted to discover that Campfire already had a dedicated staff eager to learn and an owner who shared their philosophy for operating a successful restaurant. “We respect his absolute dedication to the small details that mean so much. Plus he is just knowledgeable about the business,” says Amelia.

When asked why they agreed to stay on a Campfire, Kip explains. “It’s a  really nice facility. Starr and the staff are great to work with.  We know so many of the people who love to eat here. I just felt like the right thing to do.”
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During their short tenure at Campfire, Kip and Amelia have worked with Starr to institute a number of changes that have customers enjoying their Campfire fare more than ever.  Under their direction, the kitchen is using more locally sourced and seasonal foods. They have special features of fried chicken and prime rib on Tuesday and Friday nights respectively.  They’ve also started a special monthly wine dinner on the first Tuesday of each month and have extended the range and quality of their wine menu. All of this combined with a hyper-focus on hospitality is being well-received according to Kip. “Things really started coming together after our winter break. The start of 2023 has been great.”

For her part, Amelia loves what she sees on busy evenings in the restaurant. “I love seeing our guests enjoying their friends, the food, and the sense of place we’ve created. We have an amazing team that really cares about the work we do.”  Then she flashes her electric smile and adds, “It feels like a garden when everything is blooming. I love that.”
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Amelia and Kip Lindsey have traveled a long and winding road as they followed their shared passion for great food, exceptional hospitality, and community built around common cause. Now, 20-plus years into their adventure, they are using their considerable skills and culinary acumen to create an exceptional dining experience right here in Flat Rock. In many ways, Campfire has become the perfect recipe for delicious food in a comfortable and gracious setting.

Learn more …

www.campfiregrillnc.com

www.budyfinch.com