Chelsea Boes: You must go to Gogo's for the cinnamon buns, balance and welcome
I can hear the rain falling through the dead kudzu as I load my kids into the car and head to downtown Old Fort for Saturday morning cinnamon buns.
I called ahead, a precaution because of the ice. “Are you guys open today?”
“Yes ma’am.”
I’m from New York and congenitally bound to say you guys instead of ya’ll. Does the guy on the phone also bear a cultural necessity to call me ma’am? In any case — neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these bakers from the swift completion of their appointed magician-ship, and for that I’m thankful.
If you have not yet made the trek to Gogo’s Cinnamon Rolls, you must. You must stop, drop and Gogo. You must choose your bun, unsheathe your plastic fork, and savor each bite until nothing remains but a surf of cream cheese frosting on your plate’s farthest edge.
A fire burns in the grate of the shiny little dining room. Eaters choose carefully between varieties: sausage and gravy, lemon, apple pie, birthday cake, cookies-n-cream, original, caramel pecan, maple bacon, creamsicle, chocolate or peanut butter chocolate. Today the spitting weather has kept others away and we get the pick of the litter, plus two coffees and two chocolate milks. We imbibe while gazing out a huge grid of 12 windows into the copious parking lot of Old Fort Baptist Church.
“Do they freeze well?” asks a lady who comes in after us. Her accent is northern, like mine — more evidence of the conflux at work in Old Fort’s population. Old Fort, however people feel about the fact, is attracting outsiders. It’s a place of deep mountain history. But now here we come, strangers from other regions drawn to Asheville for work. We can’t afford to live in Asheville, so we spill out into surrounding towns.
The southern lady behind the counter says that yes, the buns freeze well. She says if you put them in an airtight container they’ll last for nine months. Take them out and heat them, and they’ll taste like they’ve just been baked.
I have no quarrel with this. But I know that unless this customer has formidable moral strength, these buns will not make it to her freezer. Like me, she’ll eat them piece by piece out of the pink box while lying to herself that this is the last bite.
But she understands this already. “I mean,” she tells the lady, “I want all of them, but the problem is, I’ll eat them all.”
The next customer is also a transplant but from the other direction, Florida and then Texas. She and her 4-year-old make this Saturday pilgrimage weekly, both for the buns and to see a person she calls Miss Wendy.
Miss Wendy lives just down the road in a yellow house, the home of her late grandmother, the original Gogo. Miss Wendy founded Gogo's when grounded by the pandemic. On the shop’s website, Miss Wendy says her grandmother “was a homemaker ... cooking for everyone my grandaddy brought home. We have no idea how many guests have sat at her table.” This included hobos who hopped off the nearby trains and slept in Gogo's furnace room. “In the morning,” Miss Wendy writes, “Gogo would yell down to them and offer them a hot breakfast — no judgment, just good food.” When I read these words I wonder if I’m Old Fort’s new hobo: just one more person from a faraway place looking for hospitality.
Gogo's shares a parking lot with Frisbee’s Market, now a Piggly Wiggly. Earlier in the week, I traversed its aisles, seeking the fulfillment of my dietary goals for the new year. I got a good globular yellow onion, Haas avocados for 99 cents, green cabbage at 89 cents per pound, Greek yogurt, a giant bouquet of cilantro for $1.79. All these round bits of nature rolled along the black conveyor belt and the cashier asked, “What are you making?”
“Um” I began, a little embarrassed, “Middle Eastern vegetarian stew?”
But, like everybody else I’ve met in Old Fort, he was really nice. He said, “Sounds delicious.” No judgment. Just good food.
From the parking lot, Gogo's ambrosia called. The marquee letters on Gogo's wall tell the truth: “We Are The 'Balance' In Your 2024 Diet."
Yes, the balance, and the welcome. I cut off the first corner of my favorite bun: apple pie. I expect the late Gogo would have made space for me in her furnace room and laid me a plate at her table.
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Chelsea Boes lives in Old Fort and works as editor of WORLDkids Magazine in Biltmore Village.
This article originally appeared on Asheville Citizen Times: Boes: Gogo's in Old Fort offers warm cinnamon buns and hospitality