Drive north on Merrimon Avenue this October and you'll pass a building most North Asheville residents have driven past a thousand times without really looking at it. For years it sold guitars, amps, sheet music. Now it smells like five-spice and hoisin.
That building, at 319 and 321 Merrimon, spent decades as Musician's Workshop. When the shop closed, the Scheffer Group, the team behind Jettie Rae's Oyster House, Gan Shan, and two Vinnie's Neighborhood Italian locations, bought the property and split it down a shared wall. One side became corporate offices. The other became The Majestic, a counter-service Chinese American restaurant that's open now and taking orders through its Spears Avenue takeout window.
The timing matters more than it looks. The Beaverdam Studio Tour returns for its ninth year on October 24 and 25, and its route runs straight up this same stretch of Merrimon before turning onto Beaverdam Road. The tour hasn't changed its format in nearly a decade. The block it passes through has.
The Building Everyone Still Calls the Music Shop
For a long stretch of the tour's history, Musician's Workshop wasn't just a nearby business, it showed up on the tour's own printed guide, listed alongside stops like Early Girl Eatery and Grovewood Gallery as one of the local fixtures along the route. That's the kind of detail that only sticks if you've actually walked the tour more than once: the instrument shop was part of the neighborhood's mental map long before anyone thought about what would replace it.
What replaced it split the building in two. The office side at 319 Merrimon now houses Scheffer Group's corporate staff. The restaurant side at 321 Merrimon opened as The Majestic, built around a New York-style Chinese American menu that founder Eric Scheffer describes as personal. Scheffer grew up in Brooklyn and on Long Island, where neighborhood Chinese restaurants were part of his family's regular life. He's said the concept came from hearing the same request from Asheville diners for years: something familiar, comforting, and done with intention.
What Actually Opened There
The Majestic is Scheffer Group's fifth Asheville restaurant, and it leans on the same bench of talent that built the others. Chef Kaya Rehnberg, who has been with the group for more than three years, runs the kitchen day to day. Ray Hui, executive chef at Gan Shan and a first-generation Chinese American whose parents were restaurateurs, helped shape the menu and stays on in an advisory role.
The format is counter service, not a sit-down dining room, which keeps the focus on volume and repeat visits rather than table turns. The menu reads like a greatest-hits list of mid-century Chinese American cooking: wonton soup, crab rangoon, five-spice spare ribs, hand-rolled New York style egg rolls stuffed with pork and shrimp, beef and broccoli, pepper steak. Nothing on it is trying to reinvent the genre. It's trying to remember it accurately.
There's a parking lot behind the building accessible from Merrimon, and a crosswalk directly out front, both small details that matter if you're planning to walk over from a Beaverdam Road studio rather than drive.
The Same Weekend the Valley Opens Its Doors
Later this month, the Beaverdam Studio Tour opens for its ninth year, October 24 from 10 to 5 and October 25 from 10 to 4. It's free and self-guided, which means you set your own pace and your own order. This year's lineup includes 17 artists who live and work in Beaverdam Valley plus seven guest artists, working across ceramics, painting, jewelry, sculpture, textiles, photography, glass, and wood.
Julie Calhoun-Roepnack, an art potter and tile muralist, has participated in every tour except the first one. Her home studio has four tile murals installed around the property along with a potter's wheel, a slab roller, an extruder, and two kilns, and she's said visitors seem as interested in seeing how the space works as they are in buying anything. Her pieces draw on the flora, fauna, and terrain of the Blue Ridge Mountains, which is a fitting thread for a tour that exists precisely because Beaverdam Valley still has enough studio space, quiet, and treeline for artists to work the way they want to.
The tour's own materials are specific about geography: the studios sit off Beaverdam Road, which splits off Merrimon Avenue in North Asheville. Anyone driving up for the weekend passes through the same corridor The Majestic now anchors before they ever reach the turn.
One Corridor, Two Kinds of Opening
None of this makes Merrimon a different street overnight. But it does mean the commercial texture along it keeps turning over even while the neighborhood's biggest annual arts event stays exactly the same shape it's had for years. A few blocks down at 952 Merrimon, Little D's opened as a casual eatery from Owen and Mindi McGlynn of Asheville Proper, built around seasonal shareable plates and craft cocktails, aiming to be a gathering spot for people who live nearby rather than a destination pulled from downtown traffic. That's a second example of the changing mix on the same street, alongside The Majestic.
The tour format hasn't moved. Same free weekend, same self-guided structure, same Beaverdam Road spine connecting the stops. What's moved is what sits along the road you take to get there. A guitar shop became a restaurant with a rabbit logo and a menu built on nostalgia. A stretch of Merrimon that used to be mostly grocery runs and drive-throughs now has a reason to stop and eat before or after you spend an afternoon watching a potter throw clay in her own driveway.
If you've done this tour before, you already know the drill: pick a few studios, leave room to wander, don't rush the conversations with the artists because that's the actual point of a self-guided format. This year, you'll just have a new place to grab lunch on the way.
The Majestic is open now at 321 Merrimon Avenue, taking phone orders for pickup at its Spears Avenue window. The Beaverdam Studio Tour runs October 24 and 25, free and open to anyone willing to make the drive up Merrimon and take the turn.
Elevate Asheville keeps an eye on this stretch of North Asheville because we live here too. If you're mapping out your tour weekend, grab dinner at The Majestic on the way home, you've earned it after a full day of studio hopping.
