For Asheville restaurants devoted to local and regional sourcing, when it comes to fish, farm to table begins about 20 miles west in Haywood County, home for over 70 years to Sunburst Trout Farms. Their acclaimed rainbow trout are grown in the Shining Rock wilderness in the Pisgah National Forest and processed in Waynesville.

The close proximity ensures freshness at Asheville restaurants. “We’ll place an order and get trout on the table for dinner that was swimming that morning, “ says William Dissen, chef and owner of The Market Place restaurant. “It doesn’t get much fresher than that.”

The Southern Appalachian brook trout is Appalachia’s only native trout.

Though the name Sunburst Trout is now ubiquitous to Asheville menus, it wasn’t always the case. When Sunburst founder Dick Jennings Jr. first called on the newly opened Corner Kitchen restaurant in 2004, it took repeated attempts to persuade co-owner Joe Scully to add it to the menu. “I was a culinary snob,” Scully admits.

Its popularity was undeniable, however, and the trout dishes have since held their place on the menu. Brian Crow, culinary director of Corner Kitchen in Biltmore Village and its sister restaurant Chestnut in downtown Asheville, laughs when asked if he could guess the number of trout he has cooked in his nearly nine-year tenure with Scully and his partner, Kevin Westmoreland. “I can’t math that high,” he says.

The vast majority of those numbers are tallied at Corner Kitchen, replicating the dish that Scully and his chefs created 21 years ago—a filet of trout breaded in a combo of ground spiced pecans, regular pecans and panko, pan-cooked and colorfully plated with ginger sweet potato mash, brown butter haricot verts, bourbon beurre blanc sauce and garnished with a tangle of sweet potato hay. “We probably do 30 plates a night,” Crow guesses.

At The Market Place, Dissen says with rare exceptions diners will find Sunburst trout on the menu, though the presentation changes up to eight times a year, following the region’s seasons and micro-seasons. A mid-fall dish had the deboned, skin-on, pan-seared fish set on thyme butter with radicchio, apple and charred alliums, drizzled with warm bacon vinaigrette.

“Sunburst Trout is considered one of the most sustainable and best rainbow trout [suppliers] in the country and it’s just outside Asheville,” Dissen says. “I’ve fished, cooked and eaten a lot of trout in my life, and theirs reigns supreme.”