- This program is made possible in part by generous support from the American Battlefield Trust, connecting you to the places where our nation was forged.

Visit battlefields.org today.

[upbeat music] - Next on North Carolina Weekend, we're showing you fresh takes on the ordinary.

We'll visit an Italian deli and bagelry in New Bern, a Caribbean-inspired restaurant and brewery in Asheville, and a chicken house in State Road with every kind of thing but chickens, coming up next.

- Funding for North Carolina Weekend is provided in part by Visit NC, dedicated to highlighting our state's natural scenic beauty, unique history, and diverse cultural attractions.

From the Blue Ridge and the Great Smoky Mountains across the Piedmont to 300 miles of Barrier Island beaches, you're invited to experience all the adventure and charm our state has to offer.

[upbeat music] ♪ - Welcome to North Carolina Weekend.

I'm Deborah Holt-Noel, and this week, we're visiting places that give you a fresh take on the ordinary.

Our first stop is in Asheville, where a chef who became fascinated with Jamaican culture during his college years has created his dream restaurant and brewery, and foodies love it.

Let's see how Chef Aaron Thomas is reimagining Caribbean-inspired fusion at Nine Mile.

[upbeat reggae music] - Nine Mile, in a sense, is, first and foremost, it's a restaurant.

Well, we are in the Montford location here.

We opened in 2008.

The concept of the food is lean towards the Caribbean.

We also have our own brewery as well.

We brew our own beer here, so we've got a nice selection of different kinds of beers.

We've got some craft cocktails that we serve on tap here in Montford, and we've got, over in our other locations, a full-service bar where you can get any kind of cocktail you'd like.

- We also have a location in West Asheville and a location in Biltmore Park in South Asheville.

The Montford is the OG.

We call it the Montford Mothership.

Nine Mile is the province or small little town in Jamaica where Bob Marley was born.

When I was, I think it was eighth grade, I bought my first Bob Marley cassette tape, and it was the Live.

It was just called Live, and I bought it.

At that point, I just fell in love with reggae music.

And I remember I always wanted to have dreads in high school, but we weren't allowed to have dreads.

But when I got to college, I was like, "That's it.

I'm not cutting my hair anymore."

I went to Jamaica in '95 on spring break with two of my college buddies, also childhood buddies.

They were cooking this chicken on these old metal barrels.

I don't think I knew what jerk chicken was at the time.

It was the best thing I ever had.

- The inspiration for the Caribbean Fusion definitely came from my partner, Aaron, the chef and the other owner.

The other inspiration was being in Asheville and being a place that had a bunch of creative and quirky restaurants already.

We felt that it would be a good fit to add something to that, something a little more worldly.

The menu started out really small, and we did, I think everything was jerk chicken and a lot of coconut curry sauces.

So over time, we would take our daily specials and add it to the menus.

And so I'm always trying to grow this business in any direction possible, whether it be, you know, getting murals on the wall or a new dish or just keeping non-bile vibrant and alive and fresh.

- I love that it's comfortable food.

Asheville is a foodie city, and we love how tasty the food is.

This is the vegan Meshack.

My partner and I are vegan, and we love that this restaurant is vegan-friendly.

It's what we get every time we come.

- They're very accommodating of diets, so gluten-free, vegan, vegetarian, everybody can eat here.

I have also had the backyard bowl, and then I think it's the pesto dish is also excellent, but can't recommend the Meshack enough if you're not sure.

- We run a bed and breakfast, and when I tell guests that just down the street from where we live is Nine Mile, it's Caribbean-influenced food.

It's fish and chicken, lots of vegetables on rice and pasta, and super interesting sauces.

In flavor profiles, you'll get nowhere else.

That's what I love about Nine Mile.

- It's a flavor profile that is fairly unique.

You can get great Chinese.

You can get great Mexican.

The Jamaican flavor is harder to find, and so being a block away, we love it.

I am having the Kingston 12.

It's a little shrimp on pasta, and the sauces they put in there just pop and really bring out the flavors.

- To me, Nine Mile is a vibe.

We have the reggae music playing.

We got the smell of our natty bread, fresh food cooking on the saute station.

We're always trying to do our best.

I think that's part of what makes Nine Mile so special, and I would say if you want fresh vegetables, good flavors, good vibes, good people, that's why you wanna come to Nine Mile.

(upbeat reggae music ends) - The original Nine Mile restaurant is located in Asheville's historic Montfort neighborhood.

For information about their hours and other locations, visit them online at ninemilavl.com.

Our producer, Seraphim Smith, loves to bake, so when he came across an Italian deli in the heart of New Bern and heard there were freshly made bagels involved, he knew he had to investigate.

Let's join Seraphim as he discovers the house-made goodness of Gemelli Italian Deli and Bagelry.

(gentle violin music) - I love New Bern, especially in the morning.

I flock towards the wild ducks and seagulls, but I also enjoy walking about the architecture with its incredible history.

And just a short walk from the water, you'll find Gemelli Italian Deli and Bagelry.

They're open for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

At Gemelli, you can snag a delicious breakfast sandwich, peruse the shelves for real Italian ingredients, enjoy exquisite pizza, get a real Italian sandwich, and dine on pasta that was made from scratch right here in New Bern.

- So my father, he moved here from Sicily 26 years ago.

He met my mother working waiting tables at a Covent Corral back in the day, and he asked her the first time he met her, he said, "Will you marry me?"

And my mother's crazy enough, she said, "Yes."

And he asked her, he said, "Would you rather a ring or a restaurant?"

And she chose a restaurant, so they opened, we opened the first restaurant in 2001.

And so we came straight off the boat from Sicily here.

- It's amazing how pizza dough can be thrown like fabric.

Tell me about your stromboli.

- So the stromboli, the dough we make fresh in-house, everybody, they ask, "What stromboli's good?"

And it's just a preference of what toppings you want.

And then we put it in the oven, it cooks, it bakes perfectly.

We throw a little of the special garlic on top, a little of our angel's dust, as we call it, with the Parmigiano cheese and oregano.

The dough's freshly made.

Our sandwich, the bread's made fresh in-house.

I mean, it's all phenomenal.

Everything's really good.

In here, you can grab meats by the pound, half pound, quarter pound.

The meats we get imported straight from Italy, the cheeses, everything imported straight from Italy.

It's like phenomenal.

A little balsamic glaze is beautiful.

It's fantastic.

- I had your arancino, and it was wonderful.

- Thank you.

- The crust on it was a perfect golden crisp.

It might just be the best arancino I've ever had.

- We make those fresh in-house, a little rice ball, and then fried till golden brown.

It's simple, but so good.

- Now, what about those bagels I keep hearing about?

- Giovanni's the bagel shop in Emerald Isle.

That's one of our partners here as well, and he does our bagels as well for us.

- Time to take a field trip to Emerald Isle and find out how the bagels are made.

I've never seen a bagel machine before.

It's neat to see how it works.

- Seeing them come out of the oven looking like little fluffy pillows, it just makes me happy to make people happy, and it just makes me happy on the inside, really.

I just love it.

- I'm just gonna try it just right now, right?

Not right out of the oven, 'cause this is when they're perfect.

♪ They're so pillowy.

- I told you it's like a little pillow.

- They are perfect.

- Giovanni's has quite the loyal following.

- This is a definite craving.

- It is.

We traveled from Missouri just to get Giovanni's bagels.

Amazing.

- Back in New Bern, at Gemelli, the bagels have been boiled, baked, and set out in the display, dozens of them.

Don't skip out on the dessert.

The cakes are homemade by Matteo's uncle.

- I've had this cake for my birthday six years in a row now.

It's a good cake.

It's my favorite cake.

I love it.

- Tell me what kind of cake that is.

- This is our homemade strawberry cake.

It's just like a strawberry cream cake.

Very good, very light.

A lot of flavor in there, too.

It's really good.

I'm grateful for this New Bern population.

They've been really fantastic to us.

I love doing business here.

All the customers are great.

My staff, I mean, we've got a fantastic staff here.

We just have a good time together.

We all joke around together.

It's always fun.

I enjoy it.

I wake up every day and love what I do.

- Loving what you do and loving your neighbors.

That's a delicious recipe for a good life.

Ciao for now, and enjoy your weekend.

♪ - Gemelli Italian Deli and Bagelry is located at 211 Pollock Street in New Bern.

For more information, visit them online at gemellinewbern.com.

Right in the heart of downtown Clayton, The Station is giving new life to a century of local history.

Once home to the town's fire department, police station, jail, and even the library, this historic landmark has been transformed into a vibrant gathering place filled with local food, drinks, shopping, and more.

- The Station is located in the heart of downtown Clayton.

It's a multi-tenant space, everything located right here in the heart of downtown.

The building actually is 100 years old next year.

It was once the courthouse, the fire department, the police station, the jail, so it housed pretty much all of the city services in one beautiful building.

We kept looking at this building.

It had just been fallen apart, but we saw it as an opportunity.

- It went from kind of an eyesore within town to this beautiful, refinished, stunning place that you see today, but the community, first and foremost, appreciates the revitalization of the building, and then secondarily, just the support of small businesses, local commerce, driving economic vitality back into downtown Clayton, keeping our farmers and our local business makers supported.

Every space has got a different use than it originally served, so taking the jail from the jail to a candle-making studio, taking the library into a full-service restaurant/cafe.

- It's a grocery market.

It's food.

It's community.

So everyone in the building, there's seven or eight different tenants within the whole building that are just rocking.

- So this is a Wisp Candle Studio and Something Art Related, and here you get to create your own candles.

You can create your own signature fragrance.

I have artwork from all Clayton residents and local artists.

These are the things that we do in here.

My name's Jenna Marra, and I own Brushes and Brows.

We offer primarily beauty services to local women and anybody in the community who needs them.

- Happy Vibes originally started just us wanting to take care of ourselves.

From there, honestly, I was like, "We need to build community."

I want to have, you know, people come in, and we share a laugh.

We share a name.

The history of the building is just so special to us, to see it grow and for us to be a part of the legacy.

- Well, we are a restaurant and a music hall.

Daniela and I are very passionate about the restaurant industry.

We are also very passionate about music, and we thought what better way to combine the two passions than to create a restaurant/music hall?

And when you come into Crescendo, the idea is for you to feel the music radiating off the walls.

We want the vibe to scream music and just be a collection of all our favorite artists and all of our favorite sounds.

Being as she's from California and I'm from New York, we decided to combine the flavors from our home states and mix them with what we've come to know and love here in North Carolina.

- We do General Tso's Brussels sprouts, which are by far our most popular item on the menu.

I think the coolest thing that's happened is really the oxtail.

- We kind of pull them off the bone, and we put it-- putting it in a quesadilla for lunch.

So in addition to Crescendo, you will find a record shop that also has canned beer and bottled wines.

The idea behind that is also so that we can pair the canned beers and the wines with the records.

So it's like, what are you drinking when you're listening to Dr.

Dre's "The Chronic"?

The idea is just to, you know, create, like, an all-in-one space where you can blend music and blend drinks as well.

It's been a really cool experience, and I couldn't think of another place that we would have wanted to open Crescendo and thriving.

- We definitely pride ourselves in having, like, different styles of food, different ethnicities supported throughout all of our vendor spaces so that we could really embody what we feel like Clayton is and who the people are that will be supporting us.

♪ - Our hope for The Station is that it would be a place where the community comes and just fills the hallways.

All the people, everybody that is in Clayton can come here and find something awesome, at the same time be supporting a local business.

- North Carolina means everything to us.

Clayton means a lot to us, but supporting small is how your businesses grow.

It's how your community is taken care of.

Your roads are paved.

Your teachers are better and paid more.

So really investing in Johnston County, investing in North Carolina to us, first and foremost, before supporting a big-box store is wildly important.

- To have a building that is all small businesses, just to be able to be a part of that in the local community, but also being able to be a part of yet another piece of history for this building, I think is really special.

- Being a part of Clayton itself has been really great for us, especially moving here from New York, finding this building, this area, this group of people that they're all about community, we fit right in with them.

- The people in Clayton, they just embrace everybody.

Like you come to Clayton one time, your family, it still has kept that small town charm where everybody knows everybody.

Everybody looks out for everybody.

It just feels always like a celebration every day.

- Clayton is a huge part of my heart.

- The Station is located at 231 East 2nd Street in Clayton.

For more information about the vendors and hours, visit them online at thestationclayton.com.

You'd expect to find chickens in a chicken house, but the Cabe family in State Road has chosen a different type of inventory.

At Cabeland Farm, you won't find poultry.

Instead, a little country store filled with just about everything you could want or need.

Teresa Litschke takes us there.

(upbeat music) - Cabeland Farm is a place that you can come and you can just relax and enjoy.

Just mill around and look and see what you can find that you might not see anywhere else.

- The chicken houses were once part of the Cabe's farm.

- We raised chickens.

Thank goodness we are out of chickens.

(laughs) - And when they stopped raising chickens, the chicken houses became storage until daughter Kenzie Cabe had the idea to begin filling them with everything she loved.

- Which put us in shock because as she grew up, she was not artistic, she was not outgoing, she was very shy, did not want to talk to people or anything.

As long as she could mess with her animals, she was happy.

- With the help of her parents and grandparents, they got to work repurposing the old chicken houses into a fun and welcoming retail shop.

- Yes, yes, you know, you see too many empty ones around that are falling in and stuff and so we had to build them so I said, we need to utilize them instead of letting them just fall or having to tear them down one day or whatever.

- So, here we go.

(laughs) - What they created is similar to a general store of yesteryear.

- Yeah, so we have a little bit of everything between furniture and candy and canned goods, anywhere from apple butter to caramel apple butter.

We have sweet potato apple butter, jellies and jams.

- They have fresh sausage that they had just killed from their own hogs.

- So they are completely grain fed, no antibiotics, no nothing, all organic meats and stuff that we have.

It's things that people ask for.

It's things that we had in the past.

We have like the dilly beans, which is your pickled beans.

So we try to have things that are your everyday things but then you try to have things that people think back and say, wow, my grandmother did this.

That takes people back in time.

- The same can be said for the furniture they sell.

- These old pieces that we get in, you know, we say all the time, if they could tell a story about where they've come from and what they've seen.

- So she will find antique furniture that may be ready to go, or she'll find antique furniture that is dilapidated that they will refurbish either to what it originally was or into something completely different.

- Visitors also have the chance to create something that could become part of their own history through art classes.

- We do a little bit of everything.

We do a lot of our stuff on wood, which makes us stand out and unique 'cause a lot of places use canvas.

So we do barn quilts and stuff like that.

- Just like to paint.

I don't get an opportunity at home.

So this is a way to get it done.

It's a really good experience here.

- My daughter and I came last spring and painted one for our house.

- It's my first time, so I'm like, I just don't wanna mess it up.

- It's a masterpiece here, that's for sure.

We'll try that.

- Just as the Cabes gave new life to old chicken houses, they hope their little country store in the middle of the North Carolina countryside also offers visitors something money can't buy.

- This is an absolute picture from God.

That's the best way I can explain it.

- Very scenic, I would say.

Yeah, just very peaceful and quiet.

- And that's what we want.

We want people to feel like they can come and just relax.

- They feel like they can come in and just breathe.

That means a lot, because you're doing something right.

- Cabeland Farm is located at 2060 Mountain Park Road in State Road, North Carolina.

The store is open Tuesday through Saturday from 10 a.m.

to 5 p.m.

For more information, check out their Facebook page or give them a call at 336-874-7777.

In historic Halifax, the story of American independence is all around you, if you know where to look.

And this year, visitors have a rare chance to see one of North Carolina's most important revolutionary documents, where it all began.

Lucas Pruitt has the story.

- Three months before the Declaration of Independence, the Halifax Resolves declared independence from Britain.

It happened right here in historic Halifax, North Carolina.

And if you walk the grounds today, you might notice something a little odd, something you've probably seen before, but haven't noticed, maybe here, or here, or here.

So what is it?

They're called Liberty Poles.

For colonists with no voice in their government, raising a pole was how you made yourself heard.

They became popular in America around 1765, when Britain mandated the first direct tax on the American colonies, bypassing local legislatures, and sparking intense resistance.

But soldiers knew exactly what they meant, and chopped them down.

So patriots raised them again, and again, and again.

In New York City alone, a pole was raised and destroyed six different times.

That symbol outlasted the war.

Look close enough, and you'll see it, even in places you've looked a thousand times before.

Today, you can find an example of one of these Liberty Poles in the place that celebrates North Carolina's cry for freedom.

Signed on April 12th, 1776, the Halifax Resolves document is finally coming home.

Long held in the National Archives, it instructed North Carolina's delegates to the Continental Congress to vote for independence, three months before the declaration was signed.

Now, for the first time, you can see it in the place where it was born.

The only known copy will be on display in the newly remodeled Visitor Center at Historic Halifax through October 6th, 2026.

- We are standing really on hallowed ground.

We're in Historic Halifax, North Carolina, on the exact spot where the Resolves were signed.

This is the summer of freedom here at Historic Halifax, and there will be living history all summer here, especially on Saturdays.

So if you have children that are interested in the history and interested in America's 250th birthday, and you're in North Carolina, this is the place to bring them.

There's a working forge, so you can see how they made their tools at the time.

There's a smokehouse, and you actually smell the hams that are being smoked in there.

You see a garden, you see the animals that were here.

You see reenactors.

We have our own cannon here now that fires occasionally.

[muskets firing] - We have a variety of trades here at Bradford Denton House.

We have arts and cooking here.

We have several talented cooks.

Just a lot of excitement, much like it was 250 years ago.

- Historic Halifax offers guided walking tours through authentically restored buildings and the Montford Archaeological Exhibit, built over the actual excavation of an early Halifax home, with walkways over foundations uncovered by archaeologists.

- There are fine homes here that the aristocrats had, and there are simple common homes here.

There's a jail here that you can walk through and see how that worked.

The Visitor Center is a great place to start when you make your journey here to Halifax.

- We have a totally reimagined Visitor Center.

Was a complete renovation, so it feels and looks like an entirely new building.

There's something here for everyone.

We tell a diverse story.

We try to honor the history of all of North Carolina.

- The stories that they're telling there are amazing, not just about the signers of the Resolves and their story, but the other people that lived here.

And when you walk up to the Visitor Center, there's a beautiful piece of Native American art, which is the walkway.

And when you go inside, you learn their story as well.

I think that the bravery of those delegates in setting their name to something that said, "We officially want to be free," would just kind of open the door for everyone else to follow suit.

And they were actually risking their lives and committing treason to help form our nation.

- 250 years ago, before the nation dared, Halifax did.

(gentle music) - Historic Halifax is at 25 St.

David Street in Halifax, and it's open Tuesday through Saturday from 9 a.m.

to 5 p.m.

For more information, call 252-583-7191, or visit them online at historicsites.nc.gov/halifax.

Well, that's it for tonight's show.

We've had a great time learning about all the fresh takes that North Carolina has to offer.

And if you've missed anything in tonight's show, remember you can always watch us again online at pbsnc.org, and find all of our stories on our YouTube channel.

Have a great North Carolina weekend, everyone.

(upbeat music) ♪ (upbeat music) ♪ - Funding for North Carolina Weekend is provided in part by VisitNC, dedicated to highlighting our state's natural scenic beauty, unique history, and diverse cultural attractions.

From the Blue Ridge and the Great Smoky Mountains across the Piedmont to 300 miles of Barrier Island beaches, you're invited to experience all the adventure and charm our state has to offer.

- This program is made possible in part by generous support from the American Battlefield Trust, connecting you to the places where our nation was forged.

Visit battlefields.org today.

(upbeat music)