Other
Ashley Capps
James Beard Award winner
- Discipline
- Other
i. Biography
That communal streak is audible in her own words, and it points to the way Ashley Capps works: attentive to sequence, tuned to the room, and oriented toward feeding people together. “As soon as we could get out of our neighborhood, we drove to the Woodfin kitchen, got all the food we had purchased, put it on Travis’ smoker in our yard and, for two weeks, cooked dinner for the neighborhood every night.”
Coming Up
A-B Tech gave Ashley Capps a foundation that could travel across kitchens with very different tempos. The path then moved through Five and Ten Restaurant in Athens, GA, Eleven Madison Park in New York, Farm and Sparrow Bakery in Asheville, NC, and MG Road Bar and Lounge in Asheville, NC. In those rooms and counters, the work moved between restaurant service, bakery production, and bar-and-lounge rhythm, building a practical fluency across pastry, service, and the wider mechanics of hospitality. Opening pastry chef at Rhubarb in Asheville, NC marked a point where the work became more clearly her own. The role carries the labor of opening a kitchen as much as the labor of pastry itself: putting structure around a new room while establishing what dessert means there from the start. She later became pastry chef at Buxton Hall Barbecue in Asheville, NC, continuing to work in a register shaped by precision, comfort, and the balance between tradition and invention. Since 2019, Ashley Capps has been co-owner of New Stock, a role that extends the same discipline beyond the pastry station. Ownership gathers the earlier years in other people’s kitchens and puts that experience to use in how a place is run, how menus are framed, and how the business holds together day to day.
Where They Are Now
At New Stock in Woodfin, North Carolina, the craft comes into focus through Apple Pie, her signature work. On paper it is a familiar dessert; in practice it depends on timing, restraint, and control of the details that make a standard pie read as deliberate rather than routine. That is the kind of pastry work where recognition comes from finish, not embellishment. The years at Five and Ten Restaurant in Athens, GA, Eleven Madison Park in New York, Farm and Sparrow Bakery in Asheville, NC, and MG Road Bar and Lounge in Asheville, NC continue to register in the present tense of New Stock. The experience reads as a working vocabulary rather than a résumé line: different rooms, different pressures, and a broader sense of how pastry sits inside a kitchen and a business.
Signature
Ashley’s signature dishes include banana pudding pie and Apple Pie. The pair shows a pastry style that can move between familiarity and clarity: one dessert carrying the pull of banana pudding, the other leaning on the directness of an Apple Pie. In both, the work stays accessible while still asking for careful attention to balance and finish.
Profile updated July 2026
FAQ
Asked of Ashley
Where did Ashley Capps train or study?
Ashley Capps trained at A-B Tech.
What recognition has Ashley Capps received?
James Beard Award nomination for pastry-making (2019).
