Highlands Supper Club

Written By: Marlene Osteen | Issue: March 2025 | Photograph By: Susan Renfro

Few restaurant openings in Highlands have been as eagerly anticipated as the Highlands Supper Club at Trailborn Highlands. Housed in one of the town’s most beloved dining spaces – a historic Joe Webb cabin that was home to the Log Cabin Restaurant for decades – the Highlands Supper Club arrives not just as a new restaurant but as a revival of a place that holds deep roots in the community.

When several years ago the building fell into disrepair, its fate seemed uncertain.

Then two years ago the team behind Trailborn Highlands acquired the property. They saw a landmark worth saving – an opportunity not just to restore the structure but to bring it back to life with a restaurant that honors its past while shaping its future.

Restoration was neither rushed nor superficial. Today, the restaurant urges you to draw a deep breath, settle down, and permit yourself to indulge. The wide plank floors gleam, the wood-paneled walls glow, and custom wallpaper inspired by indigenous rhododendrons adds warmth without affectation.

The addition of a bar creates a natural gathering place, with spirit-forward cocktails like a bacon-washed Old Fashioned and a selection of North Carolina beers that signal both reverence for place and a contemporary perspective.

If the structure speaks to history, the kitchen is all about honoring Southern food without reducing it to cliché. Indeed, the reputation for comfort and flavor in the Southern food arsenal is in safe hands with Aaron Kulzer, a Mississippi-born chef who arrived in Highlands after a career that zigzagged through fine-dining kitchens and high-end hotel restaurants across the South. He’s cooked everything from foie gras to grouper collars, but at Highlands Supper Club, he has found his sweet spot – Southern food that respects its roots while embracing finesse.

Raised in a family where food was central, Kulzer took the long road to professional kitchens, abandoning nursing school for a dishwasher gig before working his way through restaurants in Portland, Houston, Biloxi, and Florida. His time at Biloxi’s White House Hotel and Longboat Key’s Mar Vista sharpened his ability to refine Southern dishes without compromising their integrity.

And in Highlands, he’s doing just that.

“My goal is to create an experience through food,” he says. “Bringing memory back to where you are and connecting a dish with a place.”

The menu is built on dishes that read as familiar but unfold with deliberate refinement. Deviled eggs, too often an afterthought, are layered and luxurious – topped with candied Benton’s bacon, smoked tomato, and blue crab.The pork belly on Anson Mills grits is slow braised in stock with fennel and onion, its richness heightened by grits simmered in milk and heavy cream. Mac n’ cheese arrives in a searing hot cast iron skillet out of which blooms aromas of creamy Ash County cheddar and Parmesan cheese.

There is an elegance to the main courses that never lapses into pretense. A bavette steak, cooked to a perfect medium-rare, is paired with garlic confit mashed potatoes and earthy oyster mushrooms.

The local North Carolina trout, dredged in pecan flour and sautéed, arrives with brown butter acorn squash, its flavors clean and deeply satisfying. Perhaps the biggest surprise is the mushroom barbecue – a vegan dish that feels right at home on the menu, not as an obligatory nod to plant-based cooking but as an earnest exploration of Southern flavors.

Lion’s mane mushrooms, sourced from a local forager, are smoked, tossed in a Carolina vinegar barbecue sauce, and served with smashed fingerling potatoes and asparagus. It does not mimic meat, nor does it need to.

And then there are the biscuits. Kulzer’s approach is all technique – grating butter into pastry flour to achieve biscuits so impossibly flaky they seem to hover above the plate. In the pantheon of Southern biscuits, they rise, buoyed by their own airiness, to a heavenly hereafter. Impossible to stop eating, it’s the kind of dish that begins as an appetizer and is requested again for dessert. Because why not?

Desserts stay within the realm of comfort. Apple cobbler arrives just as it should—warm, its sweetness lifted rather than buried by the fruit. Mud pie is unapologetically rich, leaning into the deeper, darker tendencies of chocolate.

To pair with the meal, the restaurant offers a short but well-considered wine list, spanning major regions and varietals. The selections have clearly been chosen with intent – offering something distinct without overshadowing the food. Thoughtfully selected reds and whites complement and enhance the Southern flavors – reds provide structure and depth, while whites and lighter-bodied wines bring acidity and contrast to the richness of Southern flavors.

Highlands Supper Club is not trying to rewrite Southern food. It’s doing something far more difficult – getting it exactly right. Kulzer isn’t concerned with proving anything, only with delivering food that resonates, food that makes sense in a place like this.

The restaurant, much like the building it inhabits, is a restoration in the truest sense – not a reinvention, but a return to form.