Capella on 9

The roof is cut in two. One edge is built for a crowd — hex tile, built-in benches, high-tops. The other is small two-tops pushed against the parapet, turned out toward downtown. Capella on 9 sits on the ninth floor of the AC Hotel at 10 Broadway, and a rail garden of white river rock runs between the halves. An indoor lounge sits just inside the glass: sectional sofas, sheer curtains, same ridgeline. It’s the other way to take the view in.

McKibbon Hospitality brought the concept to the AC Hotel and opened the room as an amenity. They hired Peter Pollay, the chef-owner of Posana, to design the menu. He spent a month in Spain gathering the tapas list, then handed off the kitchen. Rakim Gaines took it from there. An East Asheville native, he started shucking oysters at the Lobster Trap as a teenager and picked up shifts at Corner Kitchen. He joined Capella’s kitchen in 2017 and became executive chef within a year, at twenty-seven. That is most of why the amenity now reads like somebody’s kitchen. “I thought a kitchen on the ninth floor downtown sounded so cool,” he told AIR Asheville.

The cocktail list keeps that same math — Spanish bones, an Asheville accent. The Smoked Bourbon skips the mixing altogether. It’s Old Forrester’s four-year bottling over smoke, nothing else, on a list otherwise built from liqueurs and shrubs. La Diabla Dulce sets a blackberry-cayenne shrub and fee foam against Corazón reposado. Some Kind of Mule mixes vodka, bourbon and tequila into one glass of ginger beer.

None of this reads like a captive hotel restaurant. Instagram backs it up. There’s a recurring featured-artist series, most recently painter Spencer Beals, plus a nod to the AVL Sounds festival crowd downtown — programming for people with no room key upstairs. The concrete totems in the gravel look like art nobody explained. Nine floors above a hotel lobby, that tracks. Time the elevator for the last hour of light, when the ridge turns to silhouette and the rail tables fill first.