Photo by Tim Robison
“It’s sort of like ‘Gym Alley’ here,” says Gary Steuber, co-owner of Mountain Juicery in Arden. A ride down Hendersonville Road reveals a plethora of health-conscious options — as well as diet pitfalls.
Challenge Number One: Bypass Chick-fil-A or Taco Bell in favor of a high-intensity work out at The Rush or the Asheville Racquet Club.
Challenge Number Two: Resist the siren call of post-work-out Starbucks.
Instead, Steuber hopes folks will savor an array of fruits and vegetables packed into one slim bottle at Mountain Juicery, a new cold-pressed juice bar on Hendersonville Road.
“I was never an ordinary breakfast guy,” says Steuber, who opened the juice bar with his brother Joey in October. “The eggs and potatoes and bacon just didn’t do it for me,” Gary continues. So he turned to juice to satisfy his early-morning cravings.
The Enka High School graduate headed to Los Angeles in his early twenties to soak in West Coast culture. Working as a mixed-martial-arts trainer, with several celebrities on his client list, he started making his own juices and thought he could expand his expertise into a new way to make a living.
“I always knew I wanted to come back to Asheville, because that’s where my heart is,” Steuber says. “Asheville is so health-conscious that I knew it would be a great place for the business.”
The brothers specialize in cold-pressed juices, which forego typical centrifugal blades that have a tendency to heat up the vegetables and remove essential vitamins and nutrients, reveals Steuber. Cold-pressed juicing uses intense pressure to release juice from fruits and veggies.
“We literally squeeze the life and all the nutrients out of the produce [and into the juice] until [the remnants] become like a piece of dried bark,” Steuber explains.
A big advantage to this process, he says, is the sheer number of fruits and vegetables that can be reduced into a single bottle — sometimes as much as 2-3 pounds of fresh veggies in a single serving.
Juicing removes the chewing barrier and replaces the stringy texture of bland vegetables like celery with a sweet, refreshing liquid. No prep, cleaning, or wasted veggies required.
“Most people will never take the time to eat as many fruits and vegetables as they should,” acknowledges Steuber. His commitment to health translates to an enthusiastic customer base, which he says thrives on word of mouth.
“We can’t keep our juices in the store,” Steuber says. “As soon as we make them, they sell.”
1863 Hendersonville Road, Arden; 828-277-6006, mountainjuicery.com