For This Restaurateur Couple, the Most Romantic Dinner Feeds 14

On Silver and Cherry Iocovozzi’s first vacation together, they roasted a whole pig. Okay, it wasn’t technically a vacation—they were catering a wedding in the Great Smoky Mountains. But for two young restaurant people in the early weeks of a then long-distance courtship, it might as well have been a honeymoon. They towed a smoker up a mountain, crashed in a tiny rented cabin, and stayed up all night keeping the low fire under the hog smoldering. “It was so romantic,” Silver gushes. “We were dressed in holey T-shirts and cowboy hats, in love and being silly. It was one of the best days of our lives.”

A lot has changed for the couple in the five years that followed. Cherry left Brooklyn and joined Silver in Asheville, NC. They launched Love Songs, a pop-up dinner series showcasing Silver’s unique approach to Filipino cooking and Cherry’s thoughtful natural wine pairings. They got married in June 2022 and less than a month later opened Neng Jr.’s, the 18-seat brick-and-mortar evolution of their pop-up that quickly gained national acclaim—including a spot on this magazine’s 2023 Best New Restaurants list. And they’re aiming to open Harmony, a combination wine store and karaoke bar, in a space adjacent to the restaurant by the end of this year.

But in other ways very little has changed. So much of Silver and Cherry’s life together feels like an extension of that long, delirious, lovestruck night in the mountains—having the best time tending to everyone else’s good time. When they’re not cooking and pouring wine for guests at the restaurant, it’s not uncommon to find the Iocovozzis showering friends and loved ones with that same hospitality at home. “Our house is definitely the gathering place,” Cherry says. “Our friends call it C&S Bar and Grille. Hosting is in our bones.” “It’s a part of both of our backgrounds, me as a Filipino and Cherry growing up in the South,” Silver adds.

The home they share on a tree-lined street in Asheville’s Five Points neighborhood is at once welcoming and strikingly intimate. Every available mantel and windowsill is filled with sentimental tchotchkes and trinkets. A trophy with a guitar-playing Snoopy above a tiny placard that reads “I CAN’T STOP LOVING YOU.” A gaudy, vintage die-cut Valentine’s Day card. Matching trucker hats airbrushed with the words Just Married. Walking through to the backyard, one might expect a trail of rose petals leading to a table for two and a cold bottle of Champagne. Except on this particular evening, the long farmhouse table in their leafy backyard was set for 14—and felt all the more romantic for it.

The Iocovozzis had just celebrated their second wedding anniversary the day before (with a road trip to Dollywood, naturally), which lent the gathering an especially celebratory mood. Cherry doled out cold martinis from an oversized vintage cocktail shaker while guests helped themselves to a Dionysian platter of ripe fruit. Silver put the finishing touches on his smoked tomato sauce and ushered everyone to the table. The dinner that evening was casual, familial—pasta, Caesar salad, peel ’n’ eat shrimp—the kind of unfussy food that sings in the hands of a great chef. Moved, perhaps, by the spaghetti, the table broke out into a rousing chorus of Nat King Cole’s “L-O-V-E.” Looooove is more than just a gaaaaame for two…. “It’s a game for 14!” Cherry called out to cheers and clinking wine glasses.

A feeling of comfortable intimacy hung in the air. “When you’re hosting, you get to create a world for the evening that we all get to exist in together and feel safe,” Cherry mused. “There’s nothing more special than being in that bubble.”