Imagine being six years old and holding an ice cream cone, paws grubby from playing outside. It’s a tower of freshly swirled soft serve. You lick it down until you hit the top of the sugar cone, and then, magically, a new swirl emerges. The next day, you spend a hot afternoon exploring the Piney Woods and end up on your Memaw’s back porch. That’s where the drink fridge lives, always stocked with cold sodas. This was Ashley Odom’s childhood reality.
When talking about food and the idea of hospitality, Ashley and I circle back to her grandmothers, both of whom owned restaurants—one, a malt shop named The Yum-Yum, complete with the aforementioned soft-serve machine and a grandmother who never cut off the tap. Hospitality is in Ashley’s DNA. You feel it the moment she greets you—like when she led me straight to her own drink fridge, stocked with sparkling waters, beer and bubbly.
Ashley, owner and founder of the catering company Feast and Merriment and now The Harvey, is many things—chef, entrepreneur, artist, and consummate hostess. Hard to pin down, her true magic lies in creating experiences where food, space and community come together.
Her artistry has always been multi-faceted. Before founding her catering business in 2007, Ashley worked as a jewelry designer in Austin, creating a line she sold at Eliza Page and other boutiques. During those years, she also worked front of house—perhaps foreshadowing her future as a formidable hostess.
Next came Colorado. While running her catering company there, she side-hustled at the Sunday farmers market with a soup and prepared food business
“I call it my carney years. I love those years. Delila [my daughter, now 15] was in a bassinet next to me, my dog Beauxregard was under the table, and I’m making quesadillas,” she laughs.
She later served as head chef at Eleven, a destination resort.
In 2015, Ashley returned to Texas and brought Feast and Merriment home to a beautiful tasting room and event space in Stonewall. Feast and Merriment also does a good bit of out-of-house catering, from intimate dinners to large weddings. Each event is shaped by a vision—decor, sound and, most importantly, food that is seasonal, flavorful, globally-informed and deeply rooted in place. Despite the logistical hurdles, Ashley remains committed to sourcing most of her ingredients from Texas growers and producers.
Ashley’s newest venture, and the setting of our conversation, is The Harvey. Located at Elk and Main, the warmly lit dining room serves as both a community and private event space, meticulously designed to showcase her ingredient-driven and sometimes wildly thematic events.
It’s a space that envelops you the moment you enter. The kind that makes you slip your phone into your pocket and lean in, where every detail has been considered. Designer Anne Edgerton collaborated with Ashley to bring the vision to life: walls finished in Venetian stucco, Danish tables that insist on lingering, and lighting engineered for comfort.
The entire room is soundproof. “You walk in and there's a room full of people and you can hear them talking, but it sounds like they're whispering,” Ashley tells me.
Nothing is too loud, nothing too stark. It is elegant without being precious, and if you’re imagining a grand birthday celebration or an intimate dinner party, it is the perfect blank slate.
Just outside The Harvey’s double doors is a courtyard, also available for gatherings, and come spring, it will double as the discreet entrance to a speakeasy taking shape at the ground level of the neighboring building.
Ashley describes her creative process in musical terms. “I’ve always been an artsy person. Catering is just an extension of that. An event is like a composition—the food, the space, the guests, the atmosphere, the music. That’s the big picture. Then there are the details—the plateware, the textures, the pairings—that’s what excites me and keeps my creative juices flowing.”
At a recent benefit supporting victims of the July 4th floods, Ashley cooked the most comforting thing she could think of: fried chicken. To be precise, it was cornflake-crusted chicken served with lavender vinegar, then finished with lavender salt and fennel pollen.
This December, The Harvey, along with the other businesses at Elk and Main, will host a German Christmas Market. By day, there will be steaming mugs of mulled Glühwein and slices of Flammkuchen; by night, glasses of Gewürztraminer and Riesling set to the soundtrack of a German band. Even Santa is rumored to make an appearance.
Ashley is an artist. And like any artist, her work reflects the periods of her life. “I feel like I’ve gone through different eras in my life,” she reflects. “I can’t believe 18 years have gone by since I started this business. But my 40s have been the best era. This is exactly where I need to be. This space came to me at the right time—when it needed to.”
**Full disclosure: before meeting Ashley at The Harvey, I was already a client. She catered my 2022 wedding, happily deviling eggs from my backyard chickens and fire-roasting vegetables I’d gathered from friends’ farms. That blend of thoughtfulness and instinct—knowing how much it meant to me, and how much sweeter fresh carrots taste to guests—is exactly what makes her work unforgettable.
Collaborator Credits:
Event décor – Denise Stone, Bee Lavish Rentals
Event floral – Corynn Key, Kismet Flowers
Hair & makeup – Erica Gray, Erica Gray Beauty
Event catering – Ashley Odom, Feast & Merriment
Hospitality is in Ashley’s DNA. You feel it the moment she greets you.