Charlie Hudson
You can smell it from the parking lot – that intoxicating perfume of caramelized sugar, orange zest, and butter-soaked cinnamon that hits like a dopamine trigger. Inside the historic Mount Toxaway Hotel, Chef Charlie Hudson is orchestrating the sweet, sticky magic of Charlie’s Hot Buns – what locals call “the most delicious silver lining to a foot injury ever discovered.”
In 2021, hobbled by long-postponed surgery and doctor’s orders to stay off his feet, Hudson was a caged tiger.
“Three months of sitting still? Impossible,” he laughs.
True to form, his mother’s remedy came in the form of a recipe card – for cinnamon buns, of course.
So, faithful to her directive, he baked a batch of buns. Then another. Then he obsessed. Eight months and countless iterations later, a cult phenomenon was born.
Hudson’s creations aren’t just cinnamon buns—they’re spiral-shaped revelations. Each bite delivers a perfect storm: cloud-soft dough yielding to the crunch of cinnamon-sugar crystals before melting into a honey-orange glaze that makes licking your fingers not just acceptable but mandatory.
One customer described them as “the kind of treat that stops all conversation mid-bite.” But this wizard of Mount Toxaway doesn’t stop at breakfast. His cocktail crackers – shatteringly crisp, salt-flecked lavosh made decadent with old-school lard – inspire otherwise reasonable people to hide bags from their families.
This season, Hudson has a growing list of ideas on the drawing board.
Donut Saturdays are now a weekly pilgrimage for the sugar faithful, and seasonal pies may be on the way – strawberries in spring, peaches in summer, apples in fall.
He’s also toying with savory additions: tomato soup, house-made hummus, other spreads, and possibly take-and-bake lasagna and fresh pasta.
“There’s always something simmering,” he says.
Adding momentum to this cinnamon-fueled operation is Chef David Gwyn, a Culinary Institute of America grad and longtime Cashiers homeowner. Gwyn built an empire of Tallahassee restaurants – Cypress, Vertigo Burgers, and Grove Market Café – before swapping retirement for this cinnamon-scented adventure. He and his wife Elizabeth have had a vacation home in Cashiers since 1998, and now they’re all in.
The shop runs Friday through Sunday in spring, expanding to Wednesday through Sunday post-Memorial Day. Call ahead—and if it’s Saturday, come early. Those donuts wait for no one.
Can’t make it to Sapphire? Hudson’s creations are stocked at Bryson’s and High Country Wine and Provisions- in Highlands, and in Cashiers at Buck’s Cafe and the Cashiers Farmers Market. But fair warning: they often sell out by noon.
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