A reader's guide to Knoxville restaurants

by George Logan

Look around you, next time you're in a restaurant, to see if you can spot anybody reading over a meal. Maybe it seems weird to you; maybe you worry that the reader is a troubled loner, reading something subversive like Mein Kampf or Das Kapital or Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot.

If reading over a meal seems subversive to you, you're probably happy with the majority of restaurants in East Tennessee, which don't provide customers with anything to distract you from contemplating the actual food and the actual waiting for the food. However, if you're like me, you wonder about those restaurants and the people who eat there, studying their hamburgers as they eat them. What are they thinking about? Are they Buddhists meditating on some steamy koan? Are they looking for Waldo? Are they stoned? If you often find yourself alone in a local diner, if you're curious and bored and wishing there were something more productive to look at than the ice water the waitress brings you 15 minutes before the actual food, read on. Several local restaurants are inspiring exceptions to the non-reading rule.

First, though, we need to address the taboos against reading while we eat. Some say reading seems unsocial, and they're right. If you think about it, so is eating.

Reading is viewed as a solitary experience, eating as a social one. Nearly everybody, from Maori tribesmen to Franciscan monks, makes a point of getting together to dine if for nothing else. It's nearly universal. Still, from holiday dinners to lunch dates, this mutual eating thing seems a perverse habit, perhaps inherited from some time before the development of speech.

The chief problem is that we communicate with the same orifice by which we consume. That incontrovertible fact, and our ancient public-eating habits, is obviously why dating is so awful and why so many marriages fail. We make our first acquaintances with prospective mates when our organs of communication are occupied with masticating food. When we try to speak, we can't understand each other.

The classic American date is dinner-and-a-movie. But you're not supposed to talk during the movie. And you're not supposed to talk while you're eating, either. So with nothing but this so-called "dating" thing behind us, we end up marrying complete strangers—and don't realize that awful fact until we buy a house together and suddenly find ourselves spending more than an hour with our former dates not eating. So, to avoid not eating with these scary strangers, we eat. That is, of course, why middle-aged married people get fat.

I've been on a lot of business lunches and dinners in my time, but I can think of only one thing I ever learned from a lunch date. What I learned was this joke a colleague taught me. He had just bitten into a big tuna melt and suddenly asked, or at least I thought he asked, "Do you like seafood?" And I said yes, very much. But actually, see, he really said, "Do you like to see food?" real fast. So he grinned and opened his mouth wide. That's the caliber of conversation I've grown to expect from lunch meetings. Many businesses fail due to excessive lunch meetings. Whittle Communications used to have lots of lunch meetings.

Anyway, it's a mystery why we insist on company to witness our eating and seek locked-door solitude to void what we have eaten. It would work much better, of course, the other way around. That way, at least, there would be no simultaneous competition for use of the same orifices.

All that's by way of supporting the theorem that when we're eating, there's only one other thing we can do gracefully. That's read. Involving only the brain and the eyes, reading does not interfere with any of the organs of digestion. And ingestion doesn't interfere with any of the organs of reading. You may even find you can read more, faster, with greater comprehension, while you're eating, especially while you're eating in public. It concentrates your mind. Being on full view in a restaurant keeps your mind from wandering toward housework or unpaid bills or personal hygiene. And you can't fall asleep, the hazard of most folks over 30 when they get comfortable at home. Also, in a restaurant or any public place, you can read a provocative article about any kind of people, and then look around and observe examples of the people and activities you're reading about. Few human activities enjoy such complementary harmony as do eating and reading.

The unnatural segregation of these two has been one of the tragic mistakes of Western civilization. There's no food or drink allowed in libraries or most bookstores. And there are, all too often, too few words to read in restaurants. Even when a restaurant offers a menu with an interesting story on the back, a historical anecdote or glossary of exotic ethnic dishes, your waitress will still snatch it up as you order, as if to be sure you won't even read any more of it than you absolutely had to. We'll have none of that, she seems to say. And before you can salvage a leftover newspaper from another table, a busboys routinely knocks it into his slop bucket. Maybe they want to be sure that next time, customers bring a crowd to entertain themselves. Restaurants' stern message seems to be, You shouldn't come in here alone. And if you do, you deserve to be bored.

I'm no gourmet. The best $20 entrees I've ever had are the ones I like about as much as a can of Vietti chili, and that's a lot. But a mere meal has never been quite enough to keep my attention. For years, meals have been primarily a quiet moment to read. I've typically read the stuff I carry around with me. Therefore, I choose restaurants primarily for their availability of reading matter. It's far more important than service; I can cheerfully endure any degree of bad service if I've found two sections of yesterday's New York Times. Sometimes I'm disappointed when the food arrives, just because it signals the beginning of the end of my read.

Occasionally a friend will start up a restaurant, and I'll be a sport and give it a try. I don't always have the heart to tell them why I don't come back, which should be obvious—because you don't have anything to read.

I'll settle for anything. I've been known to pore over street-preacher tracts, the backs of dollar bills, Worcestershire sauce labels, assessing them syntactically, memorizing ingredients, looking for hidden messages. But I'm always especially grateful to those restaurants that supply us with something more substantial.

So rather than grousing about those that don't, it seems high time we celebrated those restaurants that do the right thing: those that serve intellectual victuals along with their comestible ones.

There's no particular kind of restaurant that's better than other kinds in this regard. Most of the swanky urban hotels I've ever stayed in supply the daily newspaper free in their cafes. But even McDonald's has a reading rack of leftover newspapers, though it tends to be dominated with USA Today, the journalistic equivalent of the Happy Meal.

All intellectually humane restaurants save leftover newspapers, either stacked on top of a coat rack or on request behind the counter. Even Helma's, in East Knox County, keeps leftover newspapers for the word-hungry.

But for whatever reason, downtown restaurants tend to be more literate than restaurants elsewhere in town. Maybe it's because in the still-considerable lunch crowd, there's little family or date traffic to make solo lunch readers seem rude or unprofitable. Maybe it's because downtown's full of lawyers and politicians and reporters and other sorts of people who don't have any friends to eat with, anyway.

Tomato Head, on Market Square, is one of my favorites. Not only do solo diners have a lot of company there, but this amazing bistro provides for the lonesome diner with a used-magazine rack, restocked more often than any trout stream in the Smokies. Their choice of late-model magazines ranging from high-end fluff like Travel & Leisure and Art & Antiques to weighty political epistles like The Nation is unmatched. Best of all, they usually have a recent New Yorker—for solitary diners, the best magazine ever manufactured. (It's definitely not for fast-food joints. It might take you a week's worth of leisurely lunches to finish one article. If you're not up to the task, of course, you can just skim the great cartoons.)

The UT Campus is pretty good for mealtime reading, too. Its jewel, Hannah's on Cumberland, includes a well-stocked miniature lending library. The UT campus also hosts East Tennessee's highest concentration of coffee shops, which are a legible-cuisine phenomenon in themselves. These days, coffee houses serve snacks and light lunches and sometimes even beer—but they're different from ordinary restaurants in that they encourage loitering. At a coffee house, if you come and hang around, you're not taking up space and some poor waiter's table. If you linger unnecessarily long over one cup of coffee, you become a part of the decor and, the proprietor hopes, an appealing one. Coffee houses are, therefore, generally much better than diners for providing for our literary needs. Cynics dismiss them as a trendy '90s phenomenon, but coffee houses have a literary reputation going back two or three centuries to the days of Addison and Steele and Samuel Johnson and even the U.S. Constitutional Convention, when papers were practically written to be read in coffee houses. Even today in Knoxville, most coffee houses are lush with things legible. Golden Roast gives a nod toward reading, with a stack of National Geographics in a cozy lounge corner, but they're stacked a little too neatly, without any others around, to suspect that many patrons actually dip into them. The Daily Grind includes some bookshelves in back. Cup-a-Joe's on Cumberland has the best new-magazine selection in town, with titles ranging from Tattoo to Confederate Veteran for sale.

Both Javas are better than most Knoxville eateries in the reading department; both have handy "newsstands" of used books and magazines. Long a mecca for young folks with provocative piercings and shavings, the Old City Java does, as we'd expect, supply stuff that's esthetically or physically adventurous: recently, a battered, excised copy of Spin or Men's Journal—plus Wild Mountain Times (Journal of the Southern Appalachian Biodiversity Project, of course) and Perspectives, "Knoxville's Only Holistic Newspaper." But contrary to the prejudice that downtowners are both more intellectual and too broke to buy their own stuff, the Homberg Java, with its view of Cherokee Country Club's golf course, supplies us much more to read. The offerings on their magazine rack are much more eclectic than you'll find in any garage sale; for sheer range, from high- to low-brow, their library is unexcelled in seven counties. They have free newspapers, recent magazines, lots of big art books from Boticelli to Rockwell, plus a small but startling collection of regular books. At this writing, a book called Know Your Heirlooms sits primly right next to Richard Brautigan's The Abortion, next to an illustrated children's Bible story book. And there's something here you rarely see in other coffee shops: lots of leftover Peoples. (It's rare to sight a People magazine anywhere east of Third Creek, except in doctors' offices, the magazine's natural habitat.)

For sheer volume of available words to read, however, neither Java can touch Knoxville's reading mecca, JFG. It not only supplies a table just for leftover newspapers, but actually features a used-book store spread across one entire wall, hundreds of books of every variety. They don't seem to mind if you take one for a spin without buying.

Some displays of reading material are primarily decorative, but don't let that stop you. I re-read part of James Joyce's Dubliners at the Radisson's tony "Library" bar a year or two ago.

The Crescent Moon—on Church or Market, depending on your bias—is Knoxville's most charming restaurant locations and one of the finest breakfast-and-lunch spots downtown. They used to have a little news rack, mostly occupied with Tennessee Green and Metro Pulse and such, but the last time I was in there they'd dispensed with it to make room for extra seating. Perplexed, I scanned the bookshelves in the foyer, mostly obscure pre-1940 novels and mismatched encyclopedias, and pulled down something called Authors' Digest, B series, published in 1908. I looked up Giovanni Bocaccio—only to find most of the book had never been cut apart into individual pages—a duty the butler should have performed by early 1909, at the latest. (Where is that guy?) I considered cutting it apart myself with my butter knife, but was afraid I might alarm my fellow diners. Leaving the book's 90-year-old virginity intact, I just read it as was, skipping two pages at a time.

Suburban restaurants will only rarely spot you free reading material, except for Metro Pulse, which I've usually already read—but there are exceptions. I did happen to find a fascinating nationwide statistical survey in a copy of Restaurant Entrepreneur at the Concord Krystal the other day—probably left there inadvertently by the subscribing kitchen manager. Still, I ordered extra bacon-cheese Krystals just to give me time to finish it. Colonel's Deli in Bearden does have a small rack of old magazines, with newspapers near the garbage—not in the garbage, just on top of the garbage, as if the management is saying, We were about to throw these away, but if you want to read them... New York Bagel, nearby, has a place near the door where you can pick up newspapers to read. Long's Drugstore's luncheonette has new magazines for sale on a rack near the counter and have long maintained an admirable look-the-other-way policy about sampling new magazines to enjoy with your grilled cheese, even though they know just by looking at you that you're not going to buy them. Just be careful, and don't abuse the privilege. Nobody want's to buy an Esquire with mayonnaise and bacon-grease stains. (Long's used to be the best place to keep up with this month's comic books; unfortunately, sometime in the last year or so, the comic rack, the one that had been there since the Eisenhower administration, vanished without a trace. I haven't been back since I was shocked to discover it missing.)

Restaurateurs, take note: If you help your customers pass their time while they're eating your food, you'll profit in the long run. The more people read, the better informed they are. The better informed they are, the more prosperous they are. And the more prosperous they are, the more they dine out. I wonder whether Restaurant Entrepreneura has ever caught on to this. I'll keep up with it at the Concord Krystal.