Some restaurant spots seem cursed to fail—but are they?

by Betty Bean

Every city has them. People don't like to talk about it, but they are there. Maybe in an old historic section of town. Or tucked away in the vogue shopping plaza of the moment. Or smack dab in the middle of the hottest little suburban strip development around.

They are just sitting there. Empty buildings.

It's not as though people haven't tried to make use of these places. For some reason, they believe these buildings will make nice little restaurants. Maybe they've got grandma's scrumptious recipe for manicotti and a small savings stashed away. Some armed with the finances and resources of a national chain just want to make a buck. Others are superb chefs who were trained by masters and have a unique vision for a tasty meal.

They almost always fail. But it's not their fault. These buildings are cursed.

Call them snakebit, haunted, or doomed; some locations go through restaurants like sticks of butter. It doesn't matter what you're selling: chicken enchiladas with beans and rice and a margarita, fine steaks with French wine by candlelight, or greasy catfish and French fries. These places break hearts, ruin dreams, and bankrupt investors.

"You can go anywhere to any town—you'll find locations where there have been restaurants more than two or three times," says Chef Don DeVore, who learned not to tangle with cursed locations when his restaurant The Painted Table failed. "Whenever I travel, friends will take me around town. They'll show me places and say, 'Before it was that, it was this; before that, this; before that, this.'"

A lot of people dismiss the theory as hokum invented by kooks. And people have managed to beat the jinx in a few places. But some Knoxville locations seem forever snakebit, as though nary a franchise, gourmet, or maitre d' in the land could rescue them.

Forever Doomed

Talk about cursed. On a hill behind the Walker Springs Road Wal-Mart is a mock wild west saloon and hotel. A fake balcony wraps around the front of the building. Towering above it are two billboards: one for the Cracker Barrel Restaurant, another for World Futon. The road is under construction, but customers still flock to the Court South health club behind this vacant building.

In front are two blank plywood boards. They look like real estate signs, but whatever was pasted there has long since blown away. Perhaps even the real estate agent has given up on selling it.

It has been home to a number of clubs and restaurants, including Amigos II, Wilbur's West, and Thriller Nights. A strip club moved into the place, but it was shut down after a few months for selling alcohol (you can't have both booze and naked women in Knoxville).

Even a restaurant that never opened failed here. Its owners got stiffed when a would-be entrepreneur promised to open one, then took its equipment and skipped town.

One Realtor calls this the epitome of a doomed spot. A veteran who finds homes for all kinds of businesses, he didn't want to be quoted trashing other Realtors' property. We'll call him Deep Fry. He says people treat the old Amigos property like the plague.

"That's the best case in all of Knoxville. It's a building that sits up there like a ghost town in the sky," Deep Fry says. "It's a building nobody wants to touch because everybody's failed there.

"After enough people tried it and they all failed, it does kind of become the kiss of death. It takes a lot to bring it back," he adds.

Manuel Hermosillo, who ran Amigos, agrees a bad history can hurt you. Customers avoid known failures.

"People say, 'Ah well, they didn't do good last time,'" Hermosillo says. "That had a lot to do with Walker Springs Road. And we were as guilty of it as anyone. You bring it on yourselves."

Hermosillo says Amigos failed mainly because the building is too big and he was spread too thin between that restaurant and the original Amigos, in the Old City. "We really didn't have the people to run it that we needed to run it. We had the business. We just couldn't run both places at the same time," he says.

On nearby Kingston Pike, a giant catfish towers over traffic, his tail jerked to the side as if he's furiously trying to swim through this stretch of suburbia. His whiskers droop over the oblivious motorists. He stares vacantly at cars underneath. It is a prime West Knoxville retail area, populated by Japanese steak houses.

The building below the sign has been home to a few restaurants, their menus predetermined by this stranded fish. The last to make a go of it was Huck Finn's Catfish Chicken & Steak.

The former owner was irate when asked to talk about the restaurant's failure. "Maybe it had something to do with that horrible article y'all wrote about us," he says, referring to a pan Metro Pulse restaurant critic Bonnie Appetit gave Huck Finn's earlier this year. She labeled its food "unidentifiable lumps of fried flesh."

Realtors are baffled about why the Huck Finn's building and the old Walker Springs Road Amigos II keep failing.

"Some people think it's an access problem. Some people say it's over traffic. Nobody really knows why it doesn't succeed," Deep Fry says. "I've never been able to find anyone who could figure out why. It's in the right part of town. I don't think it's the food. They go right to Hooters, which is nothing but booze and fried food."

"I've had people interested in both those properties, but never acted on either one because it's mysterious," he adds of Huck Finn's and Amigos. "Nobody wants to have a bad property."

The Realtor trying to sell the Huck Finn's building, Dick Bales of Prudential, says he may have found a new tenant, who is looking at opening a Spanish restaurant. But he was irked when asked about the subject. "I don't want you to write this story," he says. "I'm trying to sell that place."

Bales' attitude shows that whatever a location's merits or faults, investors and restaurateurs are scared of places known for failure.

Another place synonymous with failure is a small wood-frame building with adobe walls at Homberg Place. It is tucked behind the shopping plaza, next to the Wallace Chapel AME Zion Church. Railroad tracks run along side the road, beyond which is a golf course.

Mike Goodin thought it was the ideal home for a restaurant. He liked that it was small and off a little bit from Kingston Pike. He opened Merlot's there in 1993, serving a "blend of Southern and New York" dishes, including fish, rack of lamb, homemade onion rings, and grits. After a lack of business, he closed in 1996.

Goodin doesn't blame the site but says if he were to give it another shot, he'd try somewhere else. "I thought the location was good because it wasn't right on Kingston Pike. But apparently the ones on Kingston Pike do a whole lot better. It was a little bit out of the way, but very convenient," he says.

There have been plenty of other casualties here, including Keng's Garden and Miz Sissy's. It's latest incarnation, Rhapsody's, served upscale American fare and martinis, with live jazz as a background. Not to be outdone by its predecessors, a fire here shut this restaurant down. The Knoxville Fire Department ruled it arson, but no one has been charged yet.

Try, Try Again

A bad history doesn't deter many restaurateurs. Chef Bruce Bogartz knew the track record of the old L&N train station but thought something was bound to succeed in the quaint castle-like building at Henley Street and Western Avenue.

"It was an issue, but it seemed like a beatable issue," says Bogartz, dressed in blue checkered pants and a denim shirt, an apron wrapped around his belly. A classically-trained chef, a ball cap covers his short curly brown hair.

The L&N has plenty of mystique and charm to sell it. Designed by an Irish immigrant and constructed for $170,000, the depot opened in April 1905. It has large dormers and heavy stone detailing; wrought and ornamental iron lines the stairways and porches. Its red-pressed bricks are believed to have been shipped from Chattanooga; its stone from Bedford, Ind. Adding to its nostalgia, the depot was used for scenes in the '62 movie All the Way Home, based on a James Agee novel.

After the train traffic left, the depot was renovated for the 1982 World's Fair and appeared on the brink of new life.

This building has snickered at many a hapless restaurateur. Since the early '80s, they have come and gone: Ruby Tuesdays, Parisi's, and L&N Seafood.

Customers and food critics (including our own) rave about Southbound's unique food and quaint atmosphere. Bogartz's inventive Southern cuisine menu features smoked salmon pizza, Jack Daniel's lacquered duck, and low country shellfish stew.

Monday is supposed to be his day off, but the grueling restaurant business has dragged him in to take care of a few things. While he talks about the restaurant, one of his chefs comes out and asks him for some pointers on how to make chocolate tortes for a catered party that evening. Everything but the bread is made in-house, Bogartz explains.

When Southbound opened in the summer of '96, business boomed. Even during typically dismal winter months, he had no problem filling his tables.

Last May, the customer flow shut off as if someone had cranked off a faucet, Bogartz says. Business eventually picked up again, but not to where it needs to be. He's serving about 40 plates a night now; 50 would be success.

Today, Bogartz is no longer confident he can overcome the L&N's poor record. If things don't get better soon, Bogartz says he may have to move his restaurant to West Knoxville, where there are oodles of hungry customers cruising the streets.

"We turn away people for Sunday brunch. We have 30 parties booked for Christmas. But during the week, nobody comes down here," Bogartz says. "There's talk about a convention center being built, but who can afford to sit down here for five years and wait?"

"It's like a movie that gets critical acclaim, but it is a bomb at the box office. We see so many people who say, 'Oh, you're our favorite restaurant.' But they never come."

The L&N has its faults. With high ceilings, it costs a fortune to heat and cool, and sometimes with the utilities on full blast, customers are still chilled or sweating. But the landlord has been kind to the restaurant. To deal with the perception that parking and crime are bad, Bogartz hired a traffic cop to help people find spaces and make them feel secure.

"The biggest drawback is not the building, it's being downtown. There's some mindset in Knoxville that nobody goes downtown. The building is gorgeous," Bogartz says. "It's really a shame. If you're from out of town and you get off the interstate, you'd think, 'Cool, I've stumbled upon this historic section of town.' And there's nothing here. It's just a shell."

Downtown isn't quite that bleak. There is Calhoun's, Chesapeake's, the Butcher Shop, and Regas Restaurant, plus several places in the Old City.

Bogartz adds he isn't ready to pack it in, but he's getting close. "At this point, our plans are to continue as-is," he says. "But you can't argue with numbers. All you have to do is sit in your car in West Knoxville. Just sit in a parking lot and you're blown away by the numbers they're doing."

Another restaurateur will soon try to make a traditionally doomed West Knoxville spot work.

On first glance, the Western Plaza would seem like the last place to be cursed. It is surrounded by yuppie shops and boutiques like the Fresh Market and Blue Ridge Mountain Sports. Nearby is the ritzy Sequoyah Hills neighborhood. The Kingston Pike plaza is always packed with cars.

Apparently, these people aren't looking for a sit-down meal or a cold beer. The Kiva Grill, The Mill, and The Halfshell have all failed here.

Jeff Robinson is going to give the site another try. In late January, he's planning on opening The Blackhorse Pub and Brewery, modeled on his other restaurant in Clarksville, Va. A UT graduate, Robinson first looked at the building when he considered buying The Mill's old brewing equipment.

The barrels were a joke, he says, their capacity too small to be of any use for a serious brewery. But the building is a find. His restaurant will brew four ales and one specialty brew at all times and serve pub fare of pizza, burgers, steaks, and pasta. Dressed in a green sweatshirt and tan pants, Robinson twiddles a screwdriver as he speaks. It is three days before Thanksgiving, and he and his workers are gutting the building in preparation for contractors who will renovate it. Robinson is confident he will succeed where others haven't. He ate at The Mill a few times and says it was always packed. The restaurant must have gone under for reasons other than location, he says, because it's a great spot.

"It's not a chain restaurant stuck out on an interstate exit. We need the neighborhood to support us," Robinson says. "Plus, I like living in Knoxville."

Others say the location may well curse The Blackhorse.

"If it was another two or three miles west on Kingston, it's the difference between night and day," says Jim Huff, who was a manager at Kiva Grill, an authentic Southwestern restaurant that had critics and diners raving. "The three most important things are location, location, location, and that hasn't got it. The best thing they could do is put retail in there and put the restaurant on the corner."

Breaking the Spell

What causes a building to devour restaurants like nacho chips at a Mexican eatery? Where do these hexes come from? Each of Knoxville's snakebit locations possess their own problems. Defining a "good" location is not a simple thing.

No one interviewed claims location alone will break you. But the idea of a jinxed spot can keep customers away, says Jean Disney, who worked in the restaurant business for 17 years and helped run the Kiva Grill. "It takes so much money to run a restaurant. Independents without a large pocketbook have a hard time," Disney says. "Add to it the wrong location and the perception about that location, and it's tough."

Deep Fry says developers search for sites as if it were a science, studying the demographics and traffic patterns of a city. They then compare these to cities they're familiar with and try to figure out what would be successful. When they know where they want to be, they start looking at possible sites. They want easy access, high visibility, and a busy road. Free-standing buildings are best, followed by the end of a shopping plaza. The middle of a shopping plaza is worst, he says, because it obstructs visibility and what you can do.

Deep Fry's clients are largely national franchises of fast food and family restaurants. These are more vulnerable to snakebit locations than independent sit-down restaurants, explains Dean Hitt, publisher of the journal Entree, covering the Tennessee restaurant business and affiliated with the Tennessee Restaurant Association. These thrive on high-volume roads in the suburbs or on highways, and the wrong location can spell death.

Developers of fine and casual dining also fear the snakebit location, says Barry Marks, part owner of two successful restaurants, the Italian Market & Grill and the Baker-Peters Jazz Club, both on Kingston Pike.

"I think there are bad sites. I'd be very hard pressed to go in [some] locations, even being very confident in my people," says Marks.

Malarkey, says Hitt. There are no cursed sites.

"Within the business community, people talk about places being snakebit. But I think that's all bullshit," Hitt says. "From what I can see in the state of Tennessee and the people I know who are successful operators, it doesn't matter. The location doesn't matter if the operator knows what they're doing."

Hitt speaks with experience. He's worked at two doomed sites: The Kiva Grill and Miz Sissy's. Those places failed because of management and lack of money, not because of some silly curse, Hitt says.

Restaurants usually bomb because of no capital, poor management, staggering rent, and no creativity, he says.

To prove his case, Hitt points to the Melting Pot in the Old City. Located in the basement of an old brick building with no visibility and straddled with the neighborhood's bad rap for crime and no parking, the restaurant has been a booming success for three-and-a-half years. Its predecessors, Best Italian, Club Taboo, and the hip Ella Guru's, all failed.

"The Melting Pot is a great concept with good service and wonderful food. When a person decides to go to the Melting Pot, they know they're going to spend a lot of time there and spend more money. But they're getting more out of the dining experience than something to eat. So in turn, it doesn't matter where the Melting Pot is located. In fact, it's a bad location. It's hard to get to. But it's worth going to," Hitt says. "The unique concept is the ticket. I don't think location is that important. What you do with your environment is what's important."

When the Melting Pot's owners moved in, they gutted the old restaurant, salvaging only the bar. They built oak booths to contrast the dark brick interior. Each table is covered with black tiles and a heating pad in the middle for the fondue pots where customers cook their food. Empty wine bottles dangle around the lights above each table.

"I always hated when we first moved in here, people saying, 'You're not going to make it, it's a jinxed location.' I always thought the restaurants that were here before us had good concepts, they were just poorly managed," says owner and manager Todd Dennis. Although it is a chain with about 50 locations, each restaurant is managed by a part owner, Dennis says.

Dennis says the Melting Pot chain used to look for hard-to-find locations for its restaurants. "We like the Old City. It's a good location. You can't duplicate this," motioning to the brick walls and dark atmosphere. "It fits our motif. It's romantic; we don't need basement windows. It's the perfect size. We build this restaurant in strip areas, but they just don't seem to have the character this does."

A 157-year-old home out on Kingston Pike has more character than you could cook up. Many people thought it had one mean old curse on it, too.

The three-story house with massive white columns in front was once the home of Dr. James Harvey Baker, who had been known to treat Confederate troops during the Civil War. In 1863, Union soldiers had a run-in with the doctor, exchanging gun fire with him. Baker barricaded himself in his bedroom. Despite pleas from his wife, the soldiers fatally shot the doctor through the bedroom door.

When Baker's son, Abner, returned from fighting with the Confederates after the war, he quickly followed his father to the grave. He was arrested after killing postmaster William Hall, either out of self-defense or to avenge his father's death (Hall had fought with the Union). Later that night, a mob seized Abner Baker from the jail and hung him outside. The bloody-tragedy-turned-colorful-anecdote has been kept alive, thanks to reports that the Bakers' old home is haunted, either by the doctor, his son, or both.

Located at 9000 Kingston Pike, several people have reported boxes and glasses inexplicably flying off shelves, lights flicking on and off, and doors opening and slamming. Some have heard unaccounted-for footsteps, laughter, and screams. In 1991, the owners reported a burglary at the home. What they believed was stolen turned out to have been rearranged, and police couldn't figure out where a would-be criminal got in or out of the home. The owners chalked it up to ghosts.

The stories are spooky, but it's all relatively harmless stuff...unless you happen to be a restaurateur. Eating establishments have been absolutely jinxed in this place. It has been home to Jeremiah's, Abner's Attic, Krystyna's, The Painted Table, and Hawkeye's Corner Too.

The Painted Table co-owner and chef Don DeVore served highbrow American continental dishes made with veal, lamb, fish, and aged-beef. He baked his own bread and deserts. On the tables, he laid original canvas paintings and covered them with glass.

The restaurant faced a number of problems, including a lack of capital, its location on the second floor, high rent, and having a convenience store right in front, DeVore says.

"You kind of have to beat the rap of whatever preceded you there," explains DeVore, during a cigarette-and-coffee break at Litton's Back Room where he is a chef. "When we were there, there was a tremendous amount of road construction going on. They just now finished it. There were barrels everywhere. You didn't know how to get into the place."

"There's a Phillips 66 in front kind of [messing] you up. Nobody wants to see a convenience store in front of you," DeVore adds. The convenience store [and its large sign out front, which advertised "2 Liter Coke & Pepsi 99¢ All Month"] does obstruct motorists' view of the restaurant.

But the tenants that moved into the home must have put its ghosts to work scrubbing dishes and grilling steaks. The Baker-Peters Jazz Club has been a raging success since opening early this year.

"We have Abner on our side," jokes Rod Johnston, who manages the new club. They also spent a lot of money on a unique concept that took months to develop, says part owner Marks. Their idea began as a simple martini bar but mushroomed to include fine steaks and live jazz.

The bar was custom-made with patches of marble and granite. In the jazz room, the tablecloths bear the faces of Humphrey Bogart and Marilyn Monroe. Chairs in the cigar room lounge swallow the bodies of stressed-out executives. For private conversations you can go to the jungle room, where the chairs are embroidered with monkeys and the carpet looks like leopard skin. Outside a purple martini-glass sign beacons customers into this place where the laid-back atmosphere is half kitsch, half luxury.

"We wanted to keep the traditional historical feel to the house but at the same time add a new twist, almost art deco," Johnston says.

"In Knoxville, as many restaurants as there are, there's not a lot of open niches available," Marks adds. "This is something we haven't seen before."

Hitt agreed: "Baker-Peters Jazz Club offers what these other people have not: a unique enough concept, entertainment, good food, and good service. The other people in there have not been able to pull that mix off."

The jazz club's success may show superstition has no place in running a business. But while Baker-Peters is succeeding, plenty of other inventive and delicious restaurants have failed. Call them cursed or maybe just unlucky.

Bogartz sees a niche for his restaurant but fears customers won't go out of their way for it. His restaurant's success can be judged in two ways: through the amount of business it does or by the critical praise, the popularity of its cooking classes, and the media coverage it gets.

"Nobody wants to think, 'We suck.' But if we're getting all this positive response, where are the folks come dinner time?"