From restaurants to kudzu, Knox expatriates recall the cultural icons that conjure "Knoxville"

by Jack Neely

We Knoxvillians are fond of polling ourselves about what we like about Knoxville. Those careful to give the expected answer never fail to chant "the friendly people and the low cost of living and the mountains." But for a few of us, it hasn't been a satisfying response. After all, there are friendly people everywhere. That "low cost of living" boast has a sinister spin to it, especially as it pertains to real estate—if land values are so low, doesn't that mean desire for our land is also low? And concerning that "mountains" answer, where are the Knoxville Mountains? They're an hour's drive away. Among American cities, Knoxville's not even especially lofty.

Isn't there a better answer? What would we miss if we were gone? We don't know, but we did ask several former Knoxvillians what, if anything, they missed about their old home. We didn't tell them they had to miss something, by the way. We left it up to them. And it turns out that everybody who leaves town—even the most hardened Knoxvillephobes—misses something about this old place.

A few did mention things like "mountains"—but more often they brought up things we don't think about much, even though they're things that are actually in Knoxville, much closer than the mountains. "I miss all the pikes," says former Knoxvillian Bill Grimes, of Sacramento: Kingston, Washington, Tazewell, Maynardville, Ball Camp, Maryville, Martin Mill, Middlebrook—Knoxville does have an unfair share of pikes, an abundance we may take for granted. "I'd never been in a place with a pike," says Grimes, who grew up in Austin. "I thought it was a fish."

Grimes was also intrigued with the Knoxville thunder. "The thunder in Knoxville sounded really different," he says, from the Texas storms he grew up with. "It was a rolling thunder."

Several, in fact, who have moved to the west coast miss things we take for granted—like thunderstorms and lightning bugs and kudzu—all of which are rare or nonexistent west of the Rockies. (Powdered kudzu root, in fact, goes for $25 a pound in San Francisco New Age shops.)

However, San Franciscan Jonathan Tuttle sounds like he can get along without lightning bugs if you throw all other bugs into the contract. "There aren't any bugs here! There just aren't any! The sultry summers, the humidity, the bugs—I can't say I miss it." But he found one aspect of California's culture and topography a little disorienting, compared to Tennessee. "Here, you drive for three or four hours, and you're in the same place!" Others have noticed that there's much less diversity of accents from place to place in California than in Tennessee.

Several mention a peculiar intimacy they found here. "I miss Knoxville in the summertime, when all the college kids have left," says Chris Brown, now of Memphis, citing an interesting inversion of the college-town appeal a few respondents mentioned. "Downtown, Fourth and Gill, Fort Sanders are reduced by thousands. Suddenly it felt intimate. It was your town."

Virginia Wagner spent more than a decade in Knoxville before marrying a man who works at Duke University, in '93. Househunting in Durham made her miss Knoxville. "I just wanted a lake view or mountain view or something—but here, there's nothing like that. In Durham, the river they get excited about is three feet wide."

Southwesterners remember Knoxville winters as dreary and gray. Texan Grimes remarks that deciduous trees are a mixed blessing—beautiful in the spring, summer, and fall, but suddenly desolate in the winter, when the land looks bleak and we see things that aren't meant to be seen. Another Texan recalls feeling trapped by Knoxville's gray winter skies.

But Northwesterners, whose winters are even drearier and grayer than ours, have a different perspective. Tom Lombardo moved to Portland, Oregon, three years ago and doesn't miss much about Knoxville. "Everything's better in Portland," he says. Blunt in his municipal criticisms, Lombardo is suddenly wistful recalling winter days in Knoxville. "I miss walking on Cherokee Boulevard when the sun is shining and the sky is crystal blue. And those oaks that are 250 feet tall, but the sky is so clear, so blue, you can see the smallest twigs on top sticking out against the sky. We just don't see much sun in the winter in Portland. It's gray until spring."

Topper Shutt has an especially intimate relationship to Knoxville and its climate. For three eventful years (ending about a decade ago) which saw both our all-time low temperature and our only heavy April snow in memory, Shutt was Knoxville's hipster weatherman. For most of the period since then, he's been the meteorologist for Channel 9 Eyewitness News in Washington, D.C., his childhood home. He and his wife were astonished by their first winter here. "I will never forget it," he says of that day in January 1985. "It was the coldest spot in the country, 24 below." That day in sunny Tennessee was the coldest that this weatherman has ever seen, and he sounds nostalgic about the drama of it. "It has never been that cold up here," he says of Washington. Then, in 1987, there was that deep snow in April. "Four feet in the mountains, 12 inches in Knoxville," Shutt recalls. "We had no power—so we went to Silver Spoon."

Which is still, by the way, one of his favorite restaurants in the world. Asked about his strongest impression of Knoxville—a city he's visited only once since he left, 10 years ago—he first mentions Silver Spoon, the 15-year-old restaurant in the Gallery on Kingston Pike. "They haven't been able to duplicate it anywhere," Shutt says. "I love Silver Spoon. My wife and I still talk about it to this day. The food is just great, not overly fancy, but not McDonald's, either. Just a good piece of fish. It seems like it would be such an obvious thing, but they haven't been able to duplicate it anywhere." Silver Spoon is, in fact, part of a small chain.

By the way, some restaurateurs occasionally wonder who gives reporters the right to criticize their establishments in public. Whether they want to or not, restaurants bear an enormous civic duty. As many of these responses attest, restaurants often have more power than city councils or major industries to form people's dominant and lasting impressions of a city. Only a few mentioned local politicians in either a positive or negative way. But most of our respondents, when asked what they missed most about Knoxville, first mentioned a restaurant.

Chris Brown, who moved to Memphis three years ago, doesn't pause before answering the question of what he misses most about Knoxville. "Patrick Sullivan's spinach," he says. That subtly spicy dish is also one of the first things his wife Melissa, interviewed separately, also quickly volunteers. "I've never had spinach like that," she says. [Note: After a coup, Sullivan's famous Spinach Maria is no longer available at the original Sullivan's Saloon, but is indeed still served at Sullivan's Diner.]

Wagner, who has lived in 13 cities and towns, says Regas is the best restaurant she's ever visited. And in spite of his partiality for Silver Spoon, Shutt is also loyal to the Orangery after a decade away. "I've been to a lot of nice restaurants in a lot of big cities, but that ranks up there as one of the finest."

Grimes, who has lived in Sacramento since '93, misses the pies at the Lunch Box. He also recalls the "salted bacon hanging in the store, not refrigerated or anything" and "iced tea without having to ask for it. It was an assumed drink."

Erin Miller says she can't find chow-chow in Berkeley. "In California they'd probably call it some kind of salsa," she says. She says she had no complaints about Knoxville restaurants when she lived here—but laments that, after a year and a half in the Bay area, Knoxville "food tastes worse to me than it did the last time I was here." With less of an income, she lives more frugally in Berkeley than she did in Knoxville, but says Bay-Area food is hard to beat at any level—except, maybe, the chow-chow level.

Steven Horn, of San Francisco, says he misses JFG coffee—and the smell of JFG roasting coffee. He also misses the Tomato Head, the Mighty Wurlitzer, Old Gray Cemetery, poet Marilyn Kallet, and "the bizarre parade of restaurants in Western Plaza."

With its unusually high ratio of restaurants to citizens, Knoxville thinks of itself as a restaurant town—but for some it's a frustratingly slow one. Recalling her life here in the early 1990s, Californian Linda Munson was disappointed that "there were not Thai or Korean or Indian restaurants, until recently." For many young urban professionals in the '80s, Thai restaurants became the litmus test of a cosmopolitan city. In the '80s, Knoxville didn't have one.

Another was the brewpub. After a decade in Knoxville, Ron King regretted to leave town just as our first brewpub was opening. Now, he's heard, we have two. In Denver, he says, there are 38 brewpubs. King's fondest Epicurean memories of early '90s Knoxville are the West Knoxville Hungarian restaurant Krystyna's and Les Routiers, a French restaurant downtown. He mourns to hear they both have since gone out of business. (Talking to longtime ex-Knoxvillians can be a little like looking at an old Knoxville Journal.) "That's the problem in Knoxville," King says. "It's still a small city."

But not nearly as small as some. In Laurel, Mississippi, Gina Ruffner misses Knoxville nightclubs, especially Lucille's. To find anything similar, she says, she has to drive all the way to New Orleans.

The Tuttles of San Francisco and even the Bass-Milleret family of Albuquerque say they miss a commodity that doesn't get much attention: Knoxville barbecue. Though we may not think of New Mexico as a barbecue-challenged zone, Milleret says she hasn't found anything comparable to Buddy's. Finding barbecue scarce in San Francisco, the Tuttles have asked Knoxville friends to bring them quarts of barbecue sauce; they're still nostalgic about weekly family excursions to Buddy's, though Jonathan Tuttle also recalls the unpronounceable Maryville institution Glko's and the ribs at Calhoun's. "You can sum my comments up like this," says Tuttle, "Knoxville: Barbecue. San Francisco: Bread." Always frustrated by Knoxville's lack of a bona-fide bakery, Tuttle left before the opening of Blue Moon, about which he's heard good reports.

Lombardo, who's happy in Portland, misses Tjaarda's. "I've eaten in a lot of vegetarians restaurants all around," he says. "Tjaarda's is world-class." Still harboring prejudices about Knoxville's ability to support a good restaurant, he sounds a little surprised to hear it's still in business without his patronage.

He also misses the JFG Coffee House on Jackson. "The Northwest is the Land of Coffee Houses, but JFG would be one of the best in Portland or Seattle. The bare-brick walls, the industrial feel, the high ceilings—and the coffee's great."

Anne Abel, of Aurora, Colorado, misses Long's Drug Store and "knowing that I would always see someone I knew there." Then she makes a surprising point about Krystal, the ubiquitous Southern hamburger chain she misses: "There are not too many places open around the clock here" in the Denver area, she says, "probably due to the crime rate in the Big City."

Some other Knoxville entrepreneurs may be more unusual and less replaceable than we realize. The first thing Memphian Melissa Brown mentions is McKay's Used Books. "I haven't found a used bookstore that big, anywhere," she says. She then adds that she also misses the cloistered-nook charm of Old City Books—which, alas, changed its name to the Book Eddy and moved to a more practical shopping center on Chapman Highway, still a good used and rare bookstore, but with little allowance for alcoves, a few months ago.

"There's a lot of quirky stuff in Knoxville," says King, who lived in Knoxville for a decade ("longer than I've ever lived anywhere else," he says) but left for Denver three years ago. "I've not found a Dave's Music Barn in Denver." (He's referring to the institution on Clinton Highway.)

Grimes and his family were especially fond of Ijams Nature Center, and Wagner raves about Clarence Brown as theater unequaled in the Durham area.

"I never thought I'd say this," says Ruffner, in Laurel, Mississippi. "I miss KUB. Now I get a gas bill, an electric bill, a water bill, a garbage bill, all paid separately, all at different times of the month. Having a utility board—that amazes me now."

Tuttle, who had lived in Ohio, North Florida, and Knoxville before moving to San Francisco, misses the groundedness of the South. Trying to explain what he means, he speaks of Knoxville's tangible history, which he says is "deeper" than California's—he recalls a graveyard in his Knoxville neighborhood that's older than the city of San Francisco—and the fact that the South is profoundly religious. Though not religious himself, Tuttle seems to miss being around people who are. "When you absolutely know something, it helps you live your life with certainty," he says. "Nobody that I know out here is real sure about anything."

A few mention that they miss local bands—and, occasionally, a radio station. "They don't have any great bluegrass radio stations" in Berkeley, says Miller, who listened to WNCW-FM and, back home over the holiday, the new WDVX-FM—even though bluegrass has become trendy in the Bay Area. Hearing it can make her sentimental for home.

"I get real proud of being from Knoxville," she says. "In spite of being so angry at this place."

It's clear there's another Knoxville out there, one nearly as populous as the one that will be counted in the next census. It's made up of people who used to live here, who still know their way around, and who think about us occasionally.