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After years of culinary famine, Knoxville's foodies finally get their feast of epicurean delights.

by Bonnie Appetit

"Garcon! Garcon!" I yelled across the boisterous Friday night crowd at Mango, snapping my fingers obnoxiously to get the attention of our all-too-obviously non-French-speaking waiter. "What is this?"

The "this" in question was a ramekin of what looked to be onions floating in a pool of thinly opaque goo, which was served alongside our basket of bread. With remarkable good nature (considering), our waiter explained: "It's seviche, lightly vinegared onion relish."

As I stared blankly, he explained, "It's meant to be eaten with the bread." Ah ha—this was a new one on me. Seviche, as far as I knew, had always been a dish of fish finished in onion, lime, and vinegar and served raw. And here it was, completely out of context—eat it on bread? Butter, jam, even boursin cheese, yes. But seviche? Years of dining at Shoneys hadn't prepared me for this, but there was nothing left to do but try it. And it was, quite frankly, delicious—the bracing tartness adding a whole new dimension to the crusty French bread.

Relaxing back into my chair later in the meal, I pondered this new experience as I watched Zippy ineffectually chase the last few grains of coconut jasmine rice around his plate with a fork. Our entire meal had been nothing short of a gastric revelation: watermelon gazpacho with chipotle peppers and thyme to start; giant shrimp in a mango compote with notes of cinnamon, anise, and cumin; a pecan smoked trout cake with mandarin orange and tarragon sauce; and for dessert, a smokeless truffle cigar served up with cappuccino ice cream in a crystal ashtray, complete with white and dark chocolate ashes.

It was a fabulous meal: interesting, innovative, exciting, and—dare I say it?—gourmet. It was the kind of meal that I would have killed for back in the dark ages of Knoxville cuisine (say, 1993), back when I was mired in a sad and pointless life of sampling and writing about plates of chicken fingers, rubbery grilled chicken breasts, flaccid chicken stir-fries, greasy chicken fajitas, teriyaki chicken salads, barbecued chicken sandwiches, and chicken-fried [fill-in-the-blank] ad infinitum.

That's an exaggeration, of course—but not much of one. It should be no news to readers that Knoxville has long enjoyed a reputation as the cradle of culinary mediocrity, a sort of breeding ground for lowest-common denominator chain restaurants, producing in its fertile hills and valleys such mediocre hasheries as Ruby Tuesday's, Grady's, and The Chop House. We're famous for our high restaurants-to-population ratio, famous for our fish stick consumption (in the early '90s, Mrs. Paul's ranked us number one in fish stick-per capita consumption), and known as a national test market for the chains named above and many others—so generic, apparently, is our palate, that if you can make a dish work here, you can make it work anywhere.

However, the past five years have seen a sort of renaissance in the Knoxville food scene, an emergence of a critical mass of upscale restaurants. Suddenly, it seems, good restaurants are everywhere, opening up new culinary horizons in all sorts of directions. There is the casual French classicism of By the Tracks Bistro, the contemporary Cal-Mex subtleties of Lula, the high-life jazz-inspired menus of Lucille's and Baker-Peters, the sumptuous Northern Italian of Tuscany, the vibrant neo-Greek of Kalamata Kitchen, the cosmopolitan cafe fare of Sunspot, the French bistro cooking of The Chef Bistro, the continental-Southern concoctions of Maple Grove Inn, the American nouveau of a revitalized Manhattan's, the turn-of-the-century flair of the Jockey Club, the upscale fusion food of Harry's, the French/Pacific stylings of The Orangery...and these are to name only a few, literally, of my favorite things.

Knoxville's becoming an unlikely food lover's heaven. We have, circa 1999, a real food scene, one that extends from our restaurants into our homes, wine markets, and even our grocery stores, many of which have responded by creating such gourmet powerhouses as the super Bi-Lo on Morrell Road (where you can get dried porcini mushrooms and Limburger cheese) or the newly gentrified Kroger of Knox Plaza (where you can pick up fresh sushi to go). Suddenly, foodies are everywhere in Knoxville, cooking, entertaining, and talking—eager to learn more, eat more, experience more, and gab about it later over the water cooler. In the late '90s, eating has become more about entertainment than sustenance. Food: it's not just for dinner anymore.

Karen Kendrick, owner/manager of The Orangery, has seen it all in her 25 years in the restaurant business. She remembers a Knoxville with no liquor by the drink, no salad bars, no gourmet burgers, no fresh fish, no nuthin'. "When we opened in 1973 there was a restaurant next door called Alberti's, and there was Ivanhoe, Louis, and Peros...and that was about it," she remembers (perhaps forgetting longtime mainstay Regas; and two years later, Copper Cellar opened). "When we first opened, people didn't even know what quiche was. They'd come in and ask for 'quickie.'"

Of course, the world has turned a few times since then, and Knoxville's come a long way, baby—and so have our restaurants. "What has escalated over the last five years is that people are much more discriminating about what they eat—they want everything to work well in terms of levels of flavors," Kendrick says. "The ingredients have to keep up with the demand. They want everything to work well—the ambiance, the wine, the service, the music, and especially the flavors.

"Things just move a lot faster now, because communications move faster. You can get recipes from all over the world on the Internet; you can get almost anything you want from the markets; you can get fresh fish every day," she continues. "People thrive on change now; they want variety now. With all the acceleration in our lives we get bored a lot quicker."

Education, travel, media hype, communication—all these factors have instigated a profound change in the Knoxville market, one that has precipitated even the Orangery—Knoxville's very symbol of staid French classicism—to expand its horizons. That diversification took the form of the addition of a specialty menu to accompany the array of classic French dishes that long ago established the Orangery as the last word in local gourmet. Now you can try broiled halibut with jumbo shrimp in spicy red curry sauce and jasmine rice, or perhaps an ahi tuna tower with smoked salmon, wasabi mayonnaise, sweet teriyaki onions, and fried chipotle pepper tortillas along with your coquille St. Jacques.

And then there's Mango, a fusion restaurant whose unique couplings of bold and innovative flavors are on par with—a cursory glance at cable TV's Food Network will tell you—the cutting edge fare being served anywhere in the country. "There are no borders here at Mango," says Chef Dean Hoyos-Holsberry, and his philosophy is readily apparent in the menu: tempura salmon and asparagus nori roll with wasabi soya-ginger sauce; pork and shrimp Santa Fe pot stickers with cumin black beans and oriental dipping sauce; calamari tempura with ginger apricot glaze and green curry chutney; Vietnamese sesame beef salad with nouc cham dressing.

And that's just for starters—literally; all of the above can be found on the appetizer menu. Entrees are even more complex, items like seared duck breast with guava glaze and cinnamon sweet potatoes; giant grilled shrimp with coconut jasmine rice and mango compote; and pecan smoked trout cake with mandarin orange and tarragon sauce. This is hardly the sort of fare you'd expect to find in the Fish Stick Capital of the U.S., the town that gives the greenlight to such innovations as the addition of pineapple rings to grilled chicken in chain restaurants across the nation.

Hoyos-Holsberry is an understated fellow for a pusher of the proverbial envelope, a man who sees his task in life as creating culinary delights that give his patrons pause; things that make them go hmmm. "I'm into making simplistic sauces, but at the same time, putting some notes in there that are kind of foreign," he says. "It's fun to make people look up—not to disturb them, but to make them think about what they're eating."

Gourmet, it seems, is not just for snobs anymore. In fact, some might argue that the word itself is an anachronism, and an off-putting one at that. "Gourmet is an extremely bad word," says Eric Nelson, owner of—what else?—Gourmet's Market, long the supplier of upscale foodstuffs to Knoxville's food-obsessed. "If we had it to do over again, we'd rename our store. The word gourmet just puts people off."

Betsy Child, a local restaurant-hopper and amateur chef who's senior-vice president of corporate philanthropy for Covenant Health, agrees with that assessment. "I consider myself a person who loves to cook and who loves good food," she says. "But I don't think of myself as a 'gourmet.' It's not just about how many chi-chi words you can use in the description of a meal—it's about distinctive tastes and flavors. Right now, I'm particularly interested in learning more about new herbs and spices and seasonings—and I think that's a place where Knoxville has really grown over the last five years."

Mahasti Vafaie, owner of Market Square's Tomato Head restaurant and partner (with Scott Partin) in Lula, has watched the evolution with amusement. She's the woman, after all, who in the late 1980s introduced Knoxville to such concepts as sun-dried tomatoes, polenta, tofu, lamb sausage, focaccia, pesto, and blue cheese as a pizza topping. "When I first opened, I didn't really have a concept—I just wanted to have a cool restaurant," she says. "We used to try to shock people just for the sake of being cool—we had weird things on our sign out front, like snails on pizza. But people started coming in and seeing that the food was good, and our client base really started to grow."

Vafaie has seen her approach to food take off, giving birth not only to the molé-based Cal-Mex dishes of Lula, but to other restaurants. "You know, the Sunspot's opened and they have tofu on their menu," she says. "I think our being here helped pave the way for them to open up...I don't know, maybe that's vain."

But David Pinckney, executive chef at Sunspot and Aubrey's, clearly doesn't think so. He's relatively new at the Sunspot, having joined the re-opened restaurant from The Orangery last fall, but he gives full credit to Tomato Head for helping to pave the way for his restaurant, which he calls, only slightly in jest, "the poor man's Orangery."

In an intensely competitive business, it's rare to find a chef who so graciously acknowledges his competition as does Pinckney—who also tips his hat to Lula, Mango, By the Tracks Bistro, and Harry's (whose executive chef, Bruce Bogartz, recently left to start up a new restaurant at CC's Cafe). For him, the more the merrier, if only because he thinks the more restaurants a market has, the better educated its clientele become; and the better educated they become, the more interested in new restaurants they are...it's the opposite of a vicious cycle.

He's watched the market grow by leaps and bounds, thanks in large part to education. He's made education a priority in life as a food professional, which began at The Orangery as a 16-year-old dishwasher and continued there for the next 19 years where he worked his way up through the ranks, perfecting his distinctive style, which he humbly refers to as "eclectic." That's why today he's become the favored instructor at the Glass Bazaar, the upscale culinary store and cooking school in Bearden owned by Marcia Best. There, two or three times a month, he plays to standing-room-only crowds, holding them rapt with his accessible, clear, and honest instruction—giving away all his secrets along with simple instructions on topics that range from how to boil an egg (put eggs in water, bring to boil, then turn off and let sit for 20 minutes—who knew?) to how to make a roux (cook on low for 15 minutes, and stir like crazy), and divulging real-life recipes from the Sunspot like that for raspberry-jerk sauce rasta pasta and for the smoked trout and pecan salad with bourbon-Dijon dressing.

"People are much more educated about food than ever before, and that's really changed the restaurant market," he says. "Air fares are so cheap, that people can travel and eat out all over the country—that's probably part of the reason Knoxville's restaurant scene has improved in recent years."

Pinckney will continue to hone his eclectic chops later this year with the founding of a new restaurant in Farragut called, tentatively, Little City. He's cagey about the enterprise, revealing only that it will feature many small plates and bistro-style fusion food in a casual atmosphere, inspired at least in part by Charlie Trotter's famed Chicago eatery (an influence cited by nearly every chef interviewed for this story).

One new restaurant he'll be watching with great interest is Riverside Tavern, the new Regas brothers enterprise located on the waterfront. The executive chef is an old pal of his, Kelli Lott, a fellow Bearden High grad who made her way to the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, N.Y., then on to New York City and California before returning to town to take up the reins at Riverside.

Riverside—for those who haven't seen it—is a fabulous environment, a beautiful piece of waterfront architecture (by Atlanta's Johnson Studio) that mirrors the graceful arches of the nearby Gay Street bridge. It's open, airy, elegant, and warm, and features wood-burning ovens and a rotisserie that will set the tone for the menu that Lott—along with consulting chef Steve Puleo, formerly with Grady's—is now perfecting in anticipation of an August opening.

It is familiar territory for Lott, who was recruited back to Knoxville from her former job as executive chef for the Wolfgang Puck Café in Newport Beach, Calif. "At Wolfgang Puck Café, we featured a lot of gourmet pizzas and rotisserie items—it just so happens that they had a pizza oven and rotisserie already installed when I got here," she explains "We're developing a menu that will feature a lot of pizzas and meats—a little traditional, but with some different flavors. We're trying to give things a little special flair—maybe the barbecue sauce will have an Asian influence, maybe we'll feature a Thai peanut sauce."

In the process of developing the Riverside menu, Lott and Puleo are taking a hard look at the Knoxville market. Their conclusion is that Riverside should aim for the mid-price market (under $18 for an entrée), and feature eclectic fare that's innovative but not too far out. Her outsider's opinion is this: "I think people here are really comfortable with the flavors they're comfortable with. When they put something in their mouth they haven't tried before, they need time to absorb it."

That's why, she says, she'll take it slow at Riverside. Her initial menu, for instance, will offer a white bean and cornbread appetizer. How much more familiar could you get?

Bernadette and Gary Doyle, huddled in a booth together in their intimate West Knoxville eatery, are finishing each others' sentences as they talk excitedly about the future of their restaurant and about their favorite topic in the entire world: food. They are, by any account, the ultimate foodie couple, having met at the C.I.A. (the culinary institute, not the spy center), where they fell in love, married, and embarked on a tandem career perfecting the art of the meal. New Yorker Bernadette, charmed by Gary's Southern wiles, was wooed back to his home state in the '70s to help him establish the world-class reputation of Blackberry Farms (where Bernadette was the chef and Gary the manager). Theirs is a classic culinary romance, one that has endured its colorful ups and downs, yes, but ultimately resulted in By the Tracks Bistro, the treasured offspring of their union that was born in 1995.

"We've been around the world in the U.S., and there aren't too many more countries left for us to borrow from—other than Slavic and Russian food, some African cuisines, and maybe Australian, there's really not much left," begins Bernadette. "That's why I think..."

"...it's going to start over," concludes Gary.

So goes their conversation as they talk about the new directions they'll be exploring in the near future as they prepare to move from their cramped-yet-cozy shotgun building on Northshore Drive into the Homberg space formerly inhabited by upscale Italian eatery Tuscany (which has already moved into the space formerly inhabited by Tillie's, Miz Sissy's, Merlot's, Keng's Garden, and most recently Rhapsody). The new building—which is currently undergoing a complete facelift—will double the restaurant's seating capacity, allow for the addition of a full bar, and provide devoted regulars with an element that's long been lacking at By the Tracks: leg room.

It's an exciting time for the Doyles, who've recently scored quite a coup by luring in a new chef, Joe Cairns, a real-life globetrotter who's cooked in some of the best restaurants in Paris (Le Grenadin and Taillevant), San Francisco (Aqua and Bizou), and New Orleans (Gautreau's).

Cairns' resume reads like a page from Gourmet magazine, and one has to wonder—stellar reputation of Bistro By the Tracks aside—why here, why now? For starters, he was looking for a challenging job in the Southeast to be closer to family in Chattanooga. But what drew him to Knoxville was the excitement and opportunity he saw in the market here. "The market seems to be really growing, and people seem eager to experiment," he says

Cairns was familiar with Knoxville's reputation as a test market and breeding ground for chain restaurants like Ruby Tuesday's, Grady's, and The Chop House (which are the ones he can name). But during an exploratory visit to meet with the Doyles, he was blown away by the diversity and quality he found in area eateries. "There's not a broad scene in Knoxville, but in the restaurants I went to, I was surprised at what they were serving—at the Asian flavors and at classic techniques that were being used. You can tell a lot about a city from eating in its restaurants, and I really liked what I saw in Knoxville. It seems like a city ripe for opportunity and ripe for growth."

The three—Gary, Bernadette, Joe—share the goal of steering that growth toward the development of a true regional cuisine, one that would reflect the culture and draw on local produce and products.

"Personally," says Bernadette, "I think the next trend that will be moving here from the West Coast will be people going out to try to come up with a more..."

"Regional cuisine," finishes Gary.

Already, By the Tracks peppers its menu with Granger County tomatoes and Benton County molasses (which provides the basis for the exquisite low-country barbecued shrimp with grits). And the restaurant—like several others in town, most notably Tomato Head and Lula—is working with organic Falling Star Farms to have the herbs and produce it needs specially grown right here in East Tennessee soil. "I think local, fresh, and seasonal will be the next trend, and that each area of the country will start to identify itself a little more by what it can grow," says Bernadette. "And we really do have a wealth of wonderful things around here. My new job description is going to be to go out and cultivate relationships with farmers. I'd love to do in this area what Alice Waters did in San Francisco." (Which was, for those of you unfamiliar with the name, to revolutionize the American restaurant industry in 1971 by founding Chez Panisse, a gourmet restaurant that draws nearly all its ingredients from local sources.)

But perhaps the biggest contribution the Doyles have made to Knoxville is to introduce and institutionalize the bistro concept—casual atmosphere, unpretentious menu, good service, great food, and laser-like focus. In looking forward to joining the fold, Cairns says, "I'd like to try to define things a little more into a localized, French technique-based cuisine. Taking advantage of what the area has to offer and featuring that, and pairing my experience in classical French cooking with a casual atmosphere. The term bistro means fancy-casual, and they epitomize it."

And then there's fancy-fancy. As the pianist segues into a classical piece I can't quite name, I bite into the simply delicious pan-fried trout that is my entrée, and soak in the fabulous surroundings—the giant chandeliers dripping with Austrian crystals, the ornate tile-work floors, the opulent giltwork, the intricate friezes. I close my eyes, and relish this turn-of-the-century dining experience. Turn of this century? Turn of last? At the Jockey Club, it could be either.

Knoxville's newest and, some say, most audacious restaurant, the Jockey Club offers a prix fixe six-course menu that marks a return to the simple yet elegant continental cuisine of yesteryear, brought to you by local caterer to the rich and famous, David Duncan. He's spent the better part of this year in a labor of love: renovating the L & N Station (at a cost, he estimates, in the neighborhood of $750,000) to create a gracious home for his private functions, for an off-in-the-future L & N Café, and for the Jockey Club.

Duncan, who speaks from 22 years experience in catering to the Knoxville palate, has seen fusion come, and he's convinced he'll see fusion go. What's truly new, he says, is a return to basics. "I still see everybody trying to do what everybody else does—everywhere you go you get basically the same things, just variations on the theme," he says. "It's like every restaurant that opens is just a variation of the one that opened a month ago."

Duncan's assessment of the Knoxville palate is that it's much more sophisticated than even the city's own residents might guess: "I think the market here is educated and experienced," he says. "But I think a lot of restaurants have tried to be too fancy, or too far out. And I think everybody has way undershot the level of taste, or way overshot it. My idea behind is to go back to a more traditional haute cuisine kind of thing—continental, because it's really sort of like what you would get if you went to a wonderful restaurant in Paris or New York, but with a little bit of a Southern influence."

Dean Hitt, publisher of Entree, a magazine dedicated to reporting the latest developments in Tennessee's restaurant, bar, and foodservice trade, is watching Duncan's venture closely. "You look at the market, and it appears to be moving toward a higher palate," he says. "And one of the things in my mind that makes a higher cuisine is a person's ability to recognize subtleties rather than being overwhelmed by flavors. It will be interesting to see whether Knoxville buys into a real live haute cuisine."

Duncan's hopes for the Jockey Club (which opened on July 13) are high, though he knows that with its formal dress code and upscale price tag ($48 for six courses, including appetizer, soup, salad, entrée, cheese course, dessert, and coffee with petits fours) it won't be for everyone. Still, he believes a restaurant such as the Jockey Club could not have been possible even five years ago. "People are well traveled now, and well read about food. I think we are at the point now that we can say dinner is $48 and not swallow hard, and not bat an eye. People understand that to get a nice entrée anywhere you go, you're going to be spending $25. And it's only been in the last four or five years that the market here has reached that point."

Which underscores perhaps the real driving force behind Knoxville's nascent food scene: a good economy.

"I think affluence is a very large component in the expansion of Knoxville's palate," says Rick Tate, financial advisor, former Metro Pulse food columnist, and accomplished amateur chef. "If we were in a recession and people were having to scrape by, we'd all be eating baloney sandwiches. But people are seeing their 401Ks going up 20 percent a year, and they're feeling prosperous. They're willing to splurge on the saffron-infused butter for their sourdough toast. People are willing to try new things, and have the financial resources to do it. When the next recession comes, we'll all go back to eating our Beenie-Weenies."

He's right, of course. And when the time comes, I'll be fine with Beenie-Weenies—so long as mine are comprised of miniature lamb sausages with imported cannellinis in an ancho-coffee-infused tomato coulis. There's only so far back I'm willing to turn.