Metro Pulse/Secret History/Regas

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A befuddled lamentation on a landmark

by Jack Neely

Several readers have called for a eulogy about Regas. The closing of Regas' flagship restaurant, ostensibly the oldest restaurant in town, is a lamentable thing, and deserves to be thoroughly lamented in the media on newspaper and on TV, as it has been lamented and will continue to be lamented well past its final closing next month.

As much as we lament it, though, it's not like we weren't expecting it. It's been rumored for at least two years that the Regas family, redirecting its energies toward newer restaurant projects, would soon close the original. When you've got a beautiful, sunny new place on the river, it might not make sense to keep this old dark hulk hanging on at the base of the big, noisy interstate. Most of us figured it was just a matter of time.

To say this restaurant is 81 years old requires a modest portion of poetic license. Regas has changed with the years. It has changed its decor, it has changed its menu, it has changed its name and—contrary to every memory-based article I could find about its history—it has even changed its location. Though several articles state that Regas opened in 1919 on North Gay near Magnolia, where it is now, City Directories indicate the Regas brothers' first restaurant was a few blocks south, on the west side of Gay between Commerce and Wall. When Greek immigrants George and Frank Regas took over a restaurant that had been called Mitchell's, they renamed it the Ocean Cafe. (It had been a tradition among Greek restaurateurs to give restaurants a name that evoked something about their trip to America. That's how another Greek cafe of the same era, the Manhattan Cafe around the corner (now known as Manhattan's) got its name.)

The Regases' restaurant is not listed at its current location on North Gay until 1924, when the brothers opened a new lunch counter in an already-old Victorian hotel then known as the Watauga. It was a huge building, five tall floors not counting the corner turret on top, but the Regases just had a little part it, a storefront on the Magnolia side of the building. They still didn't call their place Regas, or even Regas Brothers. Until about 1932, the Regases' restaurant was known as the Astor Cafe. By both names, it was a small, simple place, an all-night cafe with a lunch counter.

This was the place, in 1944, where a very young Dave Thomas worked the counter and dreamed of going into the restaurant business himself. The founder of the Wendy's chain remembers the simple 24-hour cafe fondly in his autobiography: "The Regas wasn't fancy, but everything was polished to a looking-glass shine."

After the seedy Watauga was condemned in 1963, the Regases removed the building's upper liabilities, demolishing the upper three floors. You can see the grand old marble-arched hotel entrance on the Gay Street side. Today, the Regas building, a Victorian hotel lobby without a hotel above it, is one of downtown's endearing architectural oddities.

Regas got fancier and fancier with the passing years, and as it got fancier, the lights got dimmer. A lot of us have memories of Sunday dinners and prom dates at Regas when, before the Orangery, it was the darkest, fanciest place in town.

Regas also expanded with the years, as many of us do, ending up with about 10 times its original seating capacity. In the 1950s they had boasted of the finest in local cuisine, proudly offering "Tennessee Country Ham" and "Tennessee Milk-Fed Chicken." Twenty years later, though, Regas had dropped its local flavors to emphasize Boston Sole, lobster tails, and Chicken Hawaiian.

They stopped changing with their last, massive remodeling to look cosy and plush as the Playboy Mansion: the dark-stained ceiling beams, wall-to-wall carpeting, copper-hooded gas fireplace and fuzzy wallpaper of the 1970s. They radically shifted the focus of the restaurant toward the south, and their newly paved Depot Street parking lot. By then, Regas had erased all obvious traces of the old Astor Cafe of 1924.

Ironically, the Astor might have stood a better chance in the year 2000 than the remodeled '70s Regas did. With high stamped-tin ceilings, decorative tile floors, and French-cafe-style tables and chairs, that original late-night coffee shop might even pass for trendy.

You wonder if it might have made sense to excavate the Astor and downsize Regas to its original size. The diminution of nearby TVA and the natural attrition of the steak-and-potatoes crowd has eroded Regas' old clientele, but it hasn't killed them. Many are still here, probably enough to support a smaller restaurant—maybe one the size of the Ocean Cafe, or the old Astor. But American retail businesses never get smaller; they just expand and expand until they close.

I'm not sure Regas is closing any more than they did when they tried a new location in 1924. For the record, the building where the original Ocean Cafe opened in 1919 may be the one still standing, though radically remodeled, at the southwest corner of Gay and Summit Hill. Its last regular street-level tenant that I remember was a Wendy's. It's a fact that's not quite coherent enough to seem ironic.

Exactly when a restaurant ceases to be the same place, for statistical purposes, is a conundrum I'm not sure I can solve, but most seem to agree that Regas is the oldest restaurant in town. The funny thing is, even if you do date it all the way to 1919, well, that's not really all that old for a restaurant. There are restaurants in New Orleans that are decades older, same name, same address, same signature dishes, and they seem to be doing fine. Several restaurants and pubs in Europe are centuries old. Some have hardly even been remodeled.

But America is smitten with change, and unfortunately for our local landmarks, Knoxville often seems more American than the rest of the country does.