Metro Pulse/Gamut/Vegetarian Cafeteria

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A near-forgotten chapter in Knoxville's culinary history

by Jack Neely

When you meet a vegetarian, you figure that 1) they're pretty young, and 2) they're from somewhere else. In a city that some remember as distinguished mainly by the smell of meat-packing plants, you wouldn't expect there'd be a deep history of vegetarianism here, outside of a handful of restaurants in Fort Sanders during the Granola Era, and one or two Old City establishments in later years. All were short-lived. Knoxville's not necessarily unusual in its lack of purely vegetarian restaurants. Last month, a cover story in Time magazine implies that American vegetarianism is a recent phenomenon.

But look in the 1922 Knoxville City Directory, and it's hard to deny the evidence: listed right there on those yellowing pages in black ink is a place called "the Vegetarian Cafeteria." It was right in the center of downtown, on a well-traveled sidewalk. There was a place of that or similar name here for about 14 years—a pretty good run for any Knoxville restaurant.

Downtown property owners learn that history sometimes turns out to be more than they bargained for. No matter how nice you get your building to look, chances are somebody's going to come along and say they remember when it was a nightclub or a gambling parlor or a whorehouse. The accounting firm of Bible, Harris, Smith—formerly Siegel, Bible—has been at its location in a good-looking two-story building at 507 Clinch Ave. for 16 years, and they still get some clients who remember when the place was the 507 Club, a 1940s mixed-drink speakeasy that attracted some of the big bands of the era, Gene Krupa and Buddy Rich. Many remember the Hickory Tavern or the New China Restaurant, or even the early-'70s Playmate Club.

There aren't many left who remember this colorful building's original purpose, the reason for which this building was built, which is the most surprising one of all. It was, almost certainly, Knoxville's first vegetarian restaurant.

Vegetarianism in the English-speaking world goes back at least a couple of centuries. There was an American Vegetarian Society established as early as 1850. Much of that preference was religious-based, back when fundamentalism dealt more with personal purity than with politics. One denomination that was especially interested in vegetarianism was, and is, the Seventh Day Adventist Church. The church has "27 Fundamental Beliefs," and number 21 emphasizes the body as the "temple of the Holy Spirit." Adventists seek "the most healthful diet possible and abstain from the unclean foods identified in the Scripture." By some interpretations, those "unclean foods" include all forms of meat.

Shortly after World War I, the church commenced its work in Knoxville with reformist zeal. Back then, most of Knoxville's Adventists were centered around the original First Adventist Church on Gill Avenue, just north of downtown. According to documents at the McClung Collection, the Adventists established several beachheads in Knoxville, eventually including a small private school, the Little Creek Academy, in the pristine West Knox County countryside; an adjacent sanitarium; and a vegetarian restaurant. One commander of the operation was Lida Funk Scott of Battle Creek, Michigan, heiress of the Funk & Wagnall fortune, and, through her association with the Seventh Day Adventist Church, a committed vegetarian. She founded a group called the Layman Foundation, which eventually opened eight vegetarian restaurants in the South. Mrs. Scott was never a full-time Knoxvillian, but she was here so often, staying at the old Atkin Hotel near the Southern station, that many locals got to know her well.

She clearly had her work cut out for her; Knoxville had, not so long ago, claimed to be the nation's highest per-capita consumer of pork. But somehow she and her local allies established what is still the longest-lived vegetarian restaurant in Knoxville history.

Back in those days, when William S. Hart was riding herd in silent westerns at the Riviera and butchers were selling mettwurst and baloney sandwiches at the Market House, the "Vegetarian Cafeteria" opened just a few doors down from Market Square at 510 Union Ave. Its first manager, a pioneer in vegetarianism in Knoxville, had the fitting name of Harvey Bean.

After a couple of years on Union, it was on West Vine Avenue briefly before settling in for a couple of years on West Clinch, near State Street—apparently in the then-new Farragut building, where another leguminously named manager, Louis Crowder, was in charge. They were apparently just biding time before they finished a grand new building of their own.

It arrived in 1926, when the Layman foundation built a broad, two-story building at 507 Clinch to suit its purpose: a big, healthy, airy place with southern exposure and big windows; natural sunlight was important to the Adventist way of thinking. The clay-tile awning gave it a sunwashed Mediterranean touch. They called it the Good Health Building. It was a convenient place for an establishment of self-improvement, right across the street from the Medical Building and between the sites of the YMCA and the YWCA. Some Knoxvillians remembered taking swims at the YWCA, then retiring for a healthy lunch at the Vegetarian. A very inexpensive one, too—they say every meal at the Vegetarian Cafeteria was just 15 cents. (Even adjusted for inflation, that's just about $1.25.)

Today, vegetarianism strikes a certain fringe of steak-and-hamburgers Americans as somehow subversive, a threat to the beef industry, or masculinity, or the American way. But in 1926, this place made no bones about its purpose. A conspicuous rectangular sign, "VEGETARIAN CAFETERIA" hung over this well-traveled sidewalk. A larger sign on the building's western wall read "HOME OF VEGETARIAN CAFETERIA AND LOVELL'S MASSAGE PARLORS."

That's a story in itself. Massage parlors were all the rage—there were two or three other such establishments within a block. We can only assume the phrase "massage parlor" didn't imply the same services it does today. They advertised "Hydrotherapy Massage and Electric Light Treatment For Ladies and Gentlemen." Like some other massage parlors in this neighborhood, the Lovells boasted an "Electro-Turkish Bath," a hot-air bath something like a modern sauna. Raymond and Delia Lovell were an exuberantly eccentric pair who called each other "Adam" and "Eve" and referred to their home in Fountain City, naturally, as "the Garden of Eden." You could get your own apples upstairs, in the cafeteria.

Steps led up to it from the broad front door. It was a spacious place, with seating for 100, illumined with sunlight through nine tall windows. "The serving deck is so arranged as to give good and rapid service," they promised, "and the food is displayed so that the patron may see at a glance how carefully his physical needs have been considered."

Fortunately, a menu from the mid-1920s survives. They served breakfast, dinner (lunch to you), and supper. The menu begins with a manifesto: "We Americans dig our graves with our teeth." They explained their insistence on an "ovo-lacto vegetarian diet" with a un- appetizing description of the qualities of meat, which it called "flesh food."

"Flesh food is damaged by the waste products caused by the breaking down of the tissues and is often infected with disease.... When we take flesh into the stomach, we take these poisons too, and they cause or aggravate disease; they clog the system, overtaxing the kidneys.

"Flesh food is second-hand material. Everyone knows that used cars, used furniture, or used clothes are better than none at all, but most of us prefer the new article." That is, vegetables.

On the menu was one category called "True Meats," an apparent slap in the face to those who favored the false ones. It included "Nut meat smothered in onions," "Vegetarian pot pie," and Boston Baked Beans. Some of the selections were topped with something called "Veg-ex gravy." As if to prove that vegetarians were regular folks, there was a pimiento-cheese sandwich. Among the other available sandwiches was an olive-and-nut selection.

There was a "Summer Squash Baked with Egg Custard," "Vegetable Loaf," and "Escalloped Salsify," a root plant also known as the "vegetable oyster." Following the Seventh-Day Adventist dictums, the restaurant served no caffeinated beverages. You could substitute "Health Cocoa" for coffee, but some preferred spinach juice or "grape nectar."

By 1929, Louis Crowder was apparently discouraged about keeping the 100-seat restaurant full. One Pernell Swartz seems to have taken it over that year, converting it to the Vegetarian Bakery. By 1931, though, they'd moved it just around the corner to a boarding house at 513 Walnut St., where it was known as "the Vegetarian," again under Crowder, who also ran a concern called the "Good Health Food Co."

Later at the same location, it was known as "the Vegetarian Dining Room," a.k.a. "Finley's Dining Room," operated by the widow Annie Finley. It last appears in 1935, when Mrs. Finley seems to have retired. It might have seemed a promising location, directly behind the burgeoning headquarters of the new Tennessee Valley Authority, but Knoxville's early experiment in vegetarian restaurants apparently didn't outlast Mrs. Finley's retirement.

Leland Straw, one of the few people around who knows anything about the place, thinks it was a victim of the times. "The Depression came, and a lot of things went down," he says. A lifelong vegetarian now in his 90s, the Adventist educator moved here from Nashville in 1940, after the last Vegetarian cafeteria closed; he never visited the one in Knoxville, but worked as a waiter at its sister cafeteria in Nashville in the early '30s. "A lot of people came," he says. "They had good food."

He helped clear out the Clinch Avenue building when it sold, about the same time he was helping establish the Little Creek Academy. He knew Lida Scott well, and he says she spent her later years at Madison College, an Adventist-run school in the Nashville area. He heard her voice some regrets about the expense of the Good Health Building—$90,000, if he remembers correctly.

The Little Creek Academy, off Northshore near Concord, closed in 1994, moving some of its functions to another institution in Crossville. But the Little Creek Sanitarium is still there: a private nursing home which feeds its patients a strictly ovo-lacto vegetarian diet. Longtime administrator Ann Goodge says that's the way it is, and everybody knows about it before they're admitted. "It's surprising how well people adjust to it," she says. "I've had very few complaints."

Downtown, the Good Health Building survives as the capacious accounting offices of Bible, Harris, Smith. LeRoy Bible, CPA, is proud of his building's heritage; a framed photo of the Vegetarian Cafeteria hangs in the ante-room. Bible admits that he knows of no vegetarians on his staff.