Knoxville’s elder restaurants challenge the industry with longevity
by Leslie Wylie
When it comes to restaurants per capita, Knoxville could eat most U.S. cities under the table and still have room for dessert. Unfortunately, however, the harsh reality of any all-you-can-eat buffet is that after the last customer has been served, the surplus has to be thrown out. For local restaurants, staying in the business is a constant struggle not to be one of those last uneaten cubes of Jell-O, bite-sized casualties of the city’s culinary death toll.
As a result, there are only a handful of local restaurants that truly qualify as senior citizens and even fewer that have managed to age gracefully. Collectively, the decades have assaulted them with fires, floods and economic droughts—perhaps proving that what doesn’t kill a restaurant makes it stronger. The ones that live to tell about it harbor an abundance of sage advice as well as some interesting stories, the sort that require a loosening of the imagination’s waistband to fully digest.
Consider the history of Regas, which ownership group Connor, Regas, Thompson LLC considers to have been founded on July 7, 1919. Although questions have been raised as to whether it bore the same name and occupied the same location back then as it does today or whether it was actually relocated to its present site at North Magnolia and Depot in the mid-‘20s from a family-owned precursor further uptown, the fact remains that Regas has undergone a dramatic change in identity over the past three-quarters of a century.
By the time Bill Regas, son of co-founder Frank Regas and a partner in the CRT group, was working there as a teenager in the ‘40s, the restaurant stood where it does now, which at the time was the floor level of a five-story hotel. He recalls manning the counter opposite the late Wendy’s founder, Dave Thomas, and describes the restaurant in its youth as a one-room, all-night diner where workers from the nearby Southern Depot could stop in for the blue plate special.
“It was an 18-stool counter with six or eight tables and six or eight booths, and that was it. It started in a very meager, small way, and it’s grown to over 400 seats,” Regas says. “You have to evolve with the times, change slightly with the times. You don’t try to stick too rigidly to the same thing.”
Evolution, in the case of Regas’ transformation from a railway diner to the hub of swanky inner-city dining, more closely resembled a procession of radical leaps and bounds interspersed with periods of calm and slowing, at times, even to a standstill. Such was the case in 2000, when the restaurant shut its doors for more than six months before reopening with the help of new investors.
With its questionable early years and temporary closing, is it fair, then, to hold Regas up against other local restaurants as the bionic grandfather of Knoxville dining? Maybe not, but there does seem to be a kind of universal recipe for success in the restaurant business, and Regas—an institution that has kept itself, or various incarnations of itself, more or less alive for slightly more or less than 85 years—seems to have a pretty good handle on its ingredients. In the spirit of this, Regas will be sharing complimentary slices of red velvet cake with patrons during its anniversary month this July. “We’re saying that 85 years is just a piece of cake,” Regas says. “We intend to remain a Knoxville tradition for quite some time.”
Another longstanding local restaurant, Litton’s, owes its longevity in part to a similar ability to evolve, albeit with changes in location and business structure, in response to the community’s needs. Four generations ago in 1946, the Litton family opened a neighborhood grocery store in Inskip that became well known for its to-go lunch business, specializing in four-for-a-dollar sandwiches and cups of pinto beans with a bun stuck on top—unlikely predecessors of today’s Litton’s menu. Barry Litton inherited the business from his father and grandfather in 1980, upon which he moved it to its present location in Fountain City.
“When we moved, it started out as a meat and seafood market, but one day a guy came in and asked for a hamburger. So we fixed one on the skillet for him, and the next day he came back with three people,” Litton explains.
Since that legendary first Litton’s burger, the philosophy of “give the customers what they want and they’ll come back” has held up well enough to earn the restaurant national notoriety. Litton hopes to pass on what he has learned to his own children, all of whom are involved in some facet of the business.
Family involvement seems to be another recurring trend in long-term restaurant survival. Wright’s Cafeteria at 5403 North Middlebrook Pike has prided itself on home-style country cooking since 1962, when J.B. Wright’s 15-year-old grocery merged with his wife Ella-May’s restaurant. When the couple retired in 1975, son David Wright and his wife Donna took over, to be later accompanied by their own daughter, Robin Griffin.
Evolution holds less importance for the Wrights, who define progress as keeping with tradition.
“We just try to keep everything the same all the time,” David says. “We probably haven’t changed half a dozen things over the past 30 years. And we’ve got a real faithful bunch of customers. We’ve got a lot of them who have eaten with us for so long, oh Lord, they were eating in here back with my mother and daddy.”
Nancy Ayres, second-generation co-owner of Ye Olde Steak House, agrees that finding what works and sticking with it is the best way to keep a restaurant alive—even if the restaurant itself burns down, as was the case with the steak house in 2002.
“We have people who come in here to say that they ate here 20 or 30 years ago, and it still tastes the same as it did then today,” Ayres says, adding that two cooks have been with the restaurant since it opened in 1968, and employee turnover is virtually nonexistent. “We don’t change our menu a lot, either. I think a lot of restaurants, especially the newer ones, they make a habit of fiddling around with their menus, and I just don’t think that’s such a good policy.”
Another reproach Ayres has for newer restaurants is their tendency to fall in line with the mainstream, a sin that she considers second only to the impersonality of chain restaurants. “If you’re going to open a restaurant, you’ve got to have your own ideas. I think people appreciate the fact that you’re doing things on your own and not just copying another restaurant. There’s just too much of the same thing out there.”
Unique presentation coupled with tradition is the formula at work for Pizza Palace, the original Magnolia Avenue drive-in that has been relying on the same family recipes since 1961. The place exists as a kind of mid-century time capsule, an anachronistic alternative to the area’s influx of fast food chains.
“The customers know what to expect when they get here,” says Charlie Peroulas, a son of one of three Greek brothers who founded the restaurant. “That’s what we do. It’s a competitive industry, but that’s what my father taught me: As long as you keep the customers happy, you’ll stay in business.”
Unfortunately, the key to making it in the restaurant world occasionally ends up on somebody else’s key chain. This is the context of reality that Sixth Avenue’s Glenwood Sandwich Shop has finally found itself operating within, after weathering more than its fair share of misfortunes over the years and consistently emerging no worse for the wear. Since 1946, it has survived two electric fires without the aid of insurance, including one in 1981 that destroyed the restaurant’s interior, as well as the kind of flooding from First Creek that owner Lillian Pritchett swears had people navigating the road in boats. Forces of nature, however, Glenwood can handle; Pritchett says that it’s the nearby Interstate she’s worried about. The restaurant is awaiting instructions from the state to close due to impending I-40 construction.
“I don’t know when. They say it’ll be within the year,” Pritchett says. “We’ll close unless he [son James] can find somewhere else right around here. You know, I can’t do this much longer.”
It’s analogous to the situation that Louis’, the 47-year-old drive-in Italian restaurant, found itself in a few years back when designs for the new I-640 off-ramp cut straight through the original establishment on Old Broadway. Louis moved into a nearby building and has done well since, but Pritchett raises a good question: Where does a restaurant draw the line between flexibility and standing its ground? When is enough enough?
There are still a few stoic restaurant owners out there who would answer the latter question with “never.” Harold Shersky of Harold’s Kosher Style Food Center, established in 1948 on Gay Street, turned 85 Sunday a week ago and has no intentions of shutting his deli’s doors anytime soon.
Sandy Adams, an employee who began working at Harold’s with her mother at age 13, explains, “He and [Harold’s late wife] Addie have always made customers feel welcome and had that attitude about them that everybody was somebody. I think you have to do that if you’re going to stay in the restaurant business this long, and Harold says he’s going to stay right here until he dies.”
March 11, 2004 • Vol. 14, No. 11
© 2004 Metro Pulse
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