Knoxville’s newly renovated S&W Restaurant is a masterpiece of restoration, community spirit and culinary expertise
Entering the new S&W Grand Café in downtown Knoxville, a gentle breeze of nostalgia wafts over you. Perhaps it’s the glazed terra cotta Art Deco façade of the old building. Or perhaps it’s the dazzling reconstruction inside, with its two-story, mirrored wall flanked by rich, wooden paneling or the ornamental, ivory-colored ceiling decorated with panels of acorns and oak leaves.
A curving, red-carpeted staircase with gleaming handrails rises to the mezzanine level. Another staircase brings you a dreamy floor higher, where you can take in views of the city.
It may be hard to believe that such a lavish dining space was built in 1937 during the bleak years of the Great Depression. After being closed for 28 years, the old S&W has been brought back to life in stunning fashion.
Saving and renovating the S&W and two other buildings adjacent to it has been a five-year process that took considerable imagination, determination, cooperation, negotiation—and about $5 million. Seeing the facelift on the 500 block of Gay Street (Knoxville’s main downtown corridor) leaves little doubt that the effort and money were well spent. The new S&W Grand Café, so reminiscent of the historic restaurant’s glory days, opened to great acclaim on Oct. 18, 2009.
The S&W came that close to being demolished several times during the more than quarter century of its abandonment.
Five years ago, its most recent date with demolition was slated to make room for a highly anticipated, eight-screen Regal movie theater. But the folks at Knox Heritage, Knox County’s primary historic preservation organization, decided they weren’t going to let that happen.
Knox Heritage members—principally executive director Kim Trent, president Finbarr Saunders and downtown developer John Craig—set to work figuring out a way to save the S&W. Saunders requested the aid of Knoxville mayor Bill Haslam in helping secure time for Knox Heritage to produce an alternate plan to preserve the 15,000-square-foot S&W. Haslam, despite being a major proponent of the new theater project, agreed to the delay.
Meanwhile, Craig asked local architect and fellow Knox Heritage member Faris Eid to do a preliminary sketch of a possible redesign for the theater that would allow the S&W to remain intact. Eid managed to come up with a reconfiguration that allowed the Regal Riviera Stadium 8 to have the same square footage and number of seats as originally planned. After careful consideration, the Regal organization agreed to the new design.
As the City of Knoxville and Knox Heritage began investigating the particulars of renovating the old buildings—a total of 29,000 square feet of space—it became clear that this would add at least several million dollars to the project. The City of Knoxville gave $10,000 to Knox Heritage to help close the funding gap.
“I give Mayor Haslam a lot of credit for being willing to take the risk because the original design for the Regal would have been much easier,” says Saunders, now a Knox County commissioner and a director of Knox Heritage. “He was willing to step up and take some political risk and some financial risk.”
The City issued a request for proposals to renovate several Gay Street buildings in the spring of 2005 with the stipulation that builders had to preserve the historic elements of the structures. Craig formed a limited liability development group along with Eid, and InSite Development Corporation president Wayne Blasius named 500 Block Partners LLC after the project’s general street address. The group produced the winning bid for the project and secured an option to buy three buildings including the S&W. Working out the complex purchase and public/private financing package with the city required protracted discussions. Most of the funding for the $5 million project came through 500 Block’s own investments and construction loans, but historic and other tax credits account for about 35 percent of the project’s renovation costs. Five Hundred Block LLC finally closed on the purchase of the property for about $527,000 in 2008.
Renovation
Giving these historic buildings a whole new look turned out to be a massive project. First, Knoxville/Knox County’s Public Building Authority oversaw city-funded work to stabilize the rear wall that serves all three buildings. Then, Jim Hickman Construction Company began restoring the buildings. Craig, who still headed 500 Block LLC, teamed up with developers Tim Hill and Mike Hatcher and publisher Dane Baker. Eid remained attached to the project as architect.
Jim Buhl, one of the project managers for the redevelopment, used the 1937 blueprints from first S&W building in Charlotte to guide him in restoring Knoxville’s historic restaurant.
But the S&W building was in terrible disrepair. The roof had fallen in, so there was considerable water damage. Much of its interior structure had to be completely rebuilt. Buhl and his crew salvaged a few of the S&W Cafeteria’s original plaster and metal ornamental ceiling medallions, each weighing about 200 pounds. A local manufacturer made a mold and reproduced the full complement of them in a material that didn’t weigh as much. They were also able to reproduce the crown molding that topped the walls.
The capiz shells covering the mezzanine’s walls were broken and dingy. Buhl found a company in Malaysia that could provide the same type of seashells. Two workers spent six days painstakingly applying about 9,500 of the delicate shells, one at a time.
The S&W’s terrazzo flooring was largely intact, though some squares had to be repaired. A local company cleaned, polished and repaired the original 10,000-square-foot terrazzo flooring. Buhl estimates the flooring would cost about $95 per square foot if installed today.
The 19 wooden steps of the staircase rising to the mezzanine floor were still intact, though its brass handrails were gone. Most of the marble stairs in the stairway going up from the mezzanine level to the banquet floor level had been destroyed, but Buhl and his crew were able to replace them with ones discovered on a marble staircase on the lower floor in the back of the building. The cafeteria’s revolving doors had to be reconstructed. Luckily, the same company that made the originals is still in business.
“We found the original four revolving door leaves,” recalls Buhl. “I was able to find a name on it—International Revolving Door. I went on the Internet, and sure enough they were still in business. I talked to the gentleman who runs the company in Evansville, Ind. I took one of the doors that was in the best condition to them, and they remanufactured four of them, made to look identical to the original doors.”
The outside of the building was in surprisingly good shape. Its Art Deco façade needed minimal renovation. The original black sign attached to it had to be replaced with a similar modern version, and the matching black-and-white glass canopy required some repair.
Buhl and Craig both said they felt proud of their respective roles in the S&W renovation, but they had also been motivated by a sense of community pride.
“From a preservationist’s standpoint and even as a developer, I feel this is not our project,” says Craig. “This is everybody’s project that we were being allowed to work on. So many people have memories of the original S&W. It’s such a part of their lives. Being able to bring it back makes so many people happy. It’s what preservation is really all about. To be able to bring that back as part of the community is the best thing I’m ever going to do in my career.”
Craig, who has his own fond childhood memories of the S&W, believes the 500 Block project has marked a turning point for Knox Heritage.
“It demonstrated that historic preservation and economic development go hand in hand and are not opposing forces,” he says. “The end result is this is a much better project overall having both of these elements rather than one or the other. Regal is very anxious to get the S&W open because they know that everybody who comes down there to eat is a potential movie customer. Each movie customer is a potential S&W diner. So it helps both.”
Open For Business
The Art Deco S&W building captured Stephanie Balest’s attention when she and her husband moved to Knoxville in 2004. She and brother Brian, then working at a four-star restaurant in Charleston, S.C., had grown up in the restaurant industry and were looking for a good place to open an eatery of their own. Stephanie showed Brian the S&W building when he came to Knoxville to scope out possible restaurant locations. He felt the building’s allure, but at the time much of the city’s recent downtown revitalization had yet to take place, so he persuaded his sister that the west side of town would be a better location. Their Northshore Brasserie quickly gained acclaim and diners aplenty with its French cuisine, excellent service, and elegant ambiance.
A few years later, when Craig met Stephanie Balest at a Knox Heritage event, she happened to mention her appreciation for the S&W building. Craig had been looking for the right restaurateur for the esteemed address and knew he’d found the right person who would do the space justice. He’d eaten at the Brasserie many times and had been impressed with the food and the whole operation. He could tell the Balests would respect the spirit of the S&W.
“We weren’t really looking to open another restaurant,” says Stephanie Balest. “But it was amazing how much downtown Knoxville had developed in those two-and-a-half years. There were more people living downtown, and a big thing was that the movie theater had opened. I couldn’t believe the S&W building was still there.”
The Balests brought in their Brasserie executive chef Shane Robertson and two silent partners as co-owners of the new S&W Grand Café. The main floor and mezzanine levels together can handle about 200 diners and offer two full-service bars. A third-floor banquet room seats approximately 160. The new S&W won’t feature cafeteria-style self-service, nor will all its seating be in straight-back chairs at square tables like its predecessor. But the building recaptures the flavor of the original.
“I want people to appreciate this building,” says Balest. “It’s nice to just sit and eat a cup of soup in this nice, historic Knoxville icon with its beautiful architecture. So we’re staying true to the space while also modernizing it.”
Diners will notice the same nod to the past in the new S&W menu. Craig’s research dug up old menus from the 1930s that the Balests and Robertson referred to when putting together the new restaurant’s menu. They decided to forgo such Depression-era staples as pig brains, pork knuckles and cow tongue, and concentrated their S&W classics instead on traditional Southern dishes such as bone-in ham steak, meatloaf, liver and onions, and fried chicken served with green beans, collard greens, fried okra and mashed potatoes.
But not everything the original S&W served was classic Southern comfort food, and the same is true for S&W Grand Café’s ample menu. The restaurant’s offerings will run the gamut from soups and salads to sandwiches, seafood and steaks. Dishes range in price from about $6 to $29.
“The menu has sort of a diner feel,” explains Balest. “It’s a lunch and dinner menu all day long. In terms of prices, we wanted to make sure it had something everyone could afford.”
From a run-down empty building to a charming centerpiece of downtown renovation, the new S&W Grand Café is set to earn a new reputation as a place where time-honored history meets exquisite dining pleasure.
An iconic past, a bright future
The S&W Cafeteria was the brainchild of Frank Sherrill and Fred Webber, two North Carolina natives whose service as mess sergeants during World War I gave them experience in cooking and preparing food for large numbers of people. After the war, they returned to the Tar Heel state.
Sherrill and Webber were intrigued by the growing success of cafeterias, the self-serve restaurants popular in large American cities at the time. A cafeteria was, after all, a highly refined version of the mess tents they had run during the war. In 1920, the budding restaurateurs opened a cafeteria in downtown Charlotte, using the initials of their last names—S and W. The building was designed in the Art Deco style that was all the rage at the time.
The success of the Charlotte S&W led to Sherrill and Webber opening another one in downtown Asheville, N.C., at 56 Patton Ave. in 1929. This S&W was in a swanky Art Deco building designed by noted architect Douglas Ellington during the highest pitch of the Roaring ‘20s.
Other S&Ws opened in downtown cities throughout the South—Knoxville and Chattanooga, Tenn.; Roanoke, Va.; and Raleigh, Atlanta, and Washington, D.C. Sherrill kept the S&W moniker even after Webber sold his interest in the growing chain after a few years. All of these early restaurants were housed in elegant Art Deco buildings that were celebrated as beloved public spaces.
The later S&Ws built in the 1960s were not as architecturally appealing, as they were located in the suburbs, often in malls and other shopping centers. There were 16 S&W Cafeterias by the mid-1960s when business began dropping. The operation closed its least successful restaurants. Eventually, the “malling” of America in the 1960s and ’70s killed off the once popular cafeteria chain.
Asheville’s S&W relocated to the Asheville Mall in 1974 and later closed in the early 1980s. In 2008, developer Steve Moberg restored Asheville’s old Patton Avenue S&W building to something very close in appearance to the original and used the S&W initials to name his own new version of the restaurant—the Steak & Wine. Upstairs is Satchel’s Martini Bar and adjacent to the main restaurant is Sadie’s, a casual seafood café. The Asheville Comedy Club, a new tenant in the building, opened this fall in the basement.
Plans were recently announced for the renovation of the historic S&W in Roanoke, Va., though not for use as a restaurant. Roanoke developers have purchased the building at 16 West Church Street that once housed the city’s S&W Cafeteria. The structure, which features limited Art Deco appointments, was the second location for the cafeteria in the Star City and dates back to 1951. Development group 16 W. Church LLC intends to reproduce as much of the original architecture as possible and make a “healthy living” center in the space. The building currently houses the Downtown Sports Club, and the group hopes to attract tenants such as a convenience store/grocer, a pharmacy, light food service facilities, and healthcare professionals. Capitalizing on the S&W name, the developers will call the renewed facility The StayWell Marketplace.
Remembering the Knoxville S&W
People think of cafeterias today as being sort of stodgy. The S&W was a very elegant place. And it was the epitome of restaurant technology when it opened. This place could serve 700 people an hour. It was a very efficient operation. The kitchen was down in the basement. They had a dumbwaiter that would bring the food up, and a separate dumbwaiter would take dirty dishes down and drop it right on the line to be washed. It was also one of the first restaurants to have air conditioning downtown. It was the place you went.
... My grandmother tells the story of the day when the S&W got integrated. She was there with some friends and suddenly there was some big commotion at the door. In walked these four African-American ladies dressed to the nines, big hats, the whole ensemble. She said Roosevelt, one of the waiters, went over, escorted them to a table right in the front, sat them down and proceeded to take care of them. My grandmother said she’ll never forget the look of pride on his face.
— John Craig, 500 Block LLC lead partner, Knox Heritage president
Back in ’36 and ’37, I worked as a carpenter on the S&W job. I was around 20 then. I was paid $40 for 40 hours and brought home $39.60. Doesn’t sound like much but you could buy 25 pounds of White Lilly flour for a dollar and a nickel. While I was working on that job, I had my first date with my late wife Rose. Sometime later we got married and were married for 57 years before she passed away 13 years ago. The S&W was the best place to eat in Knoxville. When we’d go shopping uptown, we’d go to the S&W and eat.
... I had some wood molding with a leaf carved in it that I had kept all these years. I gave it to them to put back on the new construction job.
— Von Garrett
I substituted several times for Lois Harris, who played the B3 organ at the S&W. I played big band music mostly. Everybody was so friendly. People would sit there on the benches close to the organ and listen to the music even after they had eaten. At Christmas time the restaurant would have different groups provide entertainment. I played with a local chorus group called the James King Chorus. Right before Christmas one year, the group lined up on the stairway and I played the piano for them. We didn’t use the organ that time. We furnished music and Christmas carols for the diners.
— Clara Sharp Smoot