Former Downtown Grill & Brewery mainstay eyes West Knoxville as next stop on his continuing culinary adventures
Fifteen months ago, Dan Goss stood in the middle of Gay Street in downtown Knoxville and was hit with a tsunami of déjà vu.
The former managing partner of Downtown Grill & Brewery, who’s into the home stretch of Point B, a new venture coming to Ebenezer Road in West Knoxville, had watched with growing dread over the previous days and weeks as COVID-19 had descended upon East Tennessee. Like a Biblical plague of old, it started out slowly and inexorably, canceling events, shuttering businesses and driving away customers from his establishment, one of downtown’s most popular watering holes.
“We had seen the writings on the wall pretty early going into that St. Patrick’s Day weekend [in 2020], when things started getting canceled left and right,” Goss told BLANK Newspaper recently. “In our management meetings, we started talking about what we were going to do, about how we weren’t going to put our team members at risk, but we weren’t going to take money away from people who did want to work. But then that Saturday and Sunday hit, and it was bleak.”
Like, ghost town bleak. No traffic, pedestrian or automobile. There were no lines to see a movie at the downtown Regal theater, no crowds gathering around the kiosk at the Tennessee Theatre, no patrons leaving Mast General Store with bags full of rural-chic trinkets and souvenirs. It was, Goss added, exactly like the area used to be when Downtown Grill & Brewery first opened its doors in late 2002 as one of the pioneers of the downtown revival that’s transformed Knoxville over the past two decades.
“There was nothing here then, and we couldn’t have timed it worse if we’d wanted to,” Goss said. “As soon as we opened, the Tennessee Theatre closed for renovations; the Bijou Theatre lost funding, and they weren’t sure if they could keep it open; Market Square was shut down and torn up for renovations; and then they closed [Interstate] 40 because they were renovating the James White Parkway.
“We used to throw a football in the middle of Gay Street, with no worries of any traffic ever coming by. I remember one night, one of our brewers accidentally threw it through the neon light, and we had to ask the owners for $5,000 for a new light – and we weren’t making that in day, so it was a tough sell.”
But the brewery held on, and over time it came to serve as the linchpin for overall downtown revitalization efforts on Gay Street. Goss is a humble guy who appreciates the sentiment but points to Regal, AC Entertainment and developer David Dewhirst as having parts to play, as well. His stories, however, tell the real tale: that while Knoxville’s transformation may have happened without Downtown Grill & Brewery, things might look a lot different or have taken a lot longer.
“I remember the executives from Mast General Store came in when they were thinking about opening up down here,” he said. “They came in on a Thursday, and then they came back in on a Sunday, and they called us over to tell us, ‘We were trying to decide about the store, but then we came here, and we saw your traffic. And we realized that if you have that, we’re going to have that. So we just want you to know, you’re the neighbor that brought us to town.’ Now, I’m not saying we’re the major catalyst for it, but we helped keep it warm down here as it started happening.”
But now the time has come for Goss, who wrapped up his role with the brewery in June, to move on – and he credits the pandemic, at least in part, for giving him the motivation.
Not that he’s ever lacked it. Originally from Northern California, Goss joined the Navy out of high school and spent his time as a nuclear and electrical operator. After his discharge, he spun his wheels back home in Cali before a chance conversation with a buddy in Knoxville convinced him to move to East Tennessee. That was in September 1992, and the following spring he enrolled at the University of Tennessee, intent on building out his military science and math background, getting a degree in biochemical engineering and finding work in one of the Oak Ridge labs.
“But then, probably my junior year, I was sitting there watching a centrifuge spin in a lab and thought, ‘Dude: is this really what you want to do?’” he said.
Short answer: no. Around the same time, he was supporting himself by working at Garcia’s, the now-closed Mexican restaurant in Downtown West, mostly in the back of house, since his previous restaurant work in California involved washing dishes and prep. The management at Garcia’s, however, gave him an opportunity to move to the front of house, and that’s when he “got bit by the bug,” he said.
“I ended up just stepping up and doing some part-time management with them and learning the restaurant side of stuff, and I realized that I really dig restaurants,” he said. “So I started going back to school for business marketing.”
From Garcia’s he went to Tony Roma’s, then Chili’s, and finally Silver Spoon, where he and Dave Bruce, current GM of Nama and one of the original managing partners of the Brewery, started making plans to open up a small place of their own in the Old City. That all changed when he got a phone call from Mark Harrison, the guy who would become the other managing partner for Downtown Grill & Brewery: What about the old Woodruff Building on Gay Street, constructed in 1905 and home to an iconic Knoxville department store until the early 1990s?
“We only had a little bit of money, and that was a big space, and I just told Mark that we didn’t have it,” Goss said. “But then he said the magic words, ‘What if I found the money?’”
By late summer of 2002, Harrison had set up a meeting with building owner John McCord; the pair joined the new venture as managing partners shortly thereafter, and the brewery opened that fall. Despite the urban blight that afflicted downtown at the time, Goss had high hopes, he added.
“From working in some of the other restaurants I had and bouncing around and working corporate and the mom-and-pop restaurants and knowing where we were at, I knew we would find the clientele,” he said. “We weren’t too far away from the campus, and we weren’t too far away from where people were living at the time. Knoxville’s kind of like that – it seems big, but you’re not that far from anything, and we just knew that if we did it, they would come.
“I was fortunate enough that I worked with a lot of talented people throughout my career, so we recruited talented bartenders, servers and cooks, and what they all had in common was this ability to get along and communicate with people. And our mission statement was just an encapsulation of what I had done through my career and what these people had done: When people come into our house, that’s exactly how we want to treat them. If someone’s a guest in your home, you don’t just nod toward the bathroom when they want to know where it is; you show them. You make sure they like what they’re eating. You get to know them by name.
“That’s what this is. We’ve built this so that every person coming in becomes a family member,” he added.
“We get to know them because they’re going to be the momentum to help us build this, and that’s all I was thinking about: How do we build us?”
It didn’t take long, he added, for things to get “wild.” A warning from the city about icicles on the awning led to McCord obtaining a permit for the first patio on Gay Street since the 1880s. They got in on the ground floor of the craft beer movement. They flirted with live music for a while. They simply looked for what worked, modified what didn’t and always sought to be a good neighbor, Goss added.
“I really was big in, and am still active, in the community,” he said. “I wanted to do a lot of things to kind of perpetuate and utilize the momentum the brewery had to help our neighborhoods because you can’t be a neighborhood bar if you’re not going to be a neighbor. So we started reaching out and doing charity work.”
The Leukemia and Lymphoma Society. The Love Kitchen. The Scarecrow Foundation. Through partnerships with other organizations and entities (including BLANK), Goss and his team sought to generate revenue for worthy causes and have raised “tens of hundreds of thousands of dollars using the voice of the brewery” over the years. Mostly, he added, because it was the right thing to do. But also because he’s the sort of guy who needs a challenge, and once the brewery found its footing and a formula for success, he had more idle time.
At least, until COVID hit. After that particularly bleak weekend, he and Harrison decided to shut down the restaurant even before the City of Knoxville issued a mandatory closure order, in hopes that by doing so early, they could get employees at the front of the line for unemployment checks and relief payments. For roughly 12 hours on the following Thursday, he entered the information of 114 brewery workers into the unemployment database. He made social media announcements. He informed regulars. And he gave pep talks to worried staffers who didn’t know what the future would hold.
From one of those, the seeds of Point B were planted, even though he didn’t know it at the time.
“I remember one kid came up and was asking, ‘What are we going to do?,’ and he and I had a similar conversation the week before when he was going through some stuff with some family members and was in a tough spot,” Goss said. “I said, ‘Just remember that story I told you about the duck. If you look at a duck on the water, he looks cool and calm, like he’s got his s*** together and he’s A-OK.
“‘But under the water, his feet are beating like hell, because the duck understands that you’ve got to work toward your goal even if nobody sees.’ I told him, ‘Be a duck because we’re all ducks in the water, and right now we’re at Point A. But there’s going to be a Point B at the end of this, and all you have to do is keep moving forward.”
Fast forward a few weeks later. Goss was spending most of his down time at home, save for taking care of brewery logistics where he could, such as relaying donations and contributions from loyal and long-time customers to employees through CashApp or Venmo, or occasionally dropping off food or liquor or cigarettes for team members who were struggling. In the cul-de-sac where he lived, he and his neighbors drew lines around their property so they could still socialize and their children could still play while maintaining the proper COVID-safe social distance, and it was during one of those conversations with a neighbor that he related the duck story.
“One of my neighbors said, ‘That’s really great – you should open your own restaurant and call it Point B! That would be really cool!’” she said.
In a serendipitous turn of events, the next day he got a phone call from his sister-in-law, a former property manager seeking work in the area. She happened to check in with the owner of a set of apartment buildings at 1020 Ebenezer Road that included a storefront. He wanted to put in a restaurant and knew of Goss by reputation … and suddenly, Point B became more than a motivational speech or a supportive suggestion from a neighbor.
The financing was tricky, though. After talking with 13 banks – all of which were leery to loan to a potential new restaurant venture in the middle of a pandemic, go figure – Buzz Goss (no relation, although they refer to themselves as “cousins”), president of Marble Alley Development that had overseen construction of the condos behind the brewery, finally put him in touch with a North Carolina-based institution that agreed to loan him the startup capital. Things progressed slowly, and as they often do, there was forward momentum followed by devastating setback. Last October, he hit a big one: The landlord decided to go with another offer for the space, and Point B was suddenly without a home. Then, his wife – Cyndie Goss, who serves as his partner in the new venture – came down with COVID the same month.
The following month, Goss himself contracted it, and it hit him hard.
“I ran a 103-degree fever for 10 days, and I was in and out of the hospital a couple of times,” he said. “I was hospitalized in January, and then I was diagnosed as a long-hauler, with cardiac and respiratory problems. I was hospitalized again in February or March because I had gone back to the brewery, and climbing one flight of stairs would make my pulse jump to 140, 150. I thought I was having a heart attack.
“Trying to work around the restaurant in general was tough, and that was another sign, I told my wife, that we had to get something smaller that’s just ours. So I reached back out to the landlord to see if he might have anything else, and that’s when he told me the property was available again.”
From there, it was full speed ahead, with the Gosses calling the shots. He has no complaints about any of his previous working relationships, but with the reins in their hands and theirs alone, he feels that more can be accomplished, and more can be done to help the community. Continued charity work will be a big focus, because while serving food and drinks is the whole purpose of the business, he can’t in good conscience make it the sole purpose.
Although, he added, plans are to do a pretty good job with that, too.
“We want to run brunch seven days a week because I don’t think there’s enough of that around here, and if you want an omelet on a Wednesday, I think you should be able to get one,” he said.
“We’re going to have charcuterie boards, brunch boards, seafood boards. We’ll be working with farmers’ markets and bringing in fresh produce, and with local ranchers to bring in fresh beef, pork and poultry. We want to work with bee farmers because a lot of our cocktails are going to focus on honeycomb and fresh honey.
“I think, when we come out of all of this, people are going to want that communal aspect, and the thing about Point B is that we’re not making it destination-oriented. We want Point B to be what it means to you. Maybe it is the place you stop at on the way home. Maybe it’s the place you take the kids after a ballgame. Maybe it’s the place you go for a lunch meeting.”
It’s definitely a step down, size-wise, from the 400 seats at the brewery. Point B will seat 100 inside, with another 40 to 50 on the patio, and while the original plan was to open by mid-August, supply and logistic challenges that are holdovers from the pandemic have likely pushed that back to mid-September.
But as of now, it’s his sole focus. A few weeks ago, his comrades at Downtown Grill & Brewery sent him off with a gathering that was, he described, “very surreal – like being at your own wake but being alive.” A former employee drove over from Memphis to attend; another was road-tripping across the country and rerouted his travels to be in town for it.
He’ll miss it, for sure. But in his own life, the brewery was Point A; now it’s time for Point B. And down the road … who knows?
“This isn’t downtown, like I’d like it to be, but Knoxville’s not that big that we’re so far away,” he said. “Our community is Knoxville. Not just downtown – not just West Knoxville – but Knoxville. And we’re eager to get back there one of these days. Our goal is to get this place going and get it to where it’s running, and then try to open up something downtown.
“I will always consider the brewery to be home, but it’s no different than when you grow up. And when you do, you’ve got to get out there and spread your wings.”
wildsmith@blanknews.com
Well done Dan! I’m confident that Point B will be a huge success.