If Gordon Ramsay had been born in Tennessee and pursued a winding culinary path that began at McDonald’s before eventually making its way to the recently reopened Broadway Market on East Hill Avenue one mile from the heart of downtown Knoxville, he may have turned out something like Don DeVore.
Consider: DeVore – who co-owns Broadway Market with his wife, Lauren – is big on presentation. Customers often remark on the beauty of the plates of food they’re served because how it looks is always a good indicator of how it’s going to taste, DeVore believes.
Also: He refuses to compromise with substandard ingredients. He’s not even serving one of his signature dishes, scallops, because inflation has caused the price to skyrocket.
“I used to buy them at $15, $16 a pound, and now they’re double that. That’s crazy!” he told BLANK Newspaper recently. “The ones I sell and cook are as good as they get, but I’m not going to buy them because I can’t afford to serve them to people. I can’t get in $400 worth of scallops and sit there with them because people can’t afford them. I try to keep our prices somewhat approachable. I can’t sell an order of French fries for $12.”
His manner of speaking – plain, coarse, direct and peppered with the occasional invective too salty to print in this publication – evokes another comparison to Ramsay, but on the flip side of that is a tenderness that’s much closer to the surface these days.
Broadway Market – one of Knoxville’s best-kept dining secrets that many regulars would prefer stay that way – almost didn’t make it to 2021.
For that matter, neither did DeVore, and his survival after a medical scare earlier this year, along with the ensuing recovery and outpouring of support by friends, customers and random strangers, has made him a grateful man.
“All the monetary support, that was unbelievable, and when I saw it happening, all I thought was that it could ease my mind some and allow me to concentrate on staying alive,” DeVore said. “I’ve played enough football, I’ve raced motorcycles for a bunch of years offroad – I’m just the original old badass – so I know that when you’re sick or hurting or even close to dying, that’s what you’ve got to concentrate on.
“So it really did ease my mind. You’re grateful and you can’t believe it, and in a lot of ways you’re just shocked, but you also think, ‘We can concentrate on getting better and getting well so we can maybe go back to work.’ Because hell, I don’t know what else to do, and I’m too old to do anything else!”
Say this for DeVore: He’s done a lot, and all of his experiences have sharpened his culinary know-how to make the fare at Broadway Market what it is today. After starting out as a teenager working at McDonald’s, he came to the University of Tennessee to earn a degree in literature; there, he met Lauren, and when she got a job in Seattle, he followed. He landed his first role as a chef at a cafe in the city’s famous Pike Place Market, moved back to Knoxville and launched their own establishment (the Painted Table) in West Knoxville before moving to Charleston, South Carolina.
From Knoxville to Florida and back to Knoxville … from Sequoyah Hills Cafe and Market (where Plaid Apron sits today) to eateries in Anderson and Blount counties … the couple continued to perfect their culinary offerings while searching for a forever home in which to offer them – as well as a place big enough to contain DeVore’s bombastic personality.
“I’ve been doing it longer than a lot of chefs around here have been alive. I’ve been all over the damn country, in some great cities, cooking, and I know that if you feed somebody some s—- food, you deserve to get called out,” he said. “I love what I do because somebody’s got to feed people … but you’ve got to be honest about it, and you’ve got to give people good food at a good price. I’m pretty outspoken about that, and if I come into your place, you better be putting something good on the plate, because if you don’t, forget about the other Yelpers – here comes Don!”
After opening Broadway Market in the former K Brew Coffee location, moving down Broadway and finally relocating to East Hill Avenue, the DeVores then had to contend with the COVID-19 pandemic. It was a struggle, but one they managed to weather … at least until May. Don had been feeling unwell for weeks, but like many individuals with no health insurance, he chose not to go to the doctor until his abdominal pain was excruciating.
After several hours in the Fort Sanders emergency department, he was sent home with medication, but the next day, the pain was even more intense. This time, they kept him, and a colonoscopy revealed a mass that doctors suspected might be colon cancer. Gastroenterologist Dr. Jason Huffman happened to be on call – “that was just dumb luck, because I was a miserable bastard,” DeVore added – and he brought in Dr. Gregory Midis, a surgical oncologist.
“He comes in on Monday morning and erases the dry erase board they’ve got their stuff on and starts making a diagram of my torso,” DeVore recalled. “He starts talking about what they’re going to do, where they’re going to cut me open and how if they get in there and it’s cancer, what the plan is – probably to start chemo[therapy] right away, and even if not, he told me I would be on a [colostomy] bag for two months.
“Well, he goes in and does it, and whenever I’m awake from the surgery, he comes in there and says, ‘Well, we cut enough s— out, and even though we’ve got to wait on pathology to confirm it, I don’t think it’s cancer.’ I was just lying there thankful, because he told me later that if it had been, it would have probably been impossible to beat.
“I would be dead by now, or close to it,” DeVore added, uncharacteristically quiet. “Something like that wakes you up a little. It makes you realize that nothing’s that important anymore.”
He remained in the hospital for two weeks, and the recuperation took another two months before a follow-up surgery removed the bag and “put me back together,” DeVore said. After such a long convalescence during which his movement and activity were limited, he “felt like hammered s— for a solid month,” he added.
“I got to where I started walking, and I looked like I was about 1,000 years old,” he said. “There for a while, especially when I was in the hospital, I was knocking on death’s door, and I really thought, ‘I’m done. I’m retired. I’m poor already, so I can just quit and be poor. I can’t see doing this.'”
After a week into his recovery, however, he began to see the light at the end of the tunnel. Becky Ferguson, a family friend, organized a GoFundMe campaign to help with the couple’s medical expenses, and it raised almost $25,000. At first, the DeVores planned to get Broadway Market back open by late August, but the pace of his recovery, along with the work on the restaurant to install a commercial hood that will make food prep faster and more efficient, slowed down those plans.
At the beginning of December, the DeVores reopened – albeit for call-ahead orders and dine-in by reservation only for the time being – with an expanded menu. Old standards like fried and grilled chicken and seafood (except for scallops) and burgers are on it, as are a variety of po’boys and more. In some ways, the stops and starts of the reopening process have been aggravating – the exhaust for the new hood shipped along a circuitous route before disappearing entirely, meaning a six-week wait on another one – but where such situations might have brought out his Southern-fried Gordon Ramsay temper before, it’s a lot easier to let things go these days.
“I just try not to complicate stuff, because people get so complicated,” he said. “Man, I’m old-school. We’ve got a new menu with a bunch of new stuff, but some of the old favorites are on there, as well, and the hood makes us able to do more things. We’ve been out of it for a while now – almost eight months – and a lot of stuff’s changed, but I didn’t start feeling good until September.
“For a bit there, I thought, ‘God, what have I done? We’ve got people doing this work, and we’re spending money we don’t have. I don’t know if I’ll be able to do it.’ But in the end, you just put in the work. You work long, hard hours, and you’re on your feet. And this body’s got a lot of miles on it! I just turned 60 this year, but for an old cook, I’m still pretty fast.”
At the same time, he refuses to sacrifice quality for the sake of expediency. In DeVore’s world, there’s only one way to do it: the right way. And he’ll prepare his food accordingly, whether you’re his best friend or not.
“If I hate you and you come in here, I’m going to cook your food just as well as I would for somebody I love,” he said. “I do it because that’s what I’m supposed to do, and that’s never changed.”
One thing that has changed: the attention he pays to the words he uses to say grace. Like many praying men and women, such prayers of thanks can sometimes become rote exercises in muscle memory recitation. Now, however, the blessings … and their meanings … hold special places in DeVore’s still-beating heart.
“Whenever we say grace, we say the same sorts of things: ‘Thanks for good health, family and friends,’ and now I always say ‘good health’ first,” he said. “Because that can be taken away. It can happen to anybody, and it happened to me. I’m alive, and I’m lucky, because when you get something like that cut out of you, it could have gone the other way just as easily.”
