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Feature article
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‘Aw shucks’ attitude serves tea room well
By Fred Sauceman
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The Mezzanine Tea Room
LOCATION: 122 Broad St., Kingsport
HOURS: Open 11 a.m.-2 p.m., Tuesday through Friday
PHONE: 423-246-1331
MISCELLANY: Reservations are accepted |
The kitchen at the Mezzanine Tea Room in downtown Kingsport looks like a typical home arrangement. There are no high-priced gas stoves and no multi-tiered convection ovens. The dishwasher is owner Sharon Hurd’s husband Carroll.
The simple, functional layout is consistent with Sharon’s “aw shucks” attitude about restaurant management. Even though she had no formal restaurant experience and no prior training, she’s made her tea room a success since 1994.
As you walk down Broad Street, the only clue that quiche is impending is the chalkboard outside Sharon’s gift shop, Home Sweet Home. Pass through the shop and up the stairs, and you’re in a wonderland of soups, salads, quiches and desserts, all made by Sharon and Kathy Butler and smilingly served by Pam Ross and Kim Barnett.
The Mezzanine Tea Room occupies the upper reaches of the Dobyns-Taylor building where Sharon remembers shopping as a young girl.
“This was the sports department and the men’s department,” she says. “What is now our kitchen was once a storeroom. When I first saw it, I knew this space had possibilities, and I can’t see myself in any other place.”
Sharon was flipping through her collection of cookbooks one day and noticed a chicken quiche. She decided to modify the recipe by adding pecans, and the resulting chicken-pecan quiche became the tea room’s most popular offering.
Her chicken salad has similar origins, and Sharon’s touches are honey and cranberries. It’s served either on a plate or on a croissant.
Sharon’s business philosophy and her approach to recipe selection are the same.
“I’m not afraid to try anything,” she says. “I enjoy playing with food. I can make soup out of about anything. One employee once said if you handed me a rock, I could make soup out of it.
“The other morning we cut up a bunch of vegetables and decided we’d call it spring vegetable soup.”
The day I sat down to talk with Sharon, she had just made three kinds of quiche, chicken salad and three soups. When chicken-pecan quiche disappears, as it frequently does, diners often opt for Mexican quiche, filled with salsa, black beans, green chilies and cheese.
“Most people come to a tea room for quiche,” Sharon says, “because they can’t get it other places.”
When summer arrives, the season’s fresh tomatoes are combined with Parmesan cheese for yet another take on quiche.
The inspiration for Sharon’s fudge pie was the version once served by Freels Drug Store in Kingsport, and the recipe for the Mezzanine’s Swiss chocolate cake was given to Sharon by her aunt, Ruth Fleming.
My wife pronounced the Mezzanine’s peanut butter pie the peanut-butteriest she’d ever had. The most often-ordered dessert is coconut cake.
A different tea is featured each week, and those include passion fruit, peach, blackberry and raspberry.
Bridge groups and Sunday school classes, couples and a lot of men make up the Mezzanine’s clientele. Says Sharon, “This is not just a woman place.”
“A lot of tea rooms are named for birds,” Sharon tells me. “These old buildings in Kingsport all have mezzanines, so I thought I’d just call mine that.”
Sharon’s skill in running a tea room has been passed down to her daughter, Deana, who now operates one called Lulu’s (her childhood nickname) in the Powell community near Knoxville.
Tea rooms once almost became relics of the past, but now, thanks to places like the Mezzanine and Two Sisters in Kingsport, a tea room resurgence is taking place in the South.
--------GoTriCities--------
Food writer Fred Sauceman, author of the book “The Place Setting: Timeless Tastes of the Mountain South — from Bright Hope to Frog Level,” is senior writer and executive assistant to the president for public affairs at East Tennessee State University. E-mail him at sauceman@etsu.edu.
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