Like mimeograph, telephone busy signals, and life before email, a moribund Market Square seems lost to the mists of time. It can be hard to remember that not too long ago the city center was a quiet place with a little midday traffic that simply died after 2 p.m. But Mahasti Vafaie remembers because she was there and open for business.

On Aug. 2, 1990, Vafaie opened the restaurant that remains an icon for the rebirth of Market Square and downtown Knoxville. The Tomato Head (then known as the Flying Tomato) opened as a lunch spot appeasing the early afternoon appetites of downtown workers. But in the intervening years, the growth of the restaurant would help change the face of Market Square and would introduce a number of concepts—from gourmet pizza to open-air wine service—that would contribute mightily to the transformation and tone not only of the city center, but also of Knoxville itself.

Vafaie, of course, had no such aspirations when she launched her business. The fact is she didn’t even plan on being a pizza purveyor, let alone a pioneer—chance and a stubborn landlord paved the way for that decision. All Vafaie had in mind was owning her own restaurant. When an affordable lease with an easy out clause (in the event that her restaurant plans failed) brought her to Market Square, she also acquired a pizza oven; and that’s exactly how Knoxville got its first taste of gourmet pizza.

“Initially we didn’t plan on doing pizza,” Vafaie says. “But, because the landlord wouldn’t take the oven out of the building, we said, okay, we have to do pizza, so let’s do fun and interesting ones.”

While the 1982 opening of Wolfgang Puck’s Spago in Los Angeles brought gourmet pizza into the national limelight, it wasn’t until Vafaie started advertising special pies topped with adventurous foods like smoked snails and frog legs that Knoxville’s pizza consciousness really jumped out of the box.

“Our specials were designed to catch your attention, just anything to make you stop in your tracks to look at the reader board,” she says. While a pizza topped with snails, smoked or otherwise, might still make the average bear look twice, items like sun-dried tomatoes, artichoke hearts, capers, pesto, fresh spinach, Fontina cheese, and other things that, today, seem almost run-of-the-mill pizza toppings were all novelties in Knoxville, summer of 1990.

The menu also introduced some of Knoxville’s first regularly available tofu, vegetarian, and vegan menu options. While there was a weekend brunch at the late Nature’s Pantry on Bearden Hill that had bean curd on offer, it was the Tomato Head’s Vegetarian Sub that first brought it onto the daily menu; it was also easily transformed into the city’s first consciously vegan sandwich, too. That original sub sandwich remains available, though now it’s just called the Vegetarian.

The response to the menu innovations was mostly positive, though Vafaie remembers one guest who swore she’d never step foot in the place again. But other folks did come back, many of whom were new to the city and employees of Whittle Communications—the now defunct media conglomerate had 900+ Knoxville employees who worked in the building that currently houses the Howard H. Baker Jr. United States Courthouse.

“We were really lucky to have opened when Whittle was still around,” Vafaie says. “I think that was a huge reason we were able to keep going. They were the initial customer base.”

In addition to the groundbreaking menu, Tomato Head also introduced the crazy idea of evening hours to Market Square in the spring of 1991. Despite Vafaie’s fear that nobody would come downtown after hours, a friend and co-worker, Jay Beasley, convinced her that a poster campaign throughout Fort Sanders and Maplehurst would bring enough business to sustain a Friday night opening. And so Tomato Head opened the doors for what was probably the first dinner service on Market Square in living memory.

But, sadly, Vafaie’s intuition was right. Nobody came. Not one person. And yet, for reasons that she still can’t quite explain, Vafaie persevered and opened the next Friday night as well. Nothing. Finally, several lonely nights after the beginning of the experiment, Vafaie recalls that “two people finally came in. But we had already turned off the oven, so we turned them away.” The couple, undeterred, promised that if the restaurant would open the next Friday, they would return with friends—and so they did.

At nearly the same time, Tomato Head instituted patio service.

“We couldn’t afford real outside furniture, so we just took some of the inside furniture and pulled it outside,” Vafaie says. “We did that pretty much right away. I thought, ‘Wow, we have this beautiful Square, why not enjoy it?’”

It was just that enjoyment of the Square that help inaugurate yet another development in 1997, although Vafaie says she and her husband, Scott Partin, ran afoul of the law to achieve it while imbibing a drink outside: “We were sharing a bottle of wine and an officer came by and asked us what we were doing. We said we’re just drinking some wine, and he told us we were breaking the law and wrote us a ticket.

“I called Coury [Turczyn] at Metro Pulse and asked if he could write an article about this, because it was just crazy. So he did and word got out, and people really helped and talked to the mayor, Victor Ashe.“ The effort led to the birth of the ordinance that now allows businesses to serve alcohol on their outdoor patios.

In 1996, Tomato Head also became the first Knoxville restaurant to ban smoking. Vafaie says that they tried a smoking section, “But the original restaurant was tiny, and we had a smoking section of four tables; but people would chain-smoke at those, so the restaurant would still smell. So eventually we decided to cut those four tables out as well. A few people were really upset [by the ban], but they could just step outside to smoke, so it wasn’t that big a deal.” (The state of Tennessee banned smoking in restaurants in 2007.)

Vafaie was too busy running a restaurant to keep detailed records of every new idea that the restaurant put into practice, but throughout its evolution, Tomato Head has remained open to alternative ways of doing business. And because it always seemed to attract progressively minded guests and employees, Tomato Head was often at the forefront of new ideas like recycling, use of local ingredients, a carefully planned beverage program, and other practices that are now common across the city.

Despite all the changes to Market Square and the expansion of her own business concerns over the last 25 years, Vafaie says, “The thing that blows my mind the most is coming down here on a holiday weekend or a Sunday afternoon and seeing all the people walking around. I still sometimes think that I’m gonna come down here on a holiday and it will be deserted like in the old days.”

Here’s hoping that never happens.

Tomato Head is celebrating its silver anniversary on Market Square this Saturday, Aug. 29, starting at 4 p.m. Performers include Scott Miller, Exit 65, Guy Marshall, and Jacqui and The Tumble Kings. Wristband sales benefit the Knoxville History Project, which governs the Knoxville Mercury. 

Bruce Cole

Its original staff from the early 1990s was documented by local photographer Bruce Cole and featured in a series of ads in Metro Pulse.

Dennis Perkins

Dennis Perkins' Home Palate is a tasty exploration of local options for eating out and eating well by way of restaurant reviews, features on fun or unusual foodstuffs, and interviews with local food purveyors and tastemakers. It’s a candid and personal look at what’s right (and sometimes what’s wrong) with eating 
in Knoxville and its environs. He is also the artistic 
director of the Knoxville Children’s Theatre, has directed and performed at the Actor’s Co-op and Black Box Theatre, and is a foodie par excellence.