50 years after Ruby Tuesday opened in Knoxville, its original home will disappear

John Shearer
·4 min read

Despite its closing after 45 years to make way for apartments, Stefanos Pizza on Cumberland Avenue is not the only important piece of Knoxville history disappearing there.

In the house-like structure just above it and adjoining it along 20th Street is a site also significant in American chain restaurant history. It was where the first Ruby Tuesday was.

In April 1972, Sandy Beall and some other investors, including some college fraternity buddies, opened their first restaurant there. It was a hit from the start among the University of Tennessee college community and elsewhere while focusing mostly on hamburgers.

“It was a very busy small store,” said Bob Luper, who worked there during its early days and went on to operate the popular Naples restaurant on Kingston Pike in Bearden. “It was a popular place.”

Owner Bob Luper in front of Naples Italian Restaurant in 2019. Luper worked at the original Ruby Tuesday near the Strip.
Owner Bob Luper in front of Naples Italian Restaurant in 2019. Luper worked at the original Ruby Tuesday near the Strip.

Chicago-based Core Knoxville Cumberland LLC plans to convert the 20th Street area into residential apartments for UT students. As that block will soon have a new look, a glance at the opening of the first Ruby Tuesday shows a somewhat humble start.

While efforts to reach Beall were unsuccessful, Luper said he went to work for Beall some in the early days after they were young workers in the blossoming Bearden pizzeria business.

Beall, the son of a former Manhattan Project and Oak Ridge worker (who died in April 2022 at the age of 103), was serving as a manager of the Pizza Hut on Bearden Hill, where Soccer Taco is today. Luper, meanwhile, was working at the now-razed Shakey’s closer to West Hills.

After Luper later went off to work at TGI Friday’s in Memphis after attending UT for a couple of years, he was home on a break visiting family and went by and saw Beall and asked if Ruby Tuesday needed anyone to work. He soon was asked to become head waiter, and he called a friend in Memphis, who came and joined him.

The Ruby Tuesday restaurant at 17th Street and Cumberland Avenue in 1998.
The Ruby Tuesday restaurant at 17th Street and Cumberland Avenue in 1998.

“Everybody he had was definitely a rookie,” Luper recalled with a laugh of the early days of the Ruby Tuesday on the Strip.

Luper said the restaurant had started shortly after liquor by the drink was approved in Knoxville and such American pub-style restaurants started opening in several places. Luper said that he heard the ownership of the Pizza Hut where Beall worked had given him some investment money to get started, as did some fellow UT Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity buddies, including Rick Eldridge.

A Chattanooga newspaper story from 1974 said the students had worked in the restaurant business and liked that line of work but feared that promotion the typical way would be slow. They then decided to start their own hamburger business, found the home on 20th Street and did the renovation work, bringing in barn siding, Tiffany lamps and vintage displays.

The restaurant name originated from the popular 1967 Rolling Stones song “Ruby Tuesday,” which the story said came when the young investors heard it on a car radio after brainstorming for a name.

The nation’s first Ruby Tuesday restaurant opened here in 1972 after Sandy Beall and others converted a former home and later added a garden room. The restaurant building, which never expanded down to Cumberland Avenue where Stefanos operated, was in recent years the site of the Outlook bar.
The nation’s first Ruby Tuesday restaurant opened here in 1972 after Sandy Beall and others converted a former home and later added a garden room. The restaurant building, which never expanded down to Cumberland Avenue where Stefanos operated, was in recent years the site of the Outlook bar.

It is a song lamenting the loss of a woman, but Luper remembered the restaurant said hello to plenty of customers when he started. He recalled that it was popular for the UT community and even some high-profile Vol athletes during that time, despite its limited size and atypical restaurant look.

“It was a home turned into Ruby Tuesday,” Luper recalled. “It was old and kind of drafty. They painted it up, but it was kind of small and the bar was small.”

Luper said he later went to work as well at the second Ruby Tuesday in Suburban Plaza in the 8000 block of Kingston Pike − where Barnes & Noble bookstore is now − and that was where Ruby Tuesday had its first salad bar. He also worked at the third Ruby Tuesday in Chattanooga in a former old house on Brainerd Road.

Sandy Beall, shown in a V-neck sweater behind the third and fourth people (from left) on the front row, is pictured on the Sigma Alpha Epsilon page in the 1970 UT yearbook, the Volunteer. He and some fraternity brothers started the Ruby Tuesday restaurant chain in 1972.
Sandy Beall, shown in a V-neck sweater behind the third and fourth people (from left) on the front row, is pictured on the Sigma Alpha Epsilon page in the 1970 UT yearbook, the Volunteer. He and some fraternity brothers started the Ruby Tuesday restaurant chain in 1972.

He also briefly went to work for a Ruby Tuesday-operated restaurant in Memphis called Fenwick’s and realized the chain was starting to become big. The restaurant there also used an early fax machine to do payroll, he recalled.

Luper later got tired of late nights doing restaurant/bar closing work and decided to focus on the cooking end of the business, which led to opening Naples in 1981.

Beall would later join with the Morrison’s cafeteria firm and grow the number of Ruby Tuesdays and other eateries to the hundreds before he left in 2012, although the number of Ruby Tuesdays has been downscaled in recent years. He had also moved his family in 1976 to what would become the famous Blackberry Farm in Blount County.

The nation’s first Ruby Tuesday restaurant, near the Strip by the University of Tennessee, never expanded down to Cumberland Avenue where Stefanos operated.
The nation’s first Ruby Tuesday restaurant, near the Strip by the University of Tennessee, never expanded down to Cumberland Avenue where Stefanos operated.

And on the Strip, the original Ruby Tuesday building remains as a reminder of the company’s small start. But now the time has come to say literally, “Goodbye, original Ruby Tuesday,” as this giant structural memento of a restaurant that displayed memorabilia disappears.

“I think it was an important part of Knoxville history,” Luper said.

This article originally appeared on Knoxville News Sentinel: Ruby Tuesday's original location in Knoxville will be torn down