Jaboni’s Pizza has a new owner with Copper Cellar, Ruby Tuesday experience
Often when someone starts or buys a restaurant, the focus is on the recipes or improving the recipes.
But Bart Fricks, the new owner of Jaboni’s Pizzeria at 7403 Kingston Pike along with his wife, Marti, realized the recipes for the New York-style pizzas and other dishes at Jaboni’s are basically perfect for him and the customers. He just wants to use the formulas for success he learned as a top executive with Ruby Tuesday’s and later the Copper Cellar family of restaurants to make the restaurant overall even better.
“Everybody loves the food. They talk about how authentic it is,” he said, adding that this is particularly true among customers who used to live in the New York area and say the food reminds them of home. “All we are wanting to do is maintain that and get it to the people and keep it as authentic as possible.”
He added as he talked over the phone recently that he is primarily focusing on streamlining the operation of it and the Jaboni’s in Maryville he and his wife earlier bought and adding some greater social media presence to get the word out.
For Fricks, the purchase is a mid-career switch from the corporate restaurant world to the mom-and-pop one. The 1985 Farragut High graduate has had a long career in the food industry that began its ascension when he was working at a Mr. Gatti’s pizza restaurant in Louisville, Kentucky, in the early 1990s and saw an ad saying that Ruby Tuesday’s was hiring in his hometown of Knoxville.
“I got lucky enough they hired me,” he said of the chain started by Sandy Beall and some others in 1972 in a former house off Cumberland Avenue. “It was in a very high growth mode at the time. Ruby Tuesday’s taught me a whole lot how to run restaurants. It was a good place to go cut your teeth on.”
After being involved with national training with Ruby Tuesday’s, he left after 15 years to work for the locally based Copper Cellar chain, serving as chief operating officer for the 22 locations. Following 15 years there, he was thinking about making a career switch again when he and his wife walked into the Jaboni’s in Foothills Plaza in Maryville to eat in late 2021.
It was love at first smell of the aroma of the Italian food! “I fell in love with the pizza,” he said.
A conversation with owner and founder Gavin Loyer revealed that he was looking to sell the eatery, so Fricks soon learned his future would involve a little bank rolling and a lot of dough rolling.
“After making money for everyone else, I said why don’t I finish my career making money for myself,” Fricks recalled with a laugh after deciding to purchase the business.
He kept in touch with Loyer after the former Long Island resident opened another Jaboni’s in West Knoxville in 2022, and Fricks and his wife recently bought it as well.
Fricks added that it has been easy running the already-established Jaboni’s and using his experience in operations, people managing, and marketing to oversee what he calls the best Italian restaurant in town.
However, he did make one small change to the menu that also includes sandwiches, baked pasta, calzones, and salads, he said wryly. He has added pineapple – which is popular in the South if not Long Island – as one of the possible pizza toppings on these pies made with real Italian tomatoes and Wisconsin Grande cheese.
He and his wife might also add some Jaboni’s locations down the road, he said. But for now, they are focused simply on maintaining the current quality and getting out the word even more about these two restaurants.
“It’s a great concept,” he said. “It’s a slice of Long Island. That’s what it really is.”
This article originally appeared on Knoxville News Sentinel: Knoxville pizza Jaboni's owned by Copper Cellar, Ruby Tuesday exec
