Perk City Knoxville

     If you haven’t heard, we are opening a coffee shop in East Knoxville on Magnolia Ave. “PERK CITY”.

     It’s the old Jarman’s BBQ building and it needs lots of TLC. Due to the requirements of city codes, permitting, zoning and KUB, our budget is shot. We bought the building (putting our rental homes against the loan) and took a home equity loan out on our house to get this up and running. Long story short, the money isn’t enough. Being a novice at opening a business in the city, we never anticipated the additional cost we would incur.

      We are excited about this coffee shop and what it can do for our community but we need your help. We have exhausted all other means to obtain capital so this is our only alternative. Please help us see this dream for East Knoxville come true. Any little bit will help. We are hoping to open in the spring. The money that you give will go for an espresso machine, stormwater basins and outdoor upgrades that are required. We cannot open without these requirements being met.

     Perk City is for you and the community. A safe, comfortable, spacious, meeting/gathering place to relax, have a great cup of Vienna Coffee, Tea and some of our signature baked goods. Please consider donating. We appreciate your help and look forward to seeing you at Perk City.
                                                                                       Have a blessed day.



Park City was once considered the jewel of Knoxville - a bustling neighborhood of movers and shakers who were woven through the tapestry of the history of this city and have streets, buildings, and other infrastructure named after them. However, due to urban blight and the landscape of the city changing, this area lost its resources and has become a part of the Corridor project.

Perk City aims to bring that excellence back to East Knoxville, one compostable cup of happiness at a time. It's a little quirky, sure, being helmed by two transplants from Southwest Florida who never lost that bit of sunshine and seawater in their veins; and it's a lot tasty because of the magic of family recipes and a fusion style of barista work that pulls from the roots of coffee craft to the wild flowers that sprouted into signature items such as the koburu chai masala latte and the signature item called Incredibites, which is a riff on a pull apart cinnamon roll.



As we evolve, we want to expand into displaying East Knoxville's finest art of all kinds, be it spoken word poetry, visual art hung on the walls, the mural on the side of the building conceptualized and painted by an East Knoxville-based artist, or musicians from the area performing on our stage. We want to have board game nights, open mics, and remain a safe and sober space in a community that doesn't have much of anything like this.

We envision a community center and coffee shop hybrid that can bring neighborhoods as diverse as Five Points and Holston Hills together to showcase the power and pride of this area when it can function as a whole and not fragments set against one another due to socioeconomic factors.

We've already won 10k toward this project from the Paradigm challenge run by the Knoxville Area Urban League and are working toward the City of Knoxville's Facade Improvement Grant, but we still need your help to make the dream of an East Knoxville original come to life.

Perk City is asking for $15,000 from the community - all of the proceeds will go directly into equipment to operate the coffee shop and on-site bakery as well as the internal renovations necessary to get our building up to code, repairing years of neglect to turn this into something worthy of the denizens of East Knoxville.



We're partnering with local businesses as our suppliers for coffee, dairy, tea, and other necessities as we find them; creating days and drinks to donate the proceeds of to local charitable organizations that do work in this area; and hiring from the pool of talent that surrounds us. Everything we seek to do is pure Park City and we cordially invite you to help us on our mission.

For all donors, we'll be holding a VIP night before we open to be able to see and taste the mission before anyone else in Knoxville. If we exceed our goal, we'll continue to add incentives to give back to y'all who have given so generously to us.

Thank you so much (in advance) and we look forward to meeting all of you who believe in our dream, too.

Knoxville, we're yours,
Sherene and September