The Pottery House Cafe and Grille

The Pottery House Cafe and Grille is housed in what the operator describes as the 1954 home of potters Douglas and Ruth Ferguson, at 3341 Old Mill Street in Pigeon Forge. It is a different business from the Old Mill Restaurant a short walk away, with its own menu and its own hours, and it feels more like a cottage meal than a family-style buffet of biscuits.

The cafe says every dish is served on handmade pottery made next door at Pigeon River Pottery, which the Old Mill lists as handcrafting pottery for more than 75 years. It also says its bread is made from grain ground at the on-site gristmill. Those two details are the reason to choose this over the restaurant, and they are checkable on the cafe's page.

The operator calls the cafe known for fresh-baked breads and creative Southern dishes, and a Newsweek review named fried green tomatoes, chicken almond quiche and pecan pie. The menu is published as a PDF on the site and changes with the season. Newsweek included the cafe in its 2025 Readers' Choice Awards for best farm-to-table restaurant, as the operator reports.

As of fall 2026:

• Lunch and dinner: daily, 11 AM to 9 PM
• Brunch: Saturday and Sunday, 10 AM to 2 PM
• Reservations: not accepted; a waitlist is available through the cafe's contact page
• Phone: (865) 453-6002, also used for takeout

Because there are no reservations and the house is small, weekend brunch and prime dinner are the busy windows. A weekday lunch is the calmest way to see the place.

Indoors there are small, cozy rooms, and outdoors there are garden patios by the koi pond, which makes this one of the nicer places in Pigeon Forge to eat on a mild fall evening. If the weather is good, ask for a patio table when you join the list.

Walk over to the Pigeon River Pottery to see where the plates come from, then to the Old Mill grounds for the gristmill, the Creamery and the Candy Kitchen. The Old Mill's main line is (877) 653-6455.

• Couples and small groups who want a quieter table than the Parkway chains
• Farm-to-table and baked-goods people
• Brunch seekers in Pigeon Forge

• If you are going on to Great Smoky Mountains National Park, remember that the parking tag ($5 daily, $15 weekly, $40 annual, per the National Park Service) applies to stops longer than 15 minutes in the park.
• Pigeon Forge's Fun Time Trolley costs $1 a ride if you want to skip parking.

• Address: 3341 Old Mill Street, Pigeon Forge, TN 37863
• Phone: (865) 453-6002