Around ten on a Sunday morning, Anthony Long is already moving. The kitchen at Long’s Chinese Restaurant on Western Avenue has been running since before most of Knoxville’s brunch crowd has poured its first coffee. Carts don’t roll here — this isn’t that kind of place — but the rhythm feels the same. Shumai hitting steamers, rice noodle rolls being pulled tight, turnip cakes cut and pressed onto trays. It has the feel of a kitchen that’s been doing this long enough to stop thinking about it.
Long’s has operated in the same stretch of West Knoxville for decades, and Anthony, who took over from the family’s first generation, talks about the restaurant the way someone talks about a house they grew up in. Matter-of-factly. A little defensively if you push him on comparisons to bigger cities. “We’re not trying to be Atlanta,” he said, the one time I asked. “We’re trying to be consistent.”
That consistency is what keeps a specific kind of Knoxville regular coming back. On weekends, dim sum runs from about 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., and the dining room fills with a mix of regulars who’ve been eating here since the ’90s and younger families who discovered it more recently. You order off a paper sheet, checking boxes next to items, and a server collects it. The har gow — shrimp dumplings in thin, translucent wrappers — are the thing to anchor your order. They’re delicate without being fussy. The char siu bao, both baked and steamed versions, are worth getting both to compare. The lo mai gai, sticky rice in lotus leaf, is dense and savory and exactly what it’s supposed to be.
Prices are honest. A family of four can eat well for under forty dollars, which is part of why the dining room has a multigenerational feel on weekend mornings. Grandparents, parents, kids all at the same table. It’s not a trendy scene. The lighting is fluorescent. The decor hasn’t changed much. None of that is a complaint.
What Anthony has managed, quietly and without a lot of fanfare, is to keep a genuinely regional Chinese-American restaurant alive in a mid-size Southern city during a period when that’s genuinely difficult. The dinner menu runs through Cantonese standards — roast duck, Peking-style beef, whole fish preparations that require a day’s notice — and the lunch specials draw office workers who’ve been regulars for fifteen years. He knows their orders. He asks about their kids.
If you’ve only done dim sum in a major metropolitan Chinatown, Long’s will feel quieter, smaller, less chaotic. That’s accurate. But the food quality holds up in the ways that matter. The wrappers aren’t gummy. The fillings are seasoned. The kitchen isn’t taking shortcuts on the things that would show.
Go on a Sunday, get there by 10:30 before the dining room fills, and plan to spend at least an hour. Bring people. Dim sum is a format that rewards sharing and patience, and Long’s rewards both. It’s one of the more specific pleasures Knoxville has to offer, and it doesn’t advertise that fact particularly hard. Anthony Long seems fine with that.
