Sports bar with 12 TVs plans to open Oct. 1 in former Norris mattress store
The Dam Bar, in the Anderson Crossing shopping center on Andersonville Highway in Carriage Trace & Carriage Norris, is scheduled to open Oct. 1. Neighborhoods (photo:G. Chambers Williams III )
Cindy Price, who will own and operate the business with her husband, Kenny, said the bar will be open seven days a week, and will cater to sports fans – with 12 televisions mounted on the walls.
“It will be a limited-service restaurant, with bar food such as pretzel bites, nachos with cheese or chili, hot dogs, and pizza slices, and we will do food trucks on Friday, Saturday and Sunday,” Cindy Price said.
“We wanted to do something different, so we thought about the food trucks,” she said. “Customers can also bring food from the Mexican restaurant next door, or from the [Gametime] pizza shop.”
The Prices already own GameTime Pizza & Sports Bar, which is just three doors down from The Dam Bar. They opened GameTime Pizza in late 2019, then added the sports bar part of the business about a year later.
In August 2020, the Prices opened Mattress King in the space they are now using for The Dam Bar. The mattress store closed earlier this summer.
Cindy Price said skyrocketing wholesale prices for mattresses and box springs, along with the growing trend of consumers purchasing them online, doomed their business.
They decided to open the bar because GameTime had gotten so busy that customers were bring turned away on weekends because no tables were available.
“It’s just gotten so crowded that our customers were asking for us to expand,” Price said.
The Dam Bar plans to offer some activities not provided at GameTime, she said.
“We will have darts in the back room, and we will do something different every night, like karaoke and trivia, and a band on Saturday nights,” Price said.
Kaylen Patterson, owner of Wholesale Cabinets in Oak Ridge, is building the bar in the new business. He was the one who installed the 60-foot-long knotty-pine bar at GameTime.
For The Dam Bar, the bar will have a granite top, he said last week as he and his crew worked to build the bar.
The Prices have already received a beer permit for their business from the city of Norris, but are still waiting for their liquor-by-the-drink license from the Tennessee Alcoholic Beverage Commission. The Oct. 1 opening date is contingent on that permit being approved in time, Cindy Price said.
When The Dam Bar opens, there will be three full liquor bars open in the Anderson Crossing shopping center, all within just a few dozen feet of each other. In between GameTime Pizza and The Dam Bar is the La Sierra Mexican restaurant, which has a full bar, and features karaoke and live music on certain nights.
The shopping center is framed by Dollar General on one end and Anderson Crossing Pharmacy on the other end. A computer service and repair business, Schafer Tech, is between La Sierra and The Dam Bar.
The Prices moved to this area from Punta Gorda, Florida. They opened GameTime as a dine-in restaurant replacing the former takeout-only pizza shop that was part of the Tobacco Depot. They dumped the tobacco side of the business, and initially called their new place Gametime Pizza & Subs.
Both Prices have a background in the pizza business, with Kenny Price a former manager at Domino’s and Papa John’s stores, and Cindy Price a former employee at Domino’s and Pizza Hut outlets.