Alex Gass

The Walnut Kitchen

Down on High Street in Maryville, you will find The Walnut Kitchen, a farm-to-table restaurant serving up locally grown produce and Tennessee beef. There inside, building the menu with a musical flair, is Chef Alex Gass, an Oak Ridge native. 

While it might not be obvious, Gass didn’t grow up envisioning a life in the culinary industry; he wanted to be a musician. However, his mother ran a catering business, and while he didn’t recognize it then, his life in the culinary arts had already begun. “I was trained to be a chef my whole life through my mother and all of these other instances,” he says. “With the acceptance of that and wanting to pursue something in the arts, I took off with it and made it my thing.” He approaches cooking just as he does music: blending emotion and energy to create something people love. 

The tunes are high as he looks at a sample of
everything coming off of the farm to create his menus. “It becomes my paint palette as I try to figure out the best ways to match the ingredients to bring the best product to the table,” he says. 

With a love of the Cherokee purple tomato—a product that made him realize the beauty in a raw vegetable, thanks to his grandmother—Gass creates menus with the hope of building connections with guests. When not in the restaurant, or preparing a menu for Top Chefs, Gass can be found enjoying time with his wife and children.