05/03/2025
Best burger in town 🫶🏼🍔
Today Mid City is 22 years old. Thank you so much to everyone who continues to support this business! Everyone knows that the original owner Jeff sold the business a few years ago but a lot of people don't know that the person he sold it to, me, was someone who has spent nearly all of those 22 years at Mid City.
When I first started working at Mid City, it was located where Tipton St Pub is today. The kitchen was so small you were practically touching the other cooks for the entire shift. Shoulder to shoulder, side by side, cooking on the line. Back then Mid City was a smoking restaurant and everyone would just be smoking all over the place including the employees. During Blue Plum Festival, back then it was actually in down town, things would get so crazy. I remember having to step over a random woman laying in the floor of the kitchen eating toast off the floor. We didn't know who she was, how she got there, or what happened to her after she crawled away. We were too busy getting slammed with orders to stop and do anything else. It was a different time back then and Mid City was quite the party!
After a while we lost the building for whatever reason, and I moved on to other work, Mid City was gone. It wasn't long before the old owner was serving his food out of a bar called Cahootenannys. So I had to go and get a Big Daddy, now called The Big Jeff and my favorite burger to this day. After some time Mid City got a new location and I immediately quit my job and went back to work at Mid City, but this time as a delivery driver.
As time went on, I worked every position in the restaurant, even served a time or two. By the end I was the front of house manager, and I had been working at Mid City so long I didn't really want to do anything else. I ended up leaving for a couple years to live in Colorado to help a family member out, but after sometime I missed east TN and Mid City so much. I quit my job and drove all the back to Johnson City, and started working at Mid City again. It wasn't long after that, I purchased Mid City from the original owner. I hope to do Mid City for life and I even have one in kingsport now, thats where I usually am.
Special thanks to Dody, Darwin, and the crew in JC, you guys rock! Special thanks to Karigan and the crew in Kingsport, yall helped me get Kingsport going in the right direction (it was a rough opening but that's a story for another day)
Thank you again everyone for eating at Mid City Grill. It means the world to me and my son! I wish I had some pictures from back in the early days to post but we didn't even have cameras on our phones back then ha ha! -Steven Garnett
