Tomato Head's Mahasti Vafaie: Leading with her heart

Business Journal

Mahasti Vafaie takes a bite from a strawberry offered by her son, Sidney, in this 2004 photograph when she and her restaurant received the "Friends of Change" award from the social justice organization Community Shares.

Business Journal

Mahasti Vafaie takes a bite from a strawberry offered by her son, Sidney, in this 2004 photograph when she and her restaurant received the "Friends of Change" award from the social justice organization Community Shares.

KNOXVILLE — When the Tomato Head opened on Market Square 20 years ago as the Flying Tomato, it was a weekday lunch spot that served pizza and sandwiches with liberal doses of tofu, bean sprouts and the like on paper plates with plastic forks.

"It was really a different place when we opened. It was so much smaller. The service was terrible. We weren't a chain restaurant. We didn't wear uniforms. We had funky signs. It wasn't completely embraced by everyone," founder Mahasti Vafaie recalls.

The restaurant, whose menu has grown to include a large and unique variety of specialty pizzas and entrees, sandwiches, salads and desserts, may have been ahead of its time in 1990, but Vafaie kept Tomato Head alive, in part, because of loyal customers, many of them imported to work at now-defunct Whittle Communications, who appreciated its atypical menu.

Vafaie was quick to embrace recycling and the use of organic and locally grown food, meeting an increasing demand for healthier, more sustainable fare, and to serve it downtown, where until just the last few years the streets rolled up shortly after lunch. She turned the restaurant's walls into ever-changing works by local artists and hosted live performances.

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