"This has been four years of a labor of love. This is a beautiful building that we're so excited to welcome guests into, and it's almost like the Phoenix rising from the ashes, so to speak."
That's Christine Martinez, director of food and beverage for Tellico Village, talking about Tanasi Waterfront Dining, which opens its doors on August 27. Four years is a long time to wait for a restaurant. It's an even longer time to wait for the building that used to anchor half the Village's social calendar.
Here's what most of the coverage around this reopening has missed: the new Tanasi isn't just a rebuilt golf clubhouse. It's the first restaurant of its kind the Village has ever had, one built on purpose to pull in diners who have never set foot on a Tellico Village fairway.
What Burned, and What It Took to Bring Back
In August 2022, a kitchen fire tore through the original Tanasi Clubhouse. It spread fast enough to destroy the building entirely, though everyone got out safely and golf operations were only suspended for a single day. What followed was two years of planning, financing, and committee work before a shovel ever hit dirt, then another year and a half of construction.
The rebuild cost $11.5 million, funded through a combination of $4.28 million in insurance proceeds and $7 million pulled from Village reserves. The project ran about $200,000 over that figure, a gap the Village closed by selling the temporary pro shop it had used during construction. None of it required a special assessment on residents. That detail matters if you've ever wondered what happens when a shared community asset burns down: in this case, the reserve fund did its job.
RTC General Contractors built it, the same firm behind the Toqua Clubhouse a few years earlier. That continuity shows in the finished product: a full-service restaurant, private dining rooms for events, an expanded golf pro shop, and new flex space for tournaments and outings. Casey Flenniken, the Village's director of golf operations, had been asking for a bigger shop and bigger cart storage well before the fire. He got both.
The Part That Actually Changes Things
Here's the pivot. Every other food service outlet the Village operates, Kahite Pub & Grill at the Links at Kahite, the dining room at Toqua, exists primarily to feed golfers and members. Kahite keeps golf-course hours: 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. Sunday through Thursday, 11 to 10 on weekends. It's a clubhouse restaurant in the traditional sense, built around tee times.
Tanasi was built differently. Martinez put it plainly when she described what the team was going for:
"We wanted to find the middle place that would really give something for Tellico Village and even people in Lenoir City and other parts of Loudon County. We wanted to give people an opportunity of something different."
That's not incidental language. It's a stated goal to build a restaurant that pulls from outside the gates, not just from the roster of Village golf members. Martinez also made a point of saying the bar is open to anyone who wants to stop in for a drink and a snack without playing a round first. For a community where dining out has historically meant staying inside the clubhouse ecosystem, that's a real shift in how residents will use the place, and who they'll likely run into there.
For the roughly 10,000 people who call Tellico Village home, spread across nearly 7,000 assessment-paying properties, this means a waterfront dinner option that doesn't require a guest pass explanation at the door. For neighbors in Lenoir City and the rest of Loudon County, it means a new reason to drive over.
What's Actually on Offer
The new building sits at 450 Clubhouse Point in Loudon, on the Tanasi course that first opened in 1996 as the second of the Village's three championship layouts. Tanasi has always been known for its wide-open design and oversized greens, and several holes, 8, 9, and 10, bring Tellico Lake directly into play. The restaurant now leans into that same waterfront setting rather than treating it as a backdrop for golfers between holes.
What's on the menu and floor plan:
- A full-service dining room with lake views, open for lunch and dinner
- Private event space for birthdays, gatherings, and community functions separate from the main dining room
- A bar area explicitly framed as a stop-in spot, no tee time required
- An expanded golf pro shop and flex space for group outings, separate from the dining side of the building entirely
The grand opening ribbon-cutting lands on August 27. Given the run-up in social media posts from the restaurant's own account over the past month, count on a full house that first week.
Why the Timing Landed Where It Did
None of this happened in isolation. The Village's 2026 operating budget, adopted late last year, targeted a $9 million surplus across departments and actually hit it, while trimming subsidies in golf and recreation by 10 percent. The Village's 2026 reserve study puts the starting reserve balance at $18.44 million, with the fund sitting at 77 percent of full funding, a number that accounts for near-term draws like the Tanasi rebuild itself. None of that is thrilling reading on its own, but it's the reason residents didn't see a special line item on their dues statement for a multi-million-dollar rebuild. The reserve fund existed because the Village had been planning for exactly this kind of loss long before the fire happened.
What This Means for Your Week
If you've been putting off a lake dinner because the usual spots feel like the same rotation, Tanasi gives you a genuine reason to change plans. Bring guests who aren't members. Sit at the bar without a round of golf attached to the visit. If you're planning a birthday gathering or a smaller community event, the private dining space is worth a call before your usual venue books up, since a brand-new room with lake views tends not to stay quiet for long once word gets around.
Four years is a long stretch to go without a building that used to anchor so much of daily life here. What reopens this week isn't a replica of what burned. It's a version of Tanasi built to serve a bigger circle than the one it served before, and that's worth noticing even if you never plan to play the course.
If you're weighing a move to Tellico Village, curious about what a home near Tanasi or the Village's other communities might look like, or simply want a local perspective on how a market like this actually works day to day, Liza Bryan Acheson has spent years guiding buyers and sellers through exactly these kinds of East Tennessee transitions. Reach out anytime to request your free concierge consultation.
