Alice in Appalachia is Paula West’s baby and I appreciate her taking the time over the weekend to sit down with me in the new space. With a cute lil teapot between us, of courseFirst, a reminder of how Alice came about, opening at 18 Market Square as part bar, part retail shop, part event space. “So when we first opened three years ago, the concept was stepping into Wonderland. A fairy tale, if you will,” Paula said. “And that’s still the concept. The hope is that you feel like you’ve stepped into the pages of Alice in Wonderland, but flipped into an Appalachian story—something a little more suited to East Tennessee, the hills, and those mossy undercurrents rather than the British version.”

The lease for Alice’s former space on Market Square ran through the end of last year. (It’s expected to become a coffee/sandwich shop under new occupants.) 

The Wests purchased the property at 413 S. Gay St., formerly home to Pioneer House, for $2.9 million in 2022. At the time, they announced plans for a bar and live music venue called Seven Minutes Early at “413.”

While one business concept eventually gave way to another, the broader vision for the building remains the same: start with the ground floor and build upward over time. For now, only about the front three-quarters of the first floor is in use as a retail space. The bar will be added to the back portion soon.

“We’ll also bring back Saturday and Sunday brunch as soon as we can get the building work done and permitted,” Paula said. “So it’ll have specialty cocktails, weekend brunches, and space where you can have specialty parties—birthdays, bachelorettes, things like that.”

Further down the road, they’ll add a second floor and a rooftop. “That’s definitely future planning,” Paula said. “It’s part of fleshing out the story as we go. Right now this is kind of like the preface and the first few chapters.”

And yes, the big-picture plan still includes a bridge across Strong Alley connecting Alice in Appalachia to the Wests’ Market Square businesses.

The shop is loosely arranged into character-driven sections—Queen of Hearts here, Caterpillar there, Mad Hatter toward the back, etc. 

“The Alice in Wonderland story is not just the main character and lightly built secondary ones,” Paula said. “They’re all very prominent. You hear people say all the time, ‘The Mad Hatter is my favorite,’ or ‘The White Rabbit,’ or ‘The Red Queen.’ They’re not lost in the shuffle—they’re just as important, if not more so, than Alice herself. Although I’m a little partial to Alice.”

– Courtesy of Inside of Knoxville