Steve Spurrier's Newest Adventure/Restaurant Pays Homage To His Life, Career and Gainesville Area
A life well lived shouldn’t be confined to a box. And Steve Spurrier had too many boxes.
Boxes with trophies and awards. Boxes with game balls and iconic cleats. Boxes of jerseys and pictures, autographs and letters. And boxes of visors; so many visors.
Steve Spurrier has lived a life beyond even his own imagination. And with just a little over a month until the planned grand opening of his next venture—Spurrier’s Gridiron Grille in Gainesville—the ball coach sits in a low lit private room in the middle of his new restaurant, surrounded by friends and business partners, and admits with a bit of surprise that even he has to look at his life with wonder.
“God's really smiled on me and my family, my children and grandchildren, wonderful wife, 50 years. So yeah, there's no question, it’s beyond my wildest expectations.”
A product of small Johnson City, Tennessee, Spurrier first came to Gainesville in 1963. He won a Heisman, married his wife Jerri, spent a decade in the NFL, became a coach, won a National Championship, led Danny Wuerffel to a Heisman, turned around not one but two SEC East programs and became a legend in every sense of the word.
A life like that—one beyond his wildest expectations—creates a lot of memories. The problem? They were stuffed in all those dang boxes. So his daughter Amy had an idea. It was simple, in its own right, but inspired.
Take everything out of the boxes and show it off.
Steve Spurrier is too laid back to have his life shoehorned into a stuffy museum. But a restaurant? One built around an interactive museum, and was an homage to the man but also a thank you to the fans who helped make him? That could work.
Plus it gave him something to do. Not in his retirement, because he doesn’t like that word, but between adventures.
"Some people say never retire. And I don’t like that word, retire. People ask me, ‘Coach, will you ever coach again?’ And I may coach an all-star game like I did in 2020, February, I coached the Polynesian All-Start game in Hawaii. They asked me to come out and coach one team, Frank Beamer coached the other team. Our team won.
"If one of these spring leagues pop back up—The Rock, Dwayne Johnson owns that XFL league, he bought that. They talked about maybe coming back in 2022. So I think they called and said take over the Tampa, Orlando team so I may do that.
“I’m not retired from life, I’m just not coaching right now…These people that do nothing, I don’t know how they do nothing.”
Spoken like a man who loves what he does. And Spurrier definitely loves what he does. His life, and now his museum/restaurant, is a testament to that. For that matter, it’s a testament to all that made him who he is today, even if he didn’t love it in the moment.
“Someone said if you do things in life you really enjoy, you’ll never have to work a day in your life. So, I tell people all the time I've had to work three weeks in my life. In high school I had a summer job down at Hicks Produce tomato place and we stacked tomatoes in a cart up six high, in the middle of summer, making boxes, cutting your hands to put tomato boxes together. That was three weeks of my life I really worked. Other than I’ve been lucky to do what I’m doing.”
Almost 60 years later, boxes of tomatoes from Johnson City will be back in Spurrier’s life. They’ll be shipped to Gainesville for the first three months of Spurrier’s Gridiron Grille, used to make an updated version of the tomato sandwich Spurrier ate everyday of his childhood.
The menu will contain items like the tomato sandwich, but also varying dishes from pasta to fish, sandwich’s and burgers; everything from affordable plates in the low teen’s to a $60 lamb. The names will play on some of Spurrier’s best plays and players.
“We will be very successful; we think Gainesville is a good place for a restaurant like this,” muses Spurrier.
His business partner and the restaurant’s managing partner, Freddie Wehbe, has worked tirelessly to make sure of it. Wehbe, who spent the better part of the last two years traveling the world to research why some celebrity restaurants work and others don’t, refuses to let Spurrier’s exist on name alone.
The HBC will bring fans in. The food and atmosphere will keep them coming back. Polished casual, as its called. This is no sports pub, but it’s not quite white tablecloth Shula’s either.
Wehbe wanted to put a special emphasis on things he knew would be important to the Gainesville culture. So in addition to becoming one of the Top 10 employers in Alachua County, Spurrier’s will also source all of their products locally. Not some, not most…all. Well, all but the Johnson City tomatoes, but that's a special exception.
Any cheese and milk product will be made with products from a dairy farm in Hawthorne, which is 15 minutes east of Gainesville. Beef will come from a cow farm in Williston, 20 minutes west of the city. Produce will come from Lake City, 25 minutes north of Gainesville. And if you order fish, you can pull up the Spurrier’s Gridiron Grille app and see at what time that morning the captain pulled your fish out of the Gulf near Cedar Key.
The Visors bar on the rooftop—which will feature 240 of Spurrier’s famous visors on the wall, above a floor that purposely mimics the Florida locker room from the 1960’s—is the first of its kind in the college town. The adult atmosphere that still lends it self to a laid back style has already drawn the attention of Shands and UF Health Hospital, as well as the Florida Gators University Athletics Association who plan to use both Visors and Spurrier’s private meetings rooms as a place to schmooze guests. Both have already booked rooms for the fall.
The bars both upstairs and downstairs will feature an extensive wine list, as well as a special collection from local brewery First Magnitude, with beers crafted just for Spurrier’s.
The fishbowl podcasting room has been equipped with special sound proof walls, ceilings and even air conditioning, to provide an ideal spot for streaming shows. The Dan Mullen Coaches Show will move there this football season. Paul Finebaum, SEC Network and ESPN have already reserved the spot for the Alabama football weekend. And any local Gator podcaster can use the spot for free in exchange for mentioning the restaurant.
The kitchen is one of the largest in the area; the opportunity to run it while working with a farm-to-table menu drew an executive chef out of Miami. He moved his entire family to Gainesville, knowing he couldn’t turn down the chance to become the first chef to cook at Spurrier’s.
The intentionality behind everything, while appearing effortless, has attracted others hoping to emulate what Spurrier and Wehbe believe this place can be. While visiting a recruit in the area, Alabama head coach Nick Saban stopped in just to see what his old friend and foe was doing with a restaurant. Soon after he returned, this time to take notes and ask pointed questions. He wants to open something in the same vein in Tuscaloosa; called Saban’s of course.
Outside, in addition to the seven foot tall statute commissioned of Spurrier tossing his visor, will be a Florida Gators Hall of Fame. Fans and restaurant visitors can vote on three new inductees every year.
All of it combines to create not only a place that pays homage to its namesake, but also serve as a love note to the area that has adopted Spurrier as its own. And if you’re lucky, while stopping in to poke around the museum area (something visitors will be allowed to do even if they aren’t eating at the restaurant) maybe the man himself will wander by. He’ll probably point to the football and cleat in encased in glass, and tell you about the time he kicked the game winning field goal against Auburn, and how it took years to get the ball back.
“Some guy caught it, held on to it for years. He brought it to me years later. You can tell it’s been played with in the yard and stuff. He said it was the same ball. I guess it could be.”
Or he’ll read over the letters hanging on the wall, pointing out the phone’s from presidents and dignitaries and contract negations that set the standard for what coaches make now in college football.
Maybe he’ll find the game ball from one of his six SEC Championships and recall in vivid detail how he beat Gene Stallings’ Alabama squad. You won’t find much South Carolina memento’s; he’s saving that for the Columbia restaurant.
Or he’ll point to the wall of Danny Wuerffel memorabilia, donated by his former quarterback, not wanting it to sit in a box in his house, something Spurrier understands.
Each highlighted memento and place of honor are a reminder of the journey Steve Spurrier has blazed through college football. Because a life well lived shouldn’t be confined to a box. And Steve Spurrier has had quite a life.
Comments