Tennessee's first road game of the season plays on the Puckers wall Saturday night
The Vols are at Georgia Tech at seven on ESPN — the first trip to Bobby Dodd Stadium since 1986. Last week the sports grill on Mimosa Avenue watched the crowd walk past it to the stadium. This week the crowd stays.
A sports grill on a home-game Saturday is a waiting room: everybody's there until they aren't. The night it earns the televisions is the away game, and Tennessee's first one is Saturday at seven, at Georgia Tech in Atlanta, on ESPN. Puckers — the Gatlinburg sports bar that took the old Mimosas room on Mimosa Avenue two weeks ago — gets its first real test of the wall.
- Kickoff
- Sat Sep 12 · 7 PM · ESPN
- The game
- Tennessee at Georgia Tech · Bobby Dodd Stadium, Atlanta
- Where to watch
- Puckers Sports Grill · 115 Mimosa Ave, off Blount
- Reservations
- Resy — worth it for a kickoff table
- Pucker Hour
- Mon–Fri 5–6 only · $1 Pucker Lager, $3 wells — not Saturday
- Last Saturday's hours
- Open 9 AM to 10 PM · check before you plan around it
The game itself
Tennessee hasn't played at Bobby Dodd Stadium since 1986, and Georgia Tech is the kind of September opponent that turns a comfortable evening into a long one if the Vols start slow. It's a night kickoff, so it's a full evening: sit down at six, and the fourth quarter lands around half past ten.
The practical part
Puckers takes reservations on Resy, and for a seven o'clock kickoff a booked table beats a hopeful one. Its weekday Pucker Hour — the dollar lager, the three-dollar wells — runs Monday through Friday from five to six and does not extend to Saturday, so don't plan the budget around it. Last Saturday the room opened at nine in the morning and ran until ten at night; this week's hours weren't posted as of Tuesday. If the wall is full, Kern's up Chapman Highway rents game-day sections with a television each — that's the next story down.
