Drive north on Cedar Bluff Road past the Weigel's and you've probably already slowed down for it: a low, orange-and-white steel box sitting on a lot that used to be empty, wedged between the gas station and the Arby's. No signage yet. No cars in the lot. Just a squat structure that looks like it fell off a truck.
Neighbors have been asking about it on Nextdoor for weeks. The answer, once you track it down, turns out to be smaller than the speculation and the corridor around it turns out to be busier than the one building explains.
The Orange Can Everyone Keeps Asking About
That structure is the first Knoxville location of Smalls Sliders, a cheeseburger chain built around a nine-item menu of cooked-to-order sliders, waffle fries, and hand-spun milkshakes. The company is backed by former NFL quarterback Drew Brees and was named the fastest-growing restaurant brand in the country earlier this year by the Datassential 500 industry report, which tracks growth across more than 200,000 U.S. restaurant locations.
The building itself is the point. Smalls Sliders calls its locations "Cans" because they're built from prefabricated steel shipping containers, finished in the brand's signature orange color and dropped onto a site rather than built up from a foundation. The Cedar Bluff location will run about 935 square feet with a drive-thru lane, a walk-up window, and a patio. There's no indoor dining room planned, which explains why the box looks too small to be a restaurant at all.
Construction was photographed at the 330 N. Cedar Bluff Road site on August 4. No official opening date has been announced by the corporate brand, but the local franchisee has told at least one trade outlet he's targeting November.
Four Locations, One Local Owner
The person behind the Cedar Bluff location is Blake McDavid, a 30-year-old Knoxville entrepreneur who already operates three Scooter's Coffee locations in town, with a fourth on the way. He signed the first Smalls Sliders development agreement in Tennessee in the summer of 2025, a four-unit deal covering Knoxville, Maryville, Alcoa, Oak Ridge, Halls, and Sevierville. Cedar Bluff is the first of the four to break ground.
McDavid has been candid about why he picked this particular stretch of road.
"It's very heavy traffic here off the interstate. We've got the hospital right here, a lot of schools."
The hospital he's referring to is Parkwest Medical Center, a short distance up Cedar Bluff Road. The schools are the cluster of Knox County campuses that sit along the corridor. Between the interstate exit, the hospital traffic, and the school pickup lines, it's a location picked for volume rather than atmosphere, which tracks with a building that skips a dining room entirely in favor of speed.
The Same Season, Two Blocks South
Here's the part that doesn't show up if you only look at the burger box. A few blocks south, at the corner of Cedar Bluff Road and North Peters Road, a separate and unrelated project is moving through the approval process at the same time. Knoxville's Community Development Corporation and Nashville-based developer Elmington have proposed a 202-unit apartment community on a vacant lot next to the McScrooge's liquor store, financed through up to $45 million in multifamily housing revenue bonds. At least 40 percent of the units would be reserved for households earning less than 60 percent of the area median income, with a planned mix ranging from one-bedroom to four-bedroom units.
The two projects have nothing to do with each other. One is a fast-food franchise deal signed by a local coffee-shop owner. The other is a public-private affordable housing bond backed by Knoxville's housing authority. But they're landing on the same road in the same year, and neither developer appears to have coordinated with the other.
| Smalls Sliders | The Peter Apartments | |
|---|---|---|
| Location | 330 N. Cedar Bluff Rd | 303 N. Peters Rd at Cedar Bluff Rd |
| Scale | 935 sq ft, drive-thru only | 202 units, 1BR to 4BR mix |
| Backer | Franchisee Blake McDavid | KCDC and Elmington Affordable, LLC |
| Status as of late summer 2026 | Under construction, photographed Aug. 4 | Bond authorization stage, no construction timeline set |
| Public timeline | Franchisee targeting November | Not yet announced |
What the City Already Knows About That Intersection
Before either project adds a single trip to Cedar Bluff Road, the city's own transportation engineers have already flagged a problem. A city transportation impact study tied to the apartment proposal found that the intersection of Cedar Bluff and North Peters already operates at marginal or failing levels under existing traffic, and would need lane and turn-lane upgrades to absorb the additional trips the apartment project would generate. Planning documents lay out potential improvements the city could pursue if the project advances, but as of the most recent reporting, Elmington hadn't yet provided a construction timeline or final renderings.
That finding predates the apartments. It's a statement about the road as it exists right now, with the traffic that's already there before 202 new households or a drive-thru burger stand add to it. For anyone who's felt like the stretch between the interstate and Parkwest has gotten slower to drive over the past year, that's not an impression. It's on file with the city.
Two Timelines, One Overlap
What makes this worth watching isn't that Cedar Bluff Road is changing. Corridors like this change constantly. It's that two separate developers, with no apparent connection to each other, are both moving on the same short stretch of road in the same calendar year, and the one piece of infrastructure that would need to absorb both of them has already been identified by the city as under strain.
The burger stand has a rough opening date, even if the corporate brand and the local franchisee aren't quite saying the same thing. The apartment project doesn't have one yet. It's still working through bond documents, plat reviews, and public notices before ground gets broken. That gap matters if you drive this stretch daily: the smaller, faster project will likely be finished and generating traffic well before the larger, slower one even starts construction, which means the neighborhood absorbs the two impacts in sequence rather than all at once, even though both were set in motion around the same time.
If You Already Live Here
None of this requires anyone to do anything differently this week. But it's worth knowing what you're actually looking at the next time you pass the orange box. It's not a restaurant that's about to open with tables and a host stand. It's a walk-up and drive-thru only, likely running on the kind of high-turnover model that keeps a line moving through a small parking lot near a busy intersection. If a November opening holds, expect construction fencing, contractor trucks, and reduced site access along that stretch through the fall.
Further south, the McScrooge's corner isn't going to look different anytime soon. The Peter Apartments project is still in the paperwork stage, and KCDC's board meeting notices are the place to watch if you want to know when that changes.
Cedar Bluff Road has always been a working corridor, the kind of place where the interstate exit and the hospital and the school traffic all meet in one four-lane stretch. What's different this year is that two very different kinds of growth are arriving at once, on a road the city has already said needs help keeping up.
If you're weighing what any of this means for property values, resale timing, or whether now's the moment to buy or sell near this corridor, that's a conversation worth having with someone who tracks these filings as they happen, not after the fact. Terri Lawson keeps an eye on exactly this kind of local movement across Cedar Bluff and the rest of West Knoxville. Let's Connect.
