Wild Plum Tea Room, The Old Mill Restaurant & Sevierville Outlet Mall Shopping {Gatlinburg, TN Recap}

I’m back with post 2 (of 3) for our Gatlinburg, TN trip!

I’m crazy about tea rooms and each time we go out of town we try to have tea time at a popular place. This was a little more challenging in Gatlinburg… ha, ha! But, I found a REALLY highly rated tea place on Trip Advisor called Wild Plum Tea Room.

We had the very first reservations for the day and when we walked in the place was charming, yet very quiet. We found out that the lady that runs this restaurant does the hosting, cooking AND serving! She brings a new table in about every 30 minutes and runs ONLY on reservations. We saw her turn several people away, due to not having a reservation. She makes EVERYTHING from scratch, this is a genuine dining experience!

The Wild Plum Tea Room is named after its original wild plum tea, with free refills on hot or iced. I tried it both ways and it was delicious!

The Wild Plum tea was one of the best teas I’ve ever had! She also brought out out some Wild Plum tea muffins WITH jam. What a treat!

For an appetizer, we had the Hot Pimento Cheese dip and it was SO GOOD. The peppers in it were just beyond this world. I had never tasted anything like them. Delicious. For my meal I got a quiche and salad, but I wanted to share what Brian got since it is one of her specialties. He got the lobster pie and her homemade tomato soup. Yum!

One of my favorite ways to start the morning was with a Maddi Mae’s iced latte with oat milk, vanilla and lavender syrup. Yum! I would sit out on the balcony and sip it.

We had our first day at the Nexstar dance nationals. Of course we had to get a photo by the sign!

After Autumn danced, we had dinner at Taste of Italy. It was SO good AND filling! They brought out these garlic rolls for their bread service and then with my eggplant parmesan entree I got a huge heaping portion of spaghetti too! I loved their red marinara sauce! The only disappointment with the place was that they didn’t serve wine, but would let you bring a bottle of wine in. They did serve beer.

On our way home we stopped at a grocery store and Autumn was so excited to find the bottled Starbucks Pink Drinks! These are really hard to find in St. Louis.

The next day was a little stormy, so we nixed the idea of going to Anakeesta and decided to hit up the

Sevierville Outlet Mall. I stopped in the Tennessee Homemade Wines shop and spied this peanut butter and jelly flavored wine. They had some other original flavors too.

There was a Kirkland’s in the outlet mall and they were all decked out for the fall already! I loved this fall wooden beaded wreath and the cute charcuterie board they had on display.

My FAVORITE restaurant the entire trip was to The Old Mill. I thought the overall site of the place was charming and the food was plentiful and delicious! Here is a photo of me outside the mill while we were waiting (we had a 45 minute wait, they don’t take reservations) and some of the birds you could feed around the premises. 

While waiting at The Old Mill, they had a lot of other buildings you can walk through to look around, including a store, ice cream and pottery shop. They had a loud intercom, so you could hear your name being called while you walked around from shop to shop. They sold flour, yellow cornmeal, etc. The upper photo on the right shows the starters you got with each entree, which was a garden salad, hush puppies and corn chowder soup (it reminded me more of a potato soup!). They brought out sides (family style) of mashed potatoes and green beans.