End of the Line Café in Pensacola offers a full menu of vegan comfort food and desserts.
• Owner Jen Knight started the café to create a community space for activists and like-minded individuals.
• Knight aims to show that vegan food can be flavorful and satisfying, attracting a clientele of both vegans and non-vegans.
“Would you like some cream for your cheesecake?” seems like an ridiculous question to ask a vegan.
Jen Knight, owner of Pensacola’s End of the Line Café, sure thought it was. She vividly remembers the rich, thick cream being offered to douse her vegan cheesecake at a restaurant in Cork, Ireland, in the late 1990s/early 2000s.
She thought it was a mistake at first, as it would take Pensacola another decade before that caliber of vegan desserts was on the table, Knight explained. Then—she tried it. Harmoniously merging the decadent vegan cream of her dreams with a delicate raspberry drizzle.
“I wrote home on postcards about it,” Knight said. “It stuck with me for like 10 years until we started playing with different things.”
If you step into Knight’s place at End of the Line Café at 610 E. Wright St. today, Pensacola’s first vegan restaurant that opened in 2002, the pastry case is now stocked with the same kind of delight-inducing, “wow” worthy desserts she experienced decades ago.
Not only has Knight redefined the expectations for vegan fare, but she has also lured in non-vegans who enjoy the food and atmosphere and now make up the majority of her clientele.
Evolution of End of the Line
You would never know that Knight, now revered as Pensacola’s vegan cooking guru, was still relatively new to veganism when End of the Line was conceived. She started small with vegan muffins she would bake at 3:30 a.m. after wrapping up a bartending shift.
“I’ve been an animal activist all my life, and when I started paying attention to my health and found the connection of health and diet, and how we can actually work with our ailments by changing our diet—work with the environment by changing our practices—it all comes together and it seemed to make the most sense,” Knight said of becoming vegan.
“I felt better about things. I felt like my decisions mattered. I felt like it was making a difference, and that, in turn, made me feel better and see things in a more positive light.”
This was a time in Pensacola’s history when vegan restaurants hadn’t yet made their way to the city. So, for the small handful of vegans interwoven into Knight’s circle, the solution was always cooking at home when they needed to eat, and home potlucks or picnics in an empty lot when they craved community.
“All of our friends, we all love to eat, and we didn’t want to just go without,” Knight said. “You know, just eat the thing but without the cheese or without the meat.”
If she was lucky enough to find a solid vegan restaurant while visiting a more progressive city, she had no shame in ordering a few take-out containers to take with her on the ride back home. Many things believed to be off-limits for vegans became her personal challenge to create, and the payoff was addictive when she got them right. The invention of her maple-hickory bacon, a core ingredient on her house-favorite Knuckle Sandwich, was a triumph.
“I read cookbooks for inspiration, and I read them like novels. … Something resonates with me, and it’s just inspiring and uplifting, especially when you have somebody cook a meal that is everything that you know you want that you didn’t think you could find,” Knight said. “Especially back then, when there wasn’t anything, and so it’s incredibly inspiring.”
In the early years, their dining room area had public access computers to use the internet, and it was a hot spot for poetry slams, good music, documentary screenings, art displays and Green Party of Florida environmental activism presentations. Even Def Leppard made a memorable appearance in 2003, playing a show after performing at the then-Pensacola Civic Center. Taking over the former Van Gogh’s Coffee House, End of the Line began, above all else, as a vessel to hold community and be a safe space.
“In 2001, I believe, we started talking about taking this place over, which was an existing coffee shop at the time, and some of the workers were my friends, and we all started talking about how it would be great to have this place for us to be able to do some pretty amazing things,” Knight said. “All of us were involved in local activism—political, animal activism, environmental activism—and a lot of different organizations. … The people who were actually working here had started some pretty great events with music and just making a space for all kinds of people.
“We all had this common voice,” Knight said.
Deeply rooted in activism, Knight’s convictions were also interwoven into her business practices. The dishes in her dining room were repurposed from Waterfront Rescue Mission, and her restaurant supply runs were done by bicycle to help reduce her carbon footprint.
“I had a little BOB trailer on my bike, so I was the girl who was probably wearing some vintage dress, some Converse and riding a bike around town with cat-eye glasses or sunglasses,” Knight said. “I listened to a lot of early pre-war country blues back then, a lot of music from the ’30s and ’40s. … We did all of our shopping on bikes. We did all of our recycling on bikes … I guess you could see us all coming, because we were all bike punks. None of us drove … we just didn’t want to have anything to do with, you know, using gas.”
Christian Wagley, a Healthy Gulf Florida representative and Pensacola environmental activist, said Knight’s green business practices were ahead of their time in the early 2000s.
“I saw them work, going on the bikes, bringing in loads of bread and vegetables and running the recycling off. Then they didn’t compost there, but they would save all their kitchen scraps and those would go off to a garden somewhere … they were doing that stuff before anybody else ever thought of that,” Wagley said. “So many things that were definitely ahead of its time, environmentally.”
The restaurant’s neighborhood walkability and bike rack are also worth noting, according to Wagley, making it easy for customers to access without a car.
As Knight’s vegan journey grew and she toyed with new flavors, her better batches would land a spot on their menu, gradually transitioning from a café with coffees and baked goods to a full-fledged restaurant with a motley assortment of experimental menu items, starting with sandwiches and specials.
“There was no flow of it. We just wanted to cook everything and make everybody eat everything, and just show everybody that it actually is good stuff,” Knight said. “It tastes good, it’s got all these flavors and textures, and it can be comfort food. It could be something completely new that you’ve never tried and still delicious.”
They started seeing customers come in not only for a meal but seeking guidance on rewiring their eating habits, leading her to hold classes where patrons could enjoy a meal and be empowered with education on how to prepare the ingredients themselves.
“There was a lot of people that would come and their doctors are saying, ‘You can’t eat this Southern diet you’ve eaten your whole life. You have to give up oil, fried food, dairy, meat and all this stuff.’ And they’re like, ‘What do we do? Please help me,’” Knight said. “I just feel like if somebody needs to change their diet, they don’t need to just eat. They need to know what to eat.”
While she was seeing the impact that End of the Line was having, it still required conversations with the cynics who doubted what the restaurant was accomplishing.
“That was what was interesting about the time, is that a vegan restaurant in the South, in our (what kind of seemed like) a small town, was people would come in and laugh at the menu. Literally, laugh out loud at the menu, and they were like, ‘It’s not real food,’ Knight said. “I’m like, ‘It’s the realest food.’”
Expanding space and dreams for End of the Line
It didn’t take long before her small space was packed out, combined with multi-course dinners, cooking classes, catering gigs and concerts—and they were running out of room.
Where she would go next became a challenge.
While she found plenty of cool spaces, she couldn’t get herself to leave her part of Pensacola and her neighbors, such as the Handlebar, 309 Punk House, From the Ground Up Community Garden and more.
“This side of the tracks is a magnet for creatives,” Knight said. “This neighborhood, I’ve watched it grow, and it’s watched us grow, and we’ve all grown together, and we’ve seen a lot of families grow up … it’s just where we needed to be.”
Her best option was to try to buy her building and the derelict building next door, each owned by a separate owner. While she had to wait several years for the timing to align, she finally got the green light, knowing she would need to do some construction to help the business become something she could grow into.
That expansion was recognized with the Strong Towns Award at this year’s CivicCon awards ceremony—presented in partnership by the Pensacola News Journal and the Studer Community Institute—where Knight was praised for repurposing an old building to help enrich the community around her.
“I just was so, so excited for her to win this year, because she’s deserved it for a long, long time,” Wagley said. “And as someone who’s had a front row seat watching it for 25 years—a quarter century now—it was just very, it was very rewarding to me to see someone so worthy be honored. …. She’s just very humble, and she just goes about her day, goes about running the business every day, never tries to draw attention to herself. And those are the people that you want to see be awarded and rewarded and honored.
“It has been so pleasant to watch a small, locally-owned business grow in partnership with the community,” Wagley added.
It wasn’t easy, and required working on the building one side at a time. Knight would come in with a toolbelt on “Maintenance Mondays” when the restaurant was closed, playing records while she worked to rebuild the two spaces into one.
When the renovation wrapped up a year or so ago, regulars were greeted by ethereal sunlit rooms, expanded dining rooms and outdoor courtyards, a much larger kitchen, and a new bar. The first question they had, though, was what happened to all the art?
While the art was the last to return to the walls, Knight would say it’s one of the design characteristics integral to the space, specifically their hand-painted open sign that has been there since the beginning. Now, you’ll still see all your favorites spanning the walls, including many wood-panel paintings from Pensacola-raised artist Scott “Panhandle Slim” Stanton. He still often visits for impromptu “pay what you can” pop-up painting sales.
“It took a little while to pull that character back out of it, but it never went away. It’s in the heart of this business,” Knight said.
“It’s truly one of the best community gathering spaces in Pensacola,” Wagley said. “There would be a huge void if it wasn’t there.”
What’s next for End of the Line?
Knight has big plans for End of the Line, including adding a liquor license soon, more market-type events, more music on the new performance stage, a private rental room, and a stocked grab-and-go cold case for those who want to grab their meals to go and enjoy at home.
While Knight had to make some cuts given their limited space, she is excited to expand their offerings once again.
“We’re doing what we always wanted but never had the space for,” Knight said.
She still sees new faces coming through her doors, and encourages those considering the switch to a vegan lifestyle to start small, noting that it doesn’t need to be an all-or-nothing approach.
“It’s easy to fall into these different mindsets when it comes to trying new things or changing your life or your lifestyle. … It’s not a cult, it’s not a religion, it’s not anything to where you have to go full throttle. You don’t have to cut everything out and be very rigid about it,” Knight said. “I always tell them, ‘Why don’t you just change what you put in your coffee?’ Or even a bigger change, ‘Change the milk you drink.’”
End of the Line is now open at 610 E. Wright St. from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. on Tuesday through Thursday, from 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. on Friday and Saturday, and from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. on Sunday. For real-time updates and information, follow End of the Line Café on social media.
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