"Let’s get Knotty": Exciting new family-owned restaurant coming soon to NSB

A highly-anticipated Italian-style restaurant is making its way to New Smyrna Beach in the new year.

The Knot House, a food truck-turned-sit-down restaurant will soon open its doors on Canal Street. The restaurant’s opening has been a long-time coming for owners Carling Ponder and her husband, Hanni’El Gutierrez, who have dedicated the last three years to bringing their dream to life — one that the couple never fully expected, but organically began to pursue.

The sauce speaks for itself: Authentic new Italian restaurant opens in Daytona Beach

No stranger to the restaurant business, the accomplished pair owns four food trucks — three of which are currently on the road — Rollin' Dough, which the couple opened nearly five years ago, and the Knot by Rollin' Dough, which opened six months later.

The popular food trucks have become a community-wide staple, frequenting local neighborhoods, and catering weddings and other special events everywhere from Jacksonville to Kissimmee, where their refreshingly unique menu of garlic knot sliders has taken off and earned them a fiercely loyal following.

A seemingly natural next step, the couple decided to take their offerings to new heights by preparing to open their own sit-down restaurant — one that will maintain the quality, consistency and flavors that customers know and love from the trucks, while spicing things up with several new menu additions.

What to expect on The Knot House’s menu

As the new year approaches, The Knot House is preparing to roll out a thoughtfully curated menu of mainly Italian-inspired dishes that customers new and returning can enjoy for breakfast, lunch or dinner.

According to Ponder, as the duo preps the scratch-made garlic knots each morning — a process that can take nearly six hours — the same freshly baked, raved-about bread will be used to make breakfast sandwiches for those stopping in for a morning bite.

“Our thought was, well we have to be here anyway to make garlic knots in the morning, so why not just be open, you know?” Ponder said.

“If someone’s going to be in the back, someone can be in the front. And our garlic knot, just like the fresh bread, is so good with eggs. So, we were like, let’s just do breakfast sandwiches — coffee, too. And my mom, she went to pastry school, so she’s doing fresh pastries every day.”

The Knot House plans to offer an expanded garlic knot menu with new and returning favorites — a new slider variety made possible with the additional space and equipment that a restaurant allows. According to Ponder, although the eatery plans to start simple, customers can look forward to fried options, like the spicy fried shrimp slider with crispy slaw and bang bang sauce, as well as fresh blackened fish of the day sliders, steak sliders, and chicken alfredo and pesto chicken sliders.

The Knot House will also offer pasta dishes, and for those having trouble deciding on just one, the eatery is making the choice easier than ever by offering both slider and pasta flights, where customers can try three different sliders as well as three different pasta and sauce combinations.

The soon-to-open restaurant prides itself on its made-fresh-daily garlic bread, meatballs, pastries and more, with  quality cuisine unlike you’ve ever had it before at the forefront of its menu.

According to Ponder, the couple’s Knot Spot pop-up a while back in Sanford provided a great deal of menu-curation practice, allowing the duo to release a creative new menu and see what the community loved. Taking the same approach, they plan to start small and see what sticks, expanding the eatery’s offerings as they go.

“From here, we can add more pasta, an expanded salad menu, more garlic knot sliders, and the breakfast, pastries, all that great stuff. Our plan is to start simple and maybe run a special each day to see what people are looking for, because, you know, people get bored,” Ponder said.

“You have to keep them on their toes, I feel like. And my husband, he’s from Puerto Rico, so he wanted to do kind of like an island menu eventually — when his mom's in town — and bring in some of their family meals. So, you know, we’re definitely going to spice things up.”

The beginning of The Knot House

Located in a cozy, barn-red vintage home on Canal Street, the restaurant replaces what was formerly the Rusty Rooster, a retail store owned by Ponder’s mother before the couple took it off her hands several years ago. Now three years in, Ponder noted the meticulous, time-consuming and ongoing efforts that have been put into the not-so-new building to bring the duo's vision to life.

“It’s been a process, because since this was a retail store, it’s just bones. We had to completely build out the kitchen. And because we wanted to have an expanded menu, we needed the hood, we needed a grease trap — all these things,” Ponder said.

“Then, Hurricane Ian came, and anything we weren’t planning to change, we then had to. That set us back, and then running the food trucks, too — we had to keep working, you know? It’s definitely been a process.”

With a “just do it” mindset, the couple entirely revamped the aged space, with new flooring, an expanded parking lot, outdoor patio seating, a full kitchen and more, eager to provide the eatery’s customers with a comfortable dining experience that delivers on all fronts — food, atmosphere and service — from the very first visit.

“Our goal with this, and why we’re still waiting (to open), is that we want to open and be 100 percent. We don’t want to be short staffed, we don’t want bad reviews because of certain things. We want to be on point from the moment we open. That’s the goal,” Ponder said.

“We want to wow you from the moment you walk in, so that way you’ll come back and you don’t have a reason to not come back. As long as we know what we’re selling and stay true to that, I think we’ll do well.”

Determined to keep the building’s vintage charm alive, the restaurant is decorated with simple blacks and whites, furniture the duo has collected and customized over the last three years, and only a handful of indoor tables.

An eye-catcher to say the least, and what I, like Ponder, predict will be a social media photo-op staple is The Knot House’s custom graffiti wall, done by artist Ron Rivera. Decorated in vibrant reds, yellows and greens, the wall features funky spray-painted imagery, including garlic knots, tomatoes and the duo’s classic hashtags, like #feelinknotty.

“We just wanted simple, clean and bright colors … we wanted the colors to pop and to do something different,” Ponder said, explaining the colorful wall’s design.

“All people have to do is take a picture of this wall, post it on their socials, and people are like ‘Wait where is that wall? I need to take a picture,’ you know? That was the goal. Times are changing, and you really have to make something different where people see it and want to be there.”

A food truck-turned-restaurant

Although now a great success-story, the couple’s path to becoming food truck — and now restaurant owners — was anything but ordinary.

Ponder, originally from New Smyrna Beach, got her start pursuing a career in TV journalism in Orlando, but would eventually switch gears entirely, and go on to work at the very restaurant where she met her now husband, Hanni’El, just less than 10 years ago. After the pair married, Ponder, who was bartending at the time, recalled to me a feeling that overtook the couple — an eagerness to do more.

Having always worked for someone else, the duo yearned for a project of their own, where the menu, design and creative control was fully in their hands. As fate might have it, an opportunity arose for them to purchase their now-popular Rollin' Dough food truck, and the rest was history.

“It was like a turnkey food truck at the time, which neither of us had ever done before. But he’s always done pizza. He’s from Puerto Rico, and his whole family does pizza and Italian food — which you wouldn’t think, but it’s very popular there,” Ponder explained.

“So, we had the opportunity to buy the food truck, and we were like, 'OK, let’s just do it.' It kind of started part time — he had a full-time job, I was bartending, and we were raising a baby — but we kind of realized, there’s a lot more to this, and we can probably do this. So, we both quit our jobs and went full force into Rollin' Dough and haven’t looked back.”

NSB’s newest restaurant is pet- and family-friendly, with food to go

Ultimately, Ponder plans to have a to-go style food service in the eatery’s backyard, a space she hopes to fill with both a beverage truck — that will eventually serve beer and wine — as well as a quick-service food truck with a pizza oven.

“The goal is to have Rollin' Dough in the backyard,” Ponder said. “So, (in the restaurant) will be like full service, and then there’s a fence back there, and (customers) can walk straight in and just do quick service and get it to go — so that’s when we’ll bring back pizza.”

As creative new ideas for the eatery continue to evolve, one thing remains constant: The Knot House will be a kid-, family- and pet-friendly space for the entire community to enjoy. A place with no judgement, where dogs can roam about and children play free, the soon-to-open eatery hopes to be a local hang-out spot for singles, friends and families alike.

“Our whole vision was to be pet- and kid-friendly, because not a lot of places in this city have a place where kids can be kids … I really can’t stress enough the family-friendly — even the pet-friendly atmosphere, you know?” Ponder said with a smile.

“Let your dogs run, bring anyone and everyone, because we have this space. Like, in the outside, we’re going to have yard games and stuff for people to do, so it’s a place where people want to hang out and they’re not rushed, you know? If the kids are having fun, then the parents are enjoying themselves.”

The Knot House is located at 1001 Canal St. in New Smyrna Beach. The eatery will be available for catering and private events and plans to open its doors in mid-January. For information, call 386-295-4912 or visit Facebook.com/theknothousensb.

Helena Perray is the restaurant and dining writer for The Daytona Beach News-Journal. A New Jersey native and passionate storyteller, she can be contacted at hperray@gannett.com. Follow her on Instagram and Facebook. Support local journalism by subscribing

This article originally appeared on The Daytona Beach News-Journal: The Knot House family-owned restaurant is coming soon to NSB