Nashville, “Music Metropolis,” has lengthy been a haven for musicians and songwriters, however today my hometown can be experiencing a surge of culinary expertise. A decade or two in the past, discovering handrolls made with fish from Tokyo or pure wine by the glass was a problem. Now, we’re in enterprise, with extra choices coming down the pike at a fast tempo.
Born and raised in Nashville, I spent my childhood digging into plates of fried hen with sides of squash casserole and turnip greens at Elliston Place Soda Store, and meandering out to Freeway 100 for a plate of biscuits at Loveless Cafe—institutions which have fed this metropolis for generations. We’ve all the time eaten nicely right here, however as the town has modified—turning into extra worldwide, and influenced by the East and West Coasts—so have its tastes, increasing past the down-home cooking guests would possibly count on.
That’s a superb factor. Ours is a vibrant eating scene that caters to all tastes and budgets, from experimental wonderful eating to tried-and-true lunch counters. There are far more than 13 wonderful locations to go to in Nashville, use this as your primer to getting a tasty of Music Metropolis. Whether or not you are craving a plate of sizzling hen from Prince’s or artfully organized Appalachian meals from chef Sean Brock, Nashville has it.
Apart from sizzling hen, Nashville’s different hometown meals is the “meat ‘n’ three,” a plate lunch consisting of a protein and three sides. The Southern traditional is a specialty of The Elliston Place Soda Store. Opened in 1935, it is among the few remaining (and greatest examples) of the style. Generations of Nashvillians have graced the crimson leather-based cubicles and black-and-white-tiled flooring over time, tended to by employees that feels prefer it turns over about as soon as a century. (Ms. Linda, “the pie girl,” nonetheless makes her beloved coconut meringue pies each morning.) Although Elliston Place moved to a more moderen area subsequent door a number of years in the past, it nonetheless options the soda counter and pressed tin ceiling, which makes the milkshakes, sundaes, and off-menu Elmer—all made with ice cream from Nashville’s Purity Dairy—style like the nice outdated days.
Worldwide Market launched Nashvillians to Thai meals within the Nineteen Seventies, when it opened on Belmont Boulevard serving an exceptionally inexpensive steam desk lunch of Thai and Chinese language dishes. Now, with a brand new location (throughout the road) and new possession (Anna and Arnold Myint, kids of the unique homeowners), the restaurant incorporates high-quality native meats and produce in an up to date setting—although fortunately the unique mustard-and-orange bench seating got here alongside for the journey. The kitchen is now a proving floor for chef Arnold Myint, a current James Beard Semifinalist. Menu objects enterprise past the standard choices of curries with five-spice duck lo mein, shrimp and pineapple curry, and crimson curry rice ball wraps. At lunch, diners can select from the traditional steam desk choice or order from the menu; nighttime brings desk service with Singhas and craft cocktails.
At Locust, chef Trevor Moran created his personal culinary style mixing influences from Japan to his native Eire. I’ve eaten briny Belon oysters that tasted—pleasantly—like licking a battery; a roast sole served with morels and uni; and a bowl of tiny sea snails served with toothpicks and spicy salt. The DIY beef tartare handrolls—freshly floor backside spherical, fluffy rice, and smoky pickled egg cream, plus freeze-dried capers and nori for rolling—are a should, as is the tuna crisp, that includes house-cured slices of tuna loin and stomach atop a fried wonton crisp slathered with horseradish. The cooks ship these dishes to the tables themselves to an eclectic soundtrack that includes the whole lot from Meat Loaf to old-school hip-hop). The drink checklist is heavy on pure wines, although my go-to is the Toki Highball cocktail or a can of sake. In homage to Moran’s birthplace, there’s Guinness by the pint and Irish gin and tonics compete with Orion beer and sake cups.
The diminutive Kisser, modeled after a Japanese kissaten, a neighborhood spot serving consolation meals the place locals can eat, drink, and hang around, has been a smash hit since opening in 2023. After spending years in a few of the greatest kitchens in LA and Nashville, co-owner couple Brian Lea and Leina Horii determined to deal with their very own imaginative and prescient. Impressed partially by Horii’s household sushi restaurant in California, the menu blends conventional Japanese delicacies and their fine-dining strategies with dishes like onigiri full of snow crab and avocado, a wonderfully crispy hen katsu sandwich on fluffy house-made milk bread, and bowls of udon in delicate broth. It’s among the best locations on the town to get pleasure from recent fish, significantly the chirashi bowl, brimming with sashimi and glistening salmon roe. Make sure that to finish your meal with a inexperienced melon-cream soda or a crackly miso crème brûlée.
People is a neighborhood gem that Nashville wants now greater than ever as resorts and chains threaten to seize the eating scene. The restaurant is perched on a quiet nook in East Nashville’s McFerrin Park and welcomes diners with wood-fired sourdough-crust pizzas—my favourite is adorned with Little Neck clams, parsley, bonito, and lemon—and rustic Italian-leaning dishes like Marcella beans with spicy pepper relish, bouncy focaccia with whipped ricotta, and extra. From the high-ceilinged eating room, adorned with paper lanterns and uncovered brick partitions, you may glimpse the bustling kitchen and blazing pizza oven. Pure wines and traditional cocktails are the transfer on the bar, the place the afternoon gentle streams in in the course of the every day apéro hour. The group of shockingly wholesome houseplants are as well-nourished because the patrons.
Not removed from People stands a Tex-Mex taco store with a humorousness the place you may gobble down one chef’s extremely agreeable tackle Taco Bell’s Crunchwrap. To make it, chef Bryan Lee Weaver (additionally of Butcher & Bee) fills his fluffy handmade tortillas with Texas crimson chili, pork inexperienced chili, or each while you order it “Xmas-style.” If tacos are extra your pace, you’ll discover toppings like brisket, tater tots, and freshly roasted Hatch chiles. To me, the sleeper hit is the vegetarian taco with charred poblano, whipped feta, and crispy rice, because of its number of textures and smoky warmth. The queso dip comes with extra of these heat, velvety tortillas (by no means chips!), and the frozen margaritas are tart and freed from sickly-sweet bitter combine. The inside affords retro-diner vibes, with a formica bar and crimson leather-based cubicles, however there’s nothing like grabbing a patio seat within the summertime to let these margs work their Texas magic.
Chef Sean Brock has devoted his profession to finding out Appalachian foodways and delicacies, from his time at Charleston’s award-winning eating places McCrady’s and Husk to present-day ardour tasks like Audrey. Inside this minimalist monolith of a constructing is a heat restaurant serving meals that borrows from the chef’s upbringing in rural Kentucky. On the menu, hen and dumplings with fines herbes and black truffles are primarily based on a recipe from his grandmother, Audrey, who gave the restaurant its identify. The eating room is centered across the kitchen and its woodfired grill; its partitions show Brock’s assortment of outsider artwork, from Butch Anthony to Moses Tolliver, chosen to immerse diners in his dreamworld.
Fortunate for Nashvillians, former Per Se chef and Nashville native Julia Sullivan got here dwelling to open her first solo restaurant in Henrietta Crimson. This ethereal, tiled Germantown spot boasts an oyster bar glistening with mollusks together with Maine’s salty Mookie Blues and Alabama’s buttery Homicide Factors. Regardless of Nashville’s landlocked standing (the Cumberland River doesn’t rely), Henrietta Crimson deftly combines coastal substances with Southern flavors in dishes like oysters roasted with ‘nduja butter and complete trout with dandelion greens. Wooden-fired seafood is the main focus right here, however the recent pastas and greens—significantly the beet salad with pistachio and mint—stand out, too. Brunch brings its personal purpose to go to, with dishes like shrimp toast with beets and tahini and smoked fish truffles with lemon-fennel aioli.
So named as a result of “opening a restaurant is a nasty concept,” this pure wine bar is the brainchild of owner-sommelier Alex Burch and chef Colby Rasavong. You would possibly kick issues off, for example, with a scallop-stuffed crepe in a pool of nam prik blanquette topped by a lacey tuile, and comply with that with a vegetarian laab made with sunflower milk, or ache perdu kaya toast topped with caviar. It’s all occurring inside a repurposed church sanctuary with authentic home windows and excessive ceilings. Worship at this altar of wine and meals later within the night time, and bar snacks are the vibe—assume curry-caviar corndogs and fried bologna sandwiches (a late-night Nashville traditional) with potato chip aioli.
Regardless of the ever-widening swath of eating places serving Prince’s signature dish across the globe, you must go to the unique purveyor to get real-deal Nashville sizzling hen. Because the story goes, the ultra-spicy sandwich was created as punishment by a jilted lover of Thornton Prince; however, as a substitute of catching on hearth, Prince beloved the spice a lot that he’d go on to good the recipe that launched his enterprise. At this time, Prince’s stays the most effective in school, serving up fried hen spiced with cayenne pepper oil atop a slice of white bread with a pickle (a foil to all that cayenne).
Wooden-paneled partitions line the eating room of this traditional meat ‘n’ three restaurant that’s been serving up Southern soul since 1952. Day-after-day, the fourth-generation homeowners welcome an everyday crowd hungry for roast beef, baked ham, and pit barbecue, plus every day specials like fried catfish, hen and dumplings, and reversion fixins like candied yams, turnip greens, baked apples, fried corn, and creamed potatoes. Wendell Smith’s is a slice of Nashville that has held on to its nook lot regardless of unchecked growth throughout it, nonetheless sharing area with the adjoining liquor retailer of the identical identify that’s been working simply as lengthy.
What started 70 years in the past as a humble motel and cafe initially of the Natchez Hint Parkway has been thriving from the second Lon and Annie Love started serving biscuits and fried hen to vacationers out of their dwelling kitchen. After their persevering with success, the couple turned their dwelling right into a restaurant and opened 14 rooms as a motel to accompany their new eating vacation spot. The motel went out of operation years in the past, and its rooms are actually dwelling to retail area with smoked hams, jams, and biscuit combine on supply. Although there may be now expanded out of doors seating and an outside bar serving bloody Marys when the wait is lengthy, there’s nothing higher than grabbing a seat within the tiny eating room that also appears like dwelling.
An establishment since 1974, this legendary West Nashville steakhouse is a windowless eating room that includes backlit stained glass, carpeting, a stone hearth with a roaring hearth (most nights), and sporty portraits of the hounds and horses that when lived on the grounds of the abutting Belle Meade Mansion. Martinis and Manhattans pair completely with Sperry’s steaks and seafood, from a filet Oskar smothered in crabmeat and Béarnaise to king crab legs served with drawn butter. Nashville’s very first salad bar stays gloriously intact right here, the place diners can pile their plate with neon inexperienced goddess and bacon crumbles (although the plated iceberg wedge salad topped with bacon and black olives is my alternative). Bananas Foster, one other spotlight, is served tableside in a plume of booze-soaked flames and cinnamon-fueled sparks. The doorways open at 4 for comfortable hour, when sausage-stuffed mushrooms and discounted cocktails draw a gradual stream of locals every day.
