B y J a y M c I n e r n e y P h o t o g r a p h s b y A n d r e a B e h r e n d s

NASHVILLE IS FAMOUS FOR DULCET HARMONIES AND WHISKEY-SOAKED BALLADS, BUT ITS NEW TUNE IS DARING CUISINE AND RESTAURANTS WITH PATRONS FLYING IN ON PRIVATE JETS. A LONGTIME HABITUE TRACES THE EVOLUTION OF THE CITY’S RED-HOT FOOD SCENE.

ALT-COUNTRY

H A P P Y H O U RPinewood Social houses two outdoor pools, a bowling alley, and a restaurant. Opposite: The inventive tasting menu at the Catbird Seat is critically acclaimed. Both restaurants are owned by brothers Benjamin and Max Goldberg.

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After spending the 1980s in Manhattan, and barely surviving the experience, in 1992 I mar-ried a Nashville native and bought a house in that city. I found much to capture my interest there in the coming years; what I didn’t find was a thriving dining scene. Although I was impressed on my first visit by a lively New

American bistro called the Sunset Grill, where Emmylou Harris and Steve Earle were twirling pasta, Nashville’s restaurants seemed stuck in the ’50s. Even a�er Birmingham and, later, Charleston had become centers of a Southern culinary renaissance, I used to fly to New Orleans to get a decent meal.

Now people are flying to Nashville just to eat. �e city the New

York Times called the “it” city of 2013 is being transformed by the hundreds of young people who move there every week, many of them hungry and discriminating in their tastes. During my period of residence I discovered the reason for Nashville’s culinary dor-mancy when my wife mentioned that she had had a bodyguard for part of her childhood. It turned out her father, a prominent local businessman, was an outspoken advocate of legalizing liquor sales in hotels and restaurants, which some of the more traditional ele-ments of the community opposed, to the extent of threatening my father-in-law and his family. �e legalizers eventually triumphed, but I suspect that the long tradition of dining at home or at

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P R I M A L C U T SAt Husk Nashville the menu changes daily, and all ingredients are locally produced. Here, a prime steak from grass-fed cattle.

the country club, where cocktails and wine with dinner were allowed, persisted among Nashville’s upper middle class, many of whom had personal cooks. How else to explain the city’s culinary backwardness? Foodies and wine collectors could sometimes be glimpsed at the now defunct Wild Boar, a very formal, very French restaurant set in a sterile o�ce complex that boasted an impres-sive wine cellar, with thousands of bottles, though for many of us the wines were ultimately more memorable than the haute cuisine, which arrived at the table concealed under heavy silver cloches that were removed with dramatic flourish by the tuxedoed waiters.

Given the limited dining options, we did a lot of entertain-ing at home, where I shared cooking duties with Mildred Bell, who had been cooking for my wife’s family for decades. Given Mildred’s skill set and heritage, the menu skewed Southern; �ied chicken was a �equent main course, collard and turnip greens favored sides, though I would sometimes ship ingredients in �om elsewhere, including so�-shell crabs, the sight of which horrified not a few of my native Southern �iends. Our guest list also fea-tured visitors �om New York and beyond. I remember a night that included Steve Earle, Mia Farrow, Julian Barnes, and the late Senator Fred �ompson. Another mixed Jimmy Bu�ett, Donna Tartt, and Stephen Fry. I believe that was the night my wife dis-appeared during the first course and returned during the cheese course with blood on her dress, having delivered a baby goat in the laundry.

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While Mildred’s �ied chicken was renowned among our friends, the chicken at Prince’s Hot Chicken Shack, located across town in a shabby strip mall, was world

famous. The current owner is André Prince Jeffries, who has operated the joint since 1980, before which it was owned by her great-uncle �ornton Prince. According to Je�ries, credit for the invention of hot chicken belongs to �ornton’s wife. One morning in the 1930s, �ornton, a tireless womanizer, came home �om a night with one of his girl�iends and demanded some �ied chicken. In a vengeful spirit, his wife cooked a batch loaded with cayenne, but he liked it so much he opened a restaurant devoted to it. Today some 14 establishments in the Nashville area are dedicated to serv-ing hot chicken, although the term “restaurant” might be a little grand for some. Prince’s occu-pies a cramped store�ont with a black-and-white checkerboard floor that matches the compo-sition of the clientele, the lucky diners sitting in plywood booths while the rest hover around the door and the order window.

Hot chicken is tradition-ally made with a lard-cayenne paste brushed on before or a�er cooking—or both—and served over white bread with pickles. At Prince’s it comes in mild, medium, and extra-hot, and the joke is that white people aren’t allowed to order it hotter than medium. I once ordered the medium and wept for hours, trying to find a beverage to ease the bonfire in my mouth. Every few years a�er-ward the memory of the pain would fade and I would return, though I now order the mild, which is plenty hot for me. Coke seems to be the preferred accom-paniment for the dish, although some swear by Mountain Dew.

After the hot chicken shack, Nashville’s most notable culi-nary institution is the “meat-and-three,” exemplified by Arnold’s Country Kitchen, a lunch-only bu�et. �e meat-and-three seems to have originated in central Tennessee; the name refers to a menu o�ering one fatty protein—typically �ied chicken, country ham, a pork chop, or a country-�ied steak—and three sides, such as lima beans, collard greens, and macaroni. My favorite meat-and-three when I lived in Nashville was a postcard-perfect place with a country-music-song-title-ready name: the Loveless Café.

I sold my house in Nashville in the late ’90s, but I visit intermit-tently, always looking for a decent meal. In 2001, I dined at Café Margot in East Nashville, a-down-at-the-heels neighborhood sepa-rated �om the city center by the Cumberland River. Chef Margot McCormack’s food was �esh, simple, and tasty, with Provençal and Italian influences, and it offered something new to Nash-ville—and for the neighborhood: a seasonal, eclectic, farm-to-table restaurant. In subsequent years I was intrigued as a New Yorker by the way the development of East Nashville as a center for arts, food, and culture mirrored that of Brooklyn. Margot was not only an inspiration but a nurturer of local culinary talent, as was Deb

E U R O P E A N I M P O R TRolf & Daughters, which occupies a former factory, serves “modern peasant food” by Philip Krajeck, a Southerner who grew up in Belgium and attended hotelier school in Switzerland.

Paquette, who had opened a restaurant, Zola, a few years before. (Her latest eatery, Etch, was named best in Nashville by Zagat last year.) “Margot and Deb did the spadework,” says Steve Cavendish, a former editor for the Nashville Scene. Among those who worked under McCormack was a young chef named Tandy Wilson, who in 2007 opened a restaurant called City House, which some consider the Big Bang moment of Nashville’s current dining scene. City House is unpretentious but polished, a restaurant that pays hom-age to Italy by way of California, with just a bit of Southern spin.

For a food-obsessed New Yorker, however, it was the opening of the Catbird Seat, in 2011, that reverberated. (�e buzz was so loud the New York Times wrote it up just a few weeks later.) If City House is Nashville’s equivalent of Union Square Café, the Catbird Seat is its

Chef ’s Table at Brooklyn Fare: a small-plate, tasting-menu destina-tion restaurant run by chefs with international credentials. Some diners found the prices high for Nashville—around $100 on average, before beverages—but as word �om ecstatic early eaters spread, it became tough to secure a stool at the U-shaped 20-seat bar. By the time I managed to get in, the original team of Josh Hab-iger and Erik Anderson, whose résumés included the Fat Duck, Alinea, and the French Laundry, had been replaced by Trevor Moran, an Irishman who had spent four years at Noma. While it didn’t seem to bode well that the founders had departed less than two years after achieving white heat, it’s hard to imagine the Catbird Seat was ever better than it was on my first visit.

Moran’s cooking is precise and highbrow, but he also likes to make references to lowbrow treats. �e first course, or perhaps it was the second, was a crispy piece of peppery hot chicken skin—a tasty salute to Nashville’s hometown dish. It was served alongside something that looked very much like an Oreo, though it was in fact a savory porcini cookie filled with a parmesan cream. Moran nods to his Irish roots with a dish of potato puree flavored with beer yeast le� over �om Nashville’s Yazoo Brewery and crunchy pieces of smoked bread. Best damn potato I’ve ever had. Moran has also taken note of the local bounty of country ham, which is one of central Tennessee’s—and America’s—great culinary treasures. (Ask David Chang, who was one of the first chefs to treat coun-try ham like pata negra or prosciutto.) Moran gets his �om the Hamery in nearby Mur�eesboro. �e night I was there he sand-wiched country ham marrow that originated at Karen Overton’s Wedge Oak Farm between two slices of pear. In the category of tastes-way-better-than-it-sounds: duck heart dehydrated with brine, then rehydrated with Dr. Pepper, which seemed to pair particularly well with “Lawyers, Guns, and Money,” which was playing as I ate it. As with many Nashville restaurants, the wine list is not as exciting as the menu—it takes a lot of capital and connections to build a deep list, and Tennessee’s restrictive shipping laws don’t help—but

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the food here is creative, delicious, and fun. And I daresay this is the first restaurant in Nashville that attracts patrons who fly in on private jets for a few hours of dining bliss, as one couple I met recently did. �e news that Moran is returning to Noma has sad-dened Music City foodies, but the fact that the restaurant thrived a�er the departure of the founding team is reason for optimism.

�e Catbird Seat is the creation of brothers Benjamin and Max Goldberg, Nashville natives whose portfolio includes the kitschy, downtown Paradise Park Trailer Resort, a burger and beer joint, as well as the Patterson House, a hip, expensively appointed bar devoted to cra� cocktails with eight kinds of ice made �om twice-filtered water. Can’t say I’ve ever set foot in the former, but the Pat-terson House, just downstairs �om the Catbird Seat, is the most sophisticated backdrop in town for an assignation and an arti-sanal negroni. Another Goldberg project, Pinewood Social, seems to span their high/low aesthetic. A kind of entertainment com-plex inside a former warehouse, it encompasses a six-lane bowling alley, two outdoor plunge pools, an espresso bar, and a restaurant with a sophisticated menu cre-ated by Catbird Seat alum Josh Habiger. His take on hot chicken involves deep-�ied sweetbreads with the perfect dose of cayenne paste. �e restaurant serves three meals a day, and the atmosphere is conducive to creative malin-gering; the living room next to the co�ee bar is outfitted with couches and work stations.

When I first ate at McCrady’s, in Charles-ton, South Carolina, during a food and wine festival in

2009, Sean Brock was just beginning to make a name for himself as the avatar of a new kind of Southern cooking. I had no idea then that he had spent three years at the Hermitage Hotel in Nashville. In 2013, Brock made a triumphant return to Music City, opening a branch of Husk, the restaurant he had created in Charleston three years earlier. In both outposts the food is locally produced and stri-dently Southern. (My kids still do a great impression of the waiter reciting the pedigree of the sow �om which the ham was derived and the farmer who raised it.) At first Husk Nashville seemed as if it might be a pale imitation of the original, but I have visited both establishments recently, and it’s at least as good if not better. (GQ restaurant critic Alan Richman thinks it’s way better.) Located in a former governor’s downtown mansion, it’s serving the best �ied chicken in town—cooked in butter, chicken fat, rendered ham fat, and god knows what else. Brock is also a virtuoso of pork, but his plate of Southern vegetables could convert a carnivore.

Another Charleston chef who decamped to Nashville is Andrew Coins, the chef de cuisine at Miel, �esh �om the Charleston Place Hotel. Like Brock, Coins attended Johnson & Wales University, although his menu at Miel is a little more Mediterranean and a little less Southern than Husk’s. Located in Sylvan Park, a scru�y

neighborhood better known for payday loan outfits and fast food �anchises, Miel is the brainchild of Seema Prasad, a wine-savvy restaurateur who moved �om Seattle in 2001.

Nashville has indeed become a magnet for talent �om afar, such as Philip Krajeck, who grew up in Belgium and did stints at Gramercy Tavern and Blue Hill before opening Rolf & Daughters in a former factory in East Nashville. Krajeck, who describes his fare as “modern peasant food,” was in hotelier school in Switzer-land when he fell in with a group of Italians, who taught him about pasta, and it’s the inventive homemade pastas at Rolf & Daughters, like garganelli with heritage pork ragu, that keep me returning.

Another out-of-town culinary star to plant his flag here is Jona-than Waxman, who in the ’80s introduced New Yorkers to Cali-

fornia cuisine with his restaurant Jams. Waxman, whose grilled chicken still tastes amazing some 30 years a�er I first sampled it, opened Adele’s in a former tire warehouse in the downtown neighborhood known as the Gulch, which is home to several of Nashville’s newest restaurants, including the 404, located in a former shipping container.

The latest high-profile chef to open up shop in Nashville is Chopped judge Maneet Chau-han, who moved her entire fam-ily �om New York to Nashville to open Chauhan Ale & Masala House, a gastropub with an Indian-inflected menu in an old warehouse just across Broad-way from Adele’s and the 404. Chauhan pays tribute to the meat-and-three tradition with a lunchtime choice of a protein

and three sides, such as chicken keema served with daal, paratha, and a spicy cabbage. Finally, the latest sign of Nashville’s growing culinary sophistication is Avo, Jess Rice and Susannah Herring’s raw vegan restaurant, which has become my vegetarian daugh-ter’s new favorite dining spot. �at Avo is thriving in the land of chicken-�ied steak says everything you need to know about the city’s transformation, but anyone who still doubts that the home-town of the Grand Ole Opry has morphed into a Southern version of Greenpoint as well as a dining destination should check out the tragically hip Pharmacy Burger Parlor & Beer Garden, or Margot McCormack’s latest restaurant, Marché Artisan Foods, where you have a chance of running into Jack White or one of the Black Keys.

I was sad to hear that the Sunset Grill closed last year. Nashville was a more intimate city when it opened, and the grill was a kind of clubhouse where singers, songwriters, and music execs mixed with politicians and adventurous bluebloods, including the late cross-dressing, macho aristo Neil Cargile, who didn’t believe his taste for Chanel and Cardin should prevent him �om collecting beautiful girl�iends. Like many Southern communities, Nashville has a high tolerance for eccentrics. �e influx of newcomers has changed its character, but there’s no question the food is way bet-ter. I’m really looking forward to my next visit. �

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O P E N K I T C H E NCity House serves unpretentious Italian cuisine with a California-Southern twist. Chef Tandy Wilson is credited with starting Nashville’s food revolution.

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E A R LY B I R D SThe Loveless Café, a Nashville dining institution since 1951, is open all day and serves an exceptionally good “meat-and-three,” a traditional Southern offering of one protein (fried chicken, country ham, pork chops) and three sides (such as creamed corn, green beans, potatoes).

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