Nashville Dining Guide
Nashville has become a hip tourist city. The number of dining options can be overwhelming. This is our Nashville dining guide based on four visits over the past three years.
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Overview
My dad grew up an hour from Nashville and we would visit my grandparents on a regular basis when I was growing up. For two years in the 1980s, I attended Vanderbilt University near the downtown area.
At that time Nashville was definitely not trendy. Hot chicken had yet to become a thing. The most popular restaurant in the downtown Broadway district was the Old Spaghetti Factory (it is still there and our family likes the one in San Diego).
Times have definitely changed. Nashville has all kinds of restaurants both for foodies and theme restaurants for tourists. We will say upfront that our focus is not really on the foodie places or the big theme restaurants. However, we will give you some limited suggestions in those areas
When dining in a city like Nashville we like places that are more regional in focus. In Nashville this includes Nashville Hot Chicken, Meat and Three and BBQ.
Hot Chicken
According to the Hot Chicken Cookbook, Nashville hot chicken got its start at Prince’s Hot Chicken Shack. The legend goes that in the 1930s, Thornton Price was out late one night. To get revenge his girlfriend served him chicken doused in cayenne pepper for breakfast. He liked it so much he started a hot chicken shack.
However, it was another 70 years before Nashville hot chicken hit the food scene. Most people credit Bill Purcell, Mayor of Nashville from 1999 to 2007, for driving the popularity of hot chicken. The New Yorker did a great article on this history.
Prince’s is still going today, but it is pretty far off the beaten track. Many Nashville restaurants have hot chicken on the menu. In Nashville we have tried Hattie B’s to get our official Nashville hot chicken fix. Hattie B’s is a mile west of downtown next to Vanderbilt University.
We had passed up Hattie B’s in several past visits because of the long line. On our January 2019 visit we stayed at the Hayes Street Hotel across the street from Hattie B’s. We had heard that one option is to do pickup and take back to your hotel. However, there was almost no line this time of year so we got to dine in.
Hattie B’s has six levels of heat: Southern (no heat), mild, medium, hot, damn hot and Shut the Cluck Up!
Of course, I had to go with hot, which was only level 4. This was against the advice of many people that told me to start with medium. That was advice I should have heeded. I love spicy food but found the hot overwhelming. To my taste buds the cayenne flavor was overwhelming.
The only other Nashville place I have tried hot chicken is The Stillery. This is a more trendy restaurant near Broadway. The Stillery is a fairly casual place with a wide variety of food, including wood-fired pizza.
The hot chicken at the Stillery came in either hot or “Nashville hot.” I got the hot and it was nowhere near the heat level of Hattie B’s hot.
Across the street from Hattie B’s we hung out some late nights at The Row Kitchen and Pub, a restaurant featuring live music. We were there mainly for the music but we noted they also had hot chicken on their menu.
Overall I need to experiment more with Nashville hot chicken. It may just be something that is not my thing. I tried making it at home using this recipe from Bon Appetit. They claimed it was based on Hattie B’s medium spice level. However, with 6 tablespoons of cayenne it was too hot for our family and we threw most of it out.
Meat and Three
Meat and three is more what I think of when it comes to Nashville and southern food in general. This is where you pick a meat and three side dishes. This is something I had all the time in the south. It has now become very trendy.
By most reviews, the number one place for meat and three is Arnold’s Country Kitchen. Arnold’s sounds great but it was a bit of a hike from where we were and it was raining. Also we heard there could be lines.
For our traditional Southern meal we picked Puckett’s Grocery & Restaurant. We knew it was touristy, but they specialize in Southern food. The original Puckett’s was a small grocery store in small town Tennessee. Now there are six locations throughout Nashville.
I will note that USA Today noted Puckett’s as the second-best meat and three restaurant, after Arnold’s. Puckett’s is an example of a Nashville trend, theme restaurants
Big Restaurants
The first thing any visitor to the Broadway area of downtown Nashville will notice is the big themed restaurants. In many cases, these places have multiple floors with different dining options on each floor.
Of course, these restaurants are about as touristy as it gets. But they can also be fun. In most cases they will have live music. Every time we go we see a new place has gone up that seems bigger than we ever could have imagined.
On our 2016 visit we checked out the Acme Feed and Seed which had opened the previous year. This is huge restaurant/entertainment complex in a 3-story warehouse on the river at the end of Broadway. We ended up only having drinks an appetizer because we were confused about the various options.
When we came back in December 2018 we ate next door at the new Nashville Underground. This is a four-story complex. We ate on the first floor where they were hosting a radio show for the Titans football game that afternoon. Nashville Underground has comfort classics like hot chicken, BBQ and meat and three. Acme Feed and Seed seemed more upscale with a sushi lounge. Both places had fancy brunch cocktails going on for the weekend (it was a Sunday).
The biggest new place we saw on our last visit was the Diner which is a six-story restaurant. They advertise being open 24/7 with alcohol flowing 23 hours a day. Also recently opened was the Kid Rock’s Big Ass Honky Tonk Steakhouse. This place is on the center of Broadway and is five-stories tall.
Right across the street is one of the older mega restaurants, Honky Tonk Central which opened way back in 2013. Honky Tonk Central, the Diner and Kid Rock’s restaurant are all owned by the same team.
The Tennessean did a great article on how these places helped reinvent the blighted Broadway I knew from the 1980s. The big question is how many more places can Nashville handle? We noted that a few months after we visited a new four story place, Downtown Sporting Club opened in April 2019.
Outside of downtown Nashville, the other major tourist entertainment complex in Nashville is the Opryland/ Grand Ole Opry area. You can check out our Christmas visit here where we ate in a German food hall the Bavarian Bierhaus. This was a huge place with life music and picnic table seating.
We picked the Bavarian Bierhaus because we did not get a chance to visit the Germantown area of Nashville which is home to some of Nashville’s best dining experiences. We were hoping to visit Von Elrods Beer Garden and Sausage House in Germantown. Nevertheless, we really enjoyed the Bavarian Bierhaus.
For a combined entertainment/music/dining experience in downtown Nashville the restaurant we recommend above everything else is Martin’s BBQ by the Country Music Hall of Fame.
Nashville BBQ
People from places like California tend to think of BBQ as something that is pervasive throughout the south. However, Nashville is not really known as a BBQ town.
I lived in North Carolina for six years and learned that the quality of BBQ starts to dry up from Western North Carolina until you hit western Tennessee, many miles away. Memphis is a BBQ town. In my two years in Nashville in the 1980s I never had BBQ.
Clearly this is changing as BBQ places open throughout the south, including Nashville. The one we tried was the downtown location of Martin’s BBQ.
The specialty at Martin’s is whole hog pig. The huge downtown location has 4 whole hog pits. They also have a large bar and stage area on the rooftop. As Bon Appetit describes it, is like a BBQ-themed amusement park.
My wife even tried the Alabama-style chicken wings. BBQ from northern Alabama features a mayo-based white sauce. I hate mayo, but she was pretty impressed.
When I visited Nashville in April 2019 I noted there was brand new Martin’s BBQ across the street from Vanderbilt University by the Parthenon. This was right by my old dorm and some of the favorite pizza and hamburger joints that I frequented in my college days.
Pizza and Burgers
When I lived in Nashville as a college student, pizza was my main go to. I actually had my first Chicago Deep-Dish pizza in 1983 at Obie’s Pizza on Elliston Place (with a friend from Chicago who had never had deep dish). Obie’s was still there but it looked like it no longer serves Chicago-style.
Pizza has come along way since 1983 and we found a great place near Vanderbilt on Music Row, DeSano’s Pizza. We have covered the best pizza in San Diego and I can say DeSano would be right up there. I noted that they have opened two locations in the Los Angeles area.
DeSano’s is not a mega-theme restaurant but for a pizza place it is huge with two large dining areas with picnic table seating. In the center of one of the dining rooms are three wood-burning ovens. DeSano’s features Napoletana-style pizza that quickly cooks at a high temperature. If they opened one in San Diego it would likely soar to the top of our list of favorites. We noted that they have opened some places in Los Angeles!
The Elliston Place area by Vanderbilt was home to some of my favorite spots. Two places, Elliston Place Soda Shop and Rotiers have been around for years.
Elliston Place Soda Shop is a classic soda fountain the opened in 1939. Online reviews are lukewarm and I haven’t been here since probably 1985. Most of the complaints seem to center around how old the place is, but that was part of its charm over 30 years ago.
Another old classic is Rotier’s Restaurant. This place opened in 1945 and is noted for their hamburgers. We stopped her for a great meal in 2003 but they close at 3 PM so we haven’t made it back.
The hamburger at Rotier’s has been featured on many best burger lists and on the Food Network. This includes being mentioned in the classic book Road Food and on George Motz’s Burger Land show.
Fancy Eating in Nashville
One thing missing from our Nashville Dining Guide is the more high-end foodie restaurants. This is not always our style. However, we noted that many of the best restaurants are in the Germantown area north of downtown. We plan to visit here on our next trip.
When it comes to trendy restaurants we would defer to Eater. They have a regular list of both the hottest restaurants (heatmap) and the top 38 restaurants in Nashville.
Nashville Places we Recommend
We have only scratched the surface of places in Nashville. The following is a list of places we have visited AND recommend. Note if we visit a place and don’t recommend it we simply ignore it.
Martin’s BBQ: Growing BBQ chain focused on Western TN style whole hog
Nashville Underground: Monster 4-story restaurant/music entertainment venue on Broadway. Focus is Southern food including hot chicken and meat and three.
Bavarian Bierhaus: German beer hall in the Opry Mills Mall.
Hattie B’s: Number one for hot chicken since around 2012
The Row Kitchen and Pub: We came here for drinks and late-night music. It is across the street from Hattie B’s and they have hot chicken on the menu. If the line was too long at Hattie B’s we might go here for hot chicken instead.
The Stillery: Good casual restaurant near Broadway with live music, wood-fired pizza and hot chicken among the choices.
Puckett’s Grocery & Restaurant: Small-town restaurant that now has become a Tennessee mini-chain with a Southern food theme
DeSano’s Pizza: Awesome over-fired pizza
Rotier’s Restaurant: Noted for their burgers since 1945.
Be sure and check out our full Nashville City Guide to see other places we visited in the area.
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