Food And Music

Exploring the food scene in a place is one of my favorite things to do when I travel. Food is a key component of the personality of a place. In New Orleans, it is the personality of this place. On this recent trip to Nashville, I had to adjust my expectations of food discovery. I was traveling with three sisters, all of whom had their own expectations of the trip. The three that did not marry Tom have different levels of enthusiasm about food. They enjoy eating like the rest of us, but our Dad’s philosophy of food (which Tom found depressing) stuck with them more. Our Dad occasionally expressed his feelings about food to Tom with this statement: “Tom, it’s all just another meatball.” Opinions like this amazed Tom, and depressed him to the point of tears.

That is a gross exaggeration of course, but Tom remained befuddled by the dining habits of all these in-laws for the rest of his life. What could he expect, really, from siblings whose Monday night dinner consisted of canned Vienna Sausages, canned boiled potatoes, and Campbell’s Pork & Beans?

With this in mind, it was no surprise that the Nashville trip was not about food exploration. Add to that fact the details that two of these sisters are expats, and we included a childhood friend and his wife in a few meals. They wanted the food they missed. So from the very first meal I had in Nashville I shifted my focus to what is always a fun study: New Orleans food outside New Orleans. I had the opportunity to start the comparisons immediately. Our first meal after arriving in Nashville was to meet our friend and his wife at The Factory at Franklin, a sprawling  industrial complex refurbished into a cool mall with indoor and outdoor spaces of restaurants and retail. Franklin is an old country town that is now a tony suburb of Nashville. It is home to everyone who is anyone in country music. We did not see Taylor Swift, in case you are wondering.

A place called the White Alligator could only be New Orleans, but I wasn’t aware that it was mostly New Orleans until I saw the menu. Standing at the counter I saw muffuletta, gumbo, jambalaya, and poor boys (called po-boys of course) on the menu. There was a fried oyster salad, fried seafood platters, Zapp’s potato chips, boudin balls, beignets, and blackened everything. The owner had to be from New Orleans. And he was.

I just started ordering because I was so curious. I chose a muffuletta, jambalaya, gumbo, boudin balls, and a citrus crab salad, just to be fancy. Also on the table was a fried oyster salad and two shrimp poor boys. The two expats from Nashville went right to the shrimp poor boys. They were indistinguishable from any in New Orleans. Fresh dressings, overstuffed with golden fried shrimp, both of these were great. 

We passed around all the appetizers. The tabletop was covered with food that moved all around the entire meal. As good as all of this was, it would have been better at home. Tom’s dictum, “Eat it where it lives” remains true. We all liked the gumbo, but it was on the spicy side. 

These Nashville people like their hot chicken, so it probably didn’t shock them as it might somewhere else. There were a lot of little oysters in this, which impressed me. And there were lots of shrimp too, but not much crab.

The jambalaya was packed with "stuff," in a little bowl. It too was spicy, but the ingredients didn't seem to be local. We liked this just fine too. It is a very credible version of our food, but again, we have a higher standard here, as it should be.

The muffuletta was interesting. The bread is clearly muffuletta bread, but the interior was dark, so I don’t know if the ham was cooked before assembling, or if the ham was different, but it had a different look to it. The flavor was fine because there was plenty of good olive salad on this. Nice enough.

We all liked the boudin balls. The boudin flavor was spot on and these came with a great sauce. The frying came out a little dark, looking just like the oysters on the oyster salad.

This was a pretty salad but my oldest sister said they seemed like maybe they were not our oysters, though I didn’t detect a difference. She didn’t care for this salad, probably because the frying was a little dark, and a tad greasy. I thought this was a nice salad, with plenty of feta, smoky bacon, and pickled onions. Not a typical one you'd see here, but nice.

I also got a crab salad that had a citrus vinaigrette dressing and pieces of satsuma with a decent amount of fresh crab. It was fresh tasting with pretty Bibb lettuce, and shaved fennel, but I shouldn’t have gotten it because it’s not really New Orleans food.

We stuck around The Factory at Franklin until it was dinner time, so we dropped in at Hattie B’s, a popular Nashville Chicken hotspot. It’s a cute place befitting its name, with a signature color of red. Service is fast casual, and we sat outside at a picnic table. There are five different levels of spice here. We weren’t sure what we could handle so we sampled the spice by getting medium on a small appetizer of five wings. This level is the most popular. 

We determined that we could handle it, but didn’t want to, so we dropped down to the mild, also known as Just A Kiss. There is a Southern Style that is just fried chicken. Next time I’ll try that, because I like the frying here and the batter. But this time we ordered a Half Bird done mild, and our two sides were pimento mac’n’cheese and coleslaw. The pimento mac’n’cheese surprised us by being better than we expected, and the coleslaw was ordinary. The chicken was good enough, but I think I would have preferred to have a few orders of the wings, which came with a slice of white bread and a few housemade pickles skewered on top. We also liked the dipping sauce that came with the chicken.

We walked around the mall a little more, and I couldn’t believe we stumbled into an outpost of Jeni’s Splendid Ice Cream. This place got on my list for the next L.A. visit because I became so intrigued by this Ben & Jerry’s-type gourmet ice cream shop with 29 locations. It’s out of Ohio, and I recently read about the owner Jeni’s new project, fiber bars. We went into Jeni’s and were shocked at the prices of this premium ice cream. We could get three scoops (they call them half scoops but they are as large as any full scoop out there) of different flavors with a chip of waffle cone as garnish for $7.49! That's the cheapest ice cream I’ve seen in a while, and it’s premium ice cream.

We got the darkest chocolate, the milkiest chocolate, and honey vanilla bean. Obscenely rich and delicious.

The following day we ate the breakfast buffet at The Gaylord Opryland Hotel, a most interesting place that reminds me of an inside Disneyland. It is enormous and worth checking out. I called it the terrarium, because it was under a massive glass roof with a fake river and waterfalls and thousands of plants and trees. Very cool, but I didn’t want to spend nearly a day there. 

After the radio show we headed into Nashville to check out the strip. This is the loudest place I have ever been. Parking in a lot is essential, and payment is by barcode. We spent too long trying to figure this out. We first walked into Jason Aldean’s place and kept going. We wanted to be on a rooftop but few were serving food. We ultimately wound up at a large food hall, with about thirty vendors serving everything from Fish & Chips to Turkish food, barbecue, bao, Thai, pizza, and of course Nashville Hot Chicken. My sister got the best thing of the evening, by going to the barbecue place called Honeyfire Barbecue and getting nachos. The barbecue on the nachos was tender pork with a nice smoke ring. This was interspersed with beans and cheese on crispy tortilla chips. We shared this.

I got the classic burger and housecut fries from local favorite The Pharmacy Burger. The last two sisters split a forgettable pizza.

My burger was a smash patty with American cheese and plenty of dressings. It wasn’t spectacular, but the fries were housecut and very good. There was a big pile of these, but the four of us killed it.

After that ordinary meal we hit some more clubs, ending up at Post Malone’s place called Posty’s, where we enjoyed an up-and-comer with a great stage presence named Brian Thomas on stage until we got an alert to get the car. The first three hours were $37, skipping up to $75 for 12 hours. There was no way to just add it after a grace period that passed before we could get back to the car. We called it a night.

The next morning we went back to Franklin to meet our childhood friend again, and the eating in downtown Franklin was so disappointing I couldn’t believe that a town like this with a Tecovas outpost had nothing better. We just wanted a sandwich, and settled on Franklin Mercantile. This was a waste of a meal. My club sandwich was by far the best thing on the table, and that wasn’t good.

For dinner we had popcorn at Classics night at The Grand Old Opry. It’s a beautiful place, and we were all glad we went, but once is enough. Larry Gatlin was the MC and his brothers were onstage with him. A charming host. On the shuttle back to the hotel I heard some people talking about Paul Deen’s place nearby. I wish I had known she had a place in Nashville.

The next morning my sister had a conference meeting. The three of us were left to contemplate breakfast. I was writing and I saw an article of best Nashville bakeries. The first on the list was the one we fell in love with in Reno just weeks before. Perenn had arrived in Nashville at about the same time we were discovering it in Reno. This is a fantastic bakery with a great breakfast and an enormous selection of pastries. I tried to talk the two sisters into going, and in the end it was decided that I should go and get things.

I returned with two ham and cheese croissants, a vanilla bean and chocolate chip croissant, a chocolate chip cookie, a Madeline, and a Bouchon. We sat at the bar that wasn’t open that early and had a breakfast of gourmet pastries. 

Everyone loved the ham and cheese croissants. 

The vanilla bean and chocolate one was also delicious, and it was cross-laminated, which meany shards of pastry broke off. My sisters were intrigued by this as I was the first time I saw it in Reno. 

We split the little Bouchon, which was so rich with dark chocolate that a tiny piece was enough. 

And we like the chocolate cookie okay, but the dusting of salt is offputting. And who doesn’t love a Madeline?

We loaded the car and headed to the strip again, dropping into clubs on the way to the airport. It looked like we might have the same experience of not eating again, when I took matters into my own hands and went to Morgan Wallen’s This Bar & Tennessee Kitchen. It was four floors but we managed to find one without a band. There was plenty enough volume to hear music the whole time we ate. And fortunately it was not a confluence of sound, but only the band a floor below us.

The place is beautiful and the menu looked great. We ordered mac’n’cheese to get something on the table immediately. And I couldn’t resist ordering biscuits and gravy. Somehow I felt safe doing that here, though all but one experience with this dish has been a disaster.

One of my sisters really wanted fried catfish, but I only felt mildly guilty if she didn’t get it because she’s the one from here. She can eat it any time. And does. But on the menu I saw a fried catfish special on Friday, and this was Friday! Two of the sisters got that, and the third didn’t get it only because the other two did. The flatbread was like a club sandwich on a flatbread. Hmmm. I didn’t do much better, getting sliders without noticing they were on pretzel buns. Pretzel bread/buns intrigued me until the novelty wore off.

Very shortly after we ordered the first two dishes arrived. The mac’n’cheese was a large plate of creamy Cavatappi pasta with a pile of Nashville hot chicken pieces on top. This was enough for a meal and after one bite I wish I had ordered it as my entree. This was the best macaroni and cheese I have ever had, including my own. The flavor was simply outstanding. The menu said it was made with white and yellow smoked cheddar, so I have to try that. It was missing my favorite traits of a great mac’n’cheese, which is a crusty top, but that taste knocked us all back in our tracks. 

The white gravy was also by a wide margin the very best of this kind. Now, if we are speaking of biscuits and country gravy that doesn’t take much, but this too was superb. A flaky large biscuit from the cut biscuit universe, it was ladled generously with white gravy that had a lot of flavor, and larger chunks of sausage. On top was a rosemary sprig and a slice of candied bacon. It was the good kind: thick, smoky, stiff. Incredible.

When the catfish arrived I broke off a piece from one of the three generous strips on top of a pile of fries that a sister had in front of her. It was sweet and delicate, like a wild caught catfish. Wait! Could this be wild caught catfish in Nashville in a place that doesn’t need to offer this to far less picky eaters than me? I called over the waiter. “Is this wild caught catfish?”  He admitted right away that he had no idea, but immediately offered to ask in the kitchen. He returned minutes later affirming my hypothesis. Whenever I see any place taking extra steps to offer excellence my faith is renewed that world “has not gone mad, Mr. Bottomsley.” (Frasier fans will giggle along with me at that reference. You’re welcome.)

The fish plate was plentiful, with three generous strips of catfish fried in a tasty batter over ordinary shoestring fries, with a great tartar sauce and basic coleslaw. Good stuff.

Tom always said I had a knack for ordering the wrong things, and he was so right. My pretzel bun sliders with brisket and pickled onions were fine, but nothing more. I removed the pretzel buns and ate the tender chopped brisket. Thankfully there wasn’t much sauce on these.

My sister fared even worse by comparison. Her flatbread was a great flatbread with a perfect flatbread crust and lots of great toppings for a chicken club. Ingredients like avocado jalapeño cream sauce and garlic aioli, and smoked chicken and bacon are standouts, but the other standout dishes on the table made this a back bencher.

We went to Morgan Wallen’s because it was right there and there wasn’t time to go anywhere else, like Peg Leg Porker for some barbecue. It was a wonderful spate of serendipity that the food was this good. The closest I got to Peg Leg Porker BBQ was at PigStar, their stand in the airport. I got a pulled pork sandwich that was fine and really quite tasty. I never eat such a thing, but I enjoyed it very much. The meat imparted juices into the ordinary bun, and I was quite happy with a boring BBQ sandwich.

My local sister and I also made a stop across from our gate at Party Fowl, a place I have been seeing in Nashville the last time I was there. Another chicken place (hence the name,) we had some tasty but ordinary pimento cheese and Saltine crackers. It was served with jam and housemade pickles.

I know there is plenty of good eating in Nashville, because I have had it before. It gives me another good reason to return to this vibrant Southern capital, though none is needed.