It’s 9:30 a.m. on a Thursday, and Wendell Smith’s Restaurant is slammed.
At this historic West Nashville diner serving up traditional Southern-style meat-and-threes (a predominant plus three sides), the espresso flows freely, the raucous conversations push the low ceiling to its limits, and in the course of all of it, proprietor Benji Cook dinner exhibits no indicators of slowing down.
“Golly, I’ve been right here since 1992,” says Cook dinner as he sits down at an empty desk in between serving prospects. He’s the third technology of his household to run Wendell Smith’s—his grandfather opened the restaurant in 1952—and the institution has remained in the identical spot these previous 70 years. “They used to [serve] steak and spaghetti and burgers,” he remembers. However after Cook dinner’s father launched the meat-and-threes idea, the restaurant took off.
The menus at Wendell Smith’s are printed on lengthy sheets of paper in tiny, handwritten photocopies. Choices embrace a veritable catalog of Southern soul meals: buttery lima beans, meatloaf, collard greens, fried okra, nation ham, and the listing goes on. “The meals that rolls out this kitchen—my grandfather would in all probability roll over in his grave if we knew what meals comes out of that little window yearly,” says Cook dinner of the restaurant’s intensive listing of choices.
The menu isn’t the one factor that’s modified. Cook dinner has stood watch over this road nook for many years, and he’s seen the neighborhood remodel firsthand. New companies have moved in. Skyscrapers—or “skinnies,” as Cook dinner calls them—have gone up. “This neighborhood has gentrified majorly,” he says, recalling that the neighborhood was as soon as principally working-class. “Now all of the previous folks have moved on. And now, I’m the previous man.”
By all measures, Nashville is a a lot totally different place than it was 20, and even ten years in the past. In keeping with the 2020 census, the Nashville metropolitan space noticed its inhabitants skyrocket by 21 percent in comparison with 2010, and is now dwelling to virtually 2 million folks.
New industries have additionally taken root right here. Amazon expanded Nashville’s tech sector when it opened a flashy new company workplace within the metropolis in 2021; the conglomerate has plans to proceed rising its native presence. Software program big Oracle is following go well with, constructing a serious hub on the banks of the Cumberland River.
Nashville’s development is way from over. Specialists predict that over the subsequent 5 years, more than 200,000 more people will stream into this “small huge city”. All this modification means the town is now dealing with the traditional struggles of any boomtown: overtaxed infrastructure, skeletal public transportation, lack of affordable housing, and rising price of residing.
Town’s rising pains are a stark distinction to its burgeoning tourism trade. Alongside Broadway, Nashville’s main leisure hall the place each historic and upstart honky-tonks play nation music effectively into the night time, numerous types of open-air jitneys prowl the streets—a type of booze-driven, mostly unregulated streetcar. This “Transportainment”, as they’ve been dubbed, helps ferry bachelorette events and different assorted revelers up and down the primary drag, drawn to the town by its enigmatic nickname that guarantees a sure type of enjoyable: “Nash Vegas”.
Amidst all these rising vacationer points of interest, nonetheless, are the town’s bulwarks: the watering holes, the meat-and-threes diners, the late-night joints which have been round since what looks like time immemorial to its longtime residents. However there have been reminders that even long-established establishments aren’t immune from the adjustments sweeping the town, with the Covid-19 pandemic exacerbating the transformation.
The Hermitage Cafe, a storied Nashville diner, closed late last year after many years of serving late-night grub south of Broadway. Rotier’s, one other venerable storefront that had dished out traditional cheeseburgers, pies, fried grub and different consolation meals since 1945, also shuttered last year after the owner declined to resume the lease.
Just a few blocks away from the intense lights and sounds of the Broadway honky-tonks and get together wagons, Elliston Place Soda Shop is making an attempt to buck this development. Positioned in a chief spot north of Vanderbilt College and near Centennial Park, Elliston Place Soda Store has been open since 1939, barring a renovation in 2019 that moved the restaurant subsequent door into a bigger, airier house. The brand new location is adorned in a traditional ’50s model, marrying artwork deco with trendy uncovered wooden and vivid crimson accents. The design evokes the inside of a postwar Chevy, or a imaginative and prescient board for the set of American Graffiti.
Regardless of the renovation, the menu of the Soda Store stays firmly tied to its roots as a standard meat-and-threes spot. “We need to be cognizant of the truth that we’ve received lots of people who’ve been consuming right here for years,” says Jim Myers, advertising and marketing supervisor on the Soda Store and former meals critic and columnist for The Tennessean. “We proceed to be inexpensive for the development guys developing off the road. As a result of that’s what meat-and-threes are.”
Like all old-school diner price its salt, the Soda Store has an off-menu merchandise: the Elmer, a tart, orange sherbet-buttermilk drink that’s institutional data amongst old-timers. “We get requested for it about a couple of times per week from older clientele,” Myers says. And the drink’s identify? It derives from previous Borden Dairy Firm adverts from the Nineteen Fifties which starred the model’s mascot, Elsie the Cow. “Elmer the bull, who was Elsie’s husband, was keen on buttermilk in these previous adverts. Borden Dairy used to advertise consuming buttermilk with orange sherbet as a refreshing drink in the summertime,” Myers explains.
Elmer wound up switching profession paths to turn into a glue mascot later in life, however in Nashville, his authentic legacy as a dairy king lives on. A long time after its opening, Elliston Place Soda Store nonetheless serves up the Elmer to anybody who asks for it, a reminder that some issues don’t change. However after practically a century in just about the identical location on Elliston Place, the Elmer recipe typically seems like the one fixed for the Soda Store. The neighborhood, sometimes known as the “Rock Block” for its focus of rock golf equipment and Nashville counterculture, has seen great development together with the remainder of the town, with the prime location spurring new housing developments and businesses. “All cities undergo developmental phases,” Myers says. “And it seems like, to most Nashvillians, {that a} change was flipped and it’s wholesale change in all places.”
That change is keenly felt within the metropolis’s hospitality trade. “It went from this very collaborative group of cooks and restaurateurs,” Myers explains, “to cooks and restaurant teams from out of city actually making an attempt to poach folks out of your restaurant whereas they’re consuming there,” he says. “That’s not the Nashville Approach.”
The Nashville Approach, as Myers explains it, is a way of thinking. “It’s like we’re neighbors,” he explains, noting the supportive attitudes enterprise house owners embody towards one another: “‘We love what you guys are doing down there. If there’s something you ever want, tell us. In case you run out of something, we can assist.’”
“I believe what we’re grappling with is, a whole lot of the brand new folks don’t perceive that,” Myers concludes. “What it’s and what which means. And never essentially by any fault of their very own.”
“Are they parking right here? Actually?” It’s late lunchtime at Arnold’s Country Kitchen, one among Nashville’s most well-known spots for meat-and-threes since 1983, and its proprietor Kahlil Arnold is looking the window, anxious to catch non-customers parking on his property. “Hey, might someone examine within the car parking zone?” he calls out.
“In case you’re consuming at Arnold’s, parking’s free,” he explains, maintaining one eye on the window. “So we attempt to maintain that for our prospects.” His common prospects are the spine of his enterprise. “They’ve taken care of us as a result of we’ve been a neighborhood establishment,” Arnold says. “We’re very lucky that that’s how Nashvillians handle Nashvillians.”
Arnold has some recommendation for the brand new technology of eating places opening in Nashville alongside the inhabitants increase: “A number of [new restaurants] are available in right here and simply type of throw filth on different ones…yeah, we don’t do this right here,” he says. “We’ll welcome you and settle for you as a part of our personal.”
Again at Wendell Smith’s, Cook dinner brings up the identical level. “We deal with all people the identical, man, whether or not you don’t have a nickel in your pocket or in case you’re a billionaire. It’s simply the best way we’re.” That feeling extends to the restaurant subsequent door, even when its prospects take up his lot, Cook dinner admits. “They encroach on my car parking zone and put on me out about that,” he says. “However I’d mortgage them a case of eggs in the event that they wanted it.”
The dialog turns to the Hattie B’s location throughout the road, a more recent homegrown chain. “They fell into it and killed it,” Cook dinner says. “We used to see traces out the door at 10:30 after they get able to open.”
Just a few many years in the past, a shiny new chain restaurant throughout the road from Wendell Smith’s would have felt misplaced. However now, Hattie B’s, which opened its first location in 2012 and is presently increasing outdoors Tennessee, is simply one of many newest companies to enter a phase of Nashville’s meals scene that has rocketed in recognition over the previous decade: the fried sizzling rooster sandwich.
No dish embodies the Nashville Approach, or how Nashville has modified, greater than the new rooster sandwich. One of many metropolis’s prime cultural exports together with nation music and the Grand Ole Opry is that this fiery, cayenne-forward fried rooster. Historically served with pickles and white bread, it was historically an African-American dish, in line with Rachel Martin’s 2015 piece in The Bitter Southerner, virtually completely served in Black-centered neighborhoods.
This was earlier than, in line with Martin, it grew to become the middle of a focused marketing campaign to make the dish one among Nashville’s culinary emblems. Former Nashville mayor Invoice Purcell beloved sizzling rooster a lot that he spearheaded an effort to make it a part of the town’s cultural id, and arrange the primary citywide sizzling rooster competition to unfold consciousness of the mouth-numbing recipe.
To say his efforts succeeded can be an understatement. Now, KFC’s nationwide menu features a sizzling rooster sandwich that sells like hotcakes, and Individuals from coast to coast search out “Nashville sizzling” when ordering wings and rooster sandwiches.
Although Prince’s Scorching Rooster Shack is basically accepted because the creator of the unique recipe for decent rooster, the post-Purcell increase gave rise to many companies making an attempt to journey that sizzling rooster wave.
Throughout the Cumberland River from downtown and Broadway, a methods into East Nashville, Dino’s Bar—a historic dive with an old style backlit Coca-Cola signal lighting up the unassuming entry—additionally launched its personal sizzling rooster recipe, propelled not solely by demand from the dish’s rising prominence, but in addition by the altering neighborhood. “Nobody ever got here throughout the river from the west facet of city,” says Dino’s proprietor Alex Wendkos of the neighborhood a decade in the past, when there have been solely a few bars round.
Dino’s has served up drinks and one of many nation’s best cheeseburgers because the Nineteen Seventies (and Anthony Bourdain stopped by for a Elements Unknown episode, too), however the choice so as to add a sizzling rooster sandwich was pushed, partially, by the altering neighborhood, Alex concedes.
“Everybody was placing sizzling rooster on their menu, and it appeared prefer it was attracting the vacationers who would go round searching for it,” she says. “It was like, ‘Let’s simply embrace what we do finest on this city,’ or one of many issues that we do effectively.” And the hot chicken sandwich at Dino’s is, certainly, carried out effectively: the rooster is crunchy, the coating is spicy, and the addition of cool tartar sauce, although non-traditional, is a welcome respite from the mouth-numbing energy of cayenne.
Regardless of the competitors, Nashville’s sizzling rooster purveyors say that the enterprise isn’t as cutthroat as outsiders may anticipate. “I believe it’s a respect factor, to the previous traditional—Prince’s,” Wendkos says. “Prince’s is the god of sizzling rooster.”
“Nobody’s making an attempt to step on anybody’s toes,” she provides. “All of us do our personal factor. You possibly can’t go flawed with Nashville sizzling rooster.”
At Meeting Meals Corridor on Broadway, a buzzy new spot with uncovered industrial rafters, indoor neon indicators, and a Shake Shack, an outpost of Prince’s Scorching Rooster resides in the identical constructing as a Hattie B’s. One may assume this is able to be a Montague-Capulet scenario ready to unfold, however no such animosity exists, in line with Tamara Kelly, the overall supervisor on the Prince’s location. “They’re Hattie B’s, we’re Prince’s,” she says. “[We have] mutual respect and love for one another.”
In any case, there’s loads of enterprise to go round—the meals corridor is steps faraway from the bustle of Broadway’s hungry vacationers, anxious to lastly strive that Nashville sizzling rooster for themselves. “Hattie’s and my guys, they giggle downstairs after they’re getting stock,” Tamara says. “All of them know one another, present footage of grandbabies…”
Over at Celebration Fowl, one more newer sizzling rooster chain following within the footsteps of Prince’s, albeit with a full-service idea, the story is analogous. “Our persons are simply great,” says Celebration Fowl co-owner Austin Smith of his dwelling metropolis. “All of us look out for one another.”
“All people type of does their very own type of totally different variation [of hot chicken],” Arnold says. “However all people round right here is like, in case you’re combating something, it’s not one another, it’s the town.”
Again at Arnold’s Nation Kitchen, a household walks by the door. “You coming in to seize some meals?” Arnold calls out. It looks like the household’s first time—they mill in regards to the entrance, seemingly confused by the cafetera setup (the road is hidden behind the bar and might be laborious to search out). “All proper, you go proper down this hallway, again right here and so they’ll take excellent care of you,” he says, pointing across the nook. “After which if you need a drink, come round right here and I’ll pour you the strongest drink you’ve ever had.”
At its core, the Nashville Approach, as Arnold and lots of others put it, is about kindness. It’s a small-town angle that everybody is in it collectively, {that a} rising tide lifts all boats. And in line with some, it’s an angle at risk of fading away as Nashville’s inhabitants grows and adjustments. “[The city] felt very tight and everybody knew everybody, and you’d drop something to go and assist,” Wendkos says. “And now it’s such as you’re dropping contact with each other as a result of it’s rising so quickly.”
Jim Myers places it extra bluntly: “One of the vital irksome issues on this city has at all times been the brand new chef that involves city and says, ‘I’m going to indicate you folks what actual meals is,’” he says.
Elliston Place Soda Store is among the institutions making an attempt to toe the road between previous and current. “We’ve invited everybody in, and once more, that’s the Nashville Approach,” he says. “Our menu could be very near the best way it’s been for the final 50 years,” he explains. ”However we are able to’t simply be a straight-up Southern meat-and-three, if we need to entice this broader demographic.” A spin on eggs Benedict that features Southern-style crimson eye gravy and nation ham, for instance, has made it onto the menu.
“We’re relying on the truth that as Nashville is altering a lot, that folks nonetheless need one thing that has credibility,” provides Myers, noting the significance of maintaining the previous classics alive.
Arnold, too, desires to take care of the essence of his cooking. “We’re Southern meals. We make it with love. We make it the best way Granny made it. That was the best way we had been taught, in order that’s the best way I’m going to maintain making it,” he says. “I would add a number of issues right here and there, however I’m not going to alter who we’re.”
“That is the place that in case you had been new to city, and also you got here in and confirmed some humility and had been pleasant, folks would bend over backwards that can assist you,” Myers says. ”I don’t assume we’re too far gone from that. I believe we, simply perhaps, want some extra efforts to create that sense of group.”
Although Nashville’s rising inhabitants has introduced adjustments to this metropolis, the longtime pillars of its restaurant scene hope newcomers will be part of them in preserving that famed group spirit. And it’d already be occurring.
In 2021, Hurricane Ida made landfall in Louisiana, wreaking havoc because it pushed inland. Whereas it had been downgraded to a tropical despair by the point it reached Nashville, the storm and its previous floods nonetheless caused significant damage to the town and its companies. What occurred subsequent, in line with Arnold, was a show of camaraderie that reminded him of the perfect of Nashville. “It was like all people in Nashville dug in and helped one another out,” says Arnold. “We take satisfaction— when one thing occurs, it doesn’t matter what your group is or what your ethnicity is or no matter you might be.”
“There’s no metropolis like Nashville.”
