NSHGuide
The Hit List: New Nashville Restaurants To Try Right Now
photo credit: Casey Irwin
When new restaurants open, we check them out. This means that we subject our stomachs and social lives to the good, the bad, and more often than not, the perfectly fine. But every once in a while, a new spot makes us feel like we just stumbled upon a rare record shop on Broadway. When that happens, we add it here, to The Hit List.
The Hit List is your spot to find all the best new restaurants in Nashville. As long as it opened within the past several months and we’re still talking about it, it’s on this guide. If it’s not, well, you can figure it out for yourself.
THE SPOTS
Deluca in Belle Meade is Nashville's newest spot for sexy pasta night. Grab a seat at the stone bar where you can drag pieces of guanciale through eggy carbonara sauce, dig into a bowl of gnocchi in pistachio cream with melted burrata, and sip an espresso martini with a cocoa-dusted ladyfinger for good measure. Yes, the prices are a bit higher than you’ll find at other Italian restaurants around town, but the Roman dishes here are a welcome addition to the scene.
Recently, a lot of Nashville food trucks have gone brick and mortar. Limo, a Peruvian spot in the East End, is one of the most exciting to make this transition. Pop in for an easy, casual dinner involving purple corn drinks and ceviche that's a meal in itself, arriving in an alarmingly large bowl and chock full of bright and tangy seafood. The true star of the menu, though, is the lomo saltado—a rich, gorgeous stew of beef with perfectly caramelized plantains that tastes just as good heated up the next day. The space is more industrial than warm and cozy, but one order of chicken empanadas and yuca fries with huancaina and we could be dining behind Tootsie’s for all we care.
photo credit: Casey Irwin
We’ve never set out to eat our weight in lentils, but after trying the hearty tomato and berbere-laden stew in the center of the vegetarian plate at Abem, that quest looks pretty appealing. This is the newest Ethiopian restaurant in town, and it’s one of the best options for a soothing late breakfast/early lunch that you’ll want to repeat over and over again. Drink some spiced tea, a liquid form of the greatest hug you’ve ever received, and order the lentil sambusa, a perfectly flaky pocket containing delicious black lentils. The small, one-room cafe is bright and perfect for digging into sauteed beef jerky in the quanta fir-fir, and tearing into the homemade injera with gusto.
Restaurants are overdoing it with mac and cheese—places nowadays just take any ingredient, toss it in with some cheese and elbow macaroni, and charge $25 for it. That’s not the case at Curry And Tikka, an Indian spot in South Nashville where the tikka mac and cheese contains large chunks of bell pepper and a healthy swirl of spicy tikka masala sauce for around $10. It’s a dish that somehow gets tastier after bites of delhiwalla chicken tikka, a plate of melt-off-the-bone, expertly charred poultry with a visible layer of yogurt and spices. It’s hard to find a better, more affordable (and tasty) lunch than this, especially considering they have a $15-per-person buffet. But whatever you decide to order, make sure it includes some garlic naan, just one of seven homemade breads on the menu, along with some saucy cauliflower manchurian.
Let us present you with Nashville’s current lunch holy trinity: a massive tijuana hot dog covered in chipotle crema, carnitas melt on texas toast, and agua frescas with free refills. This should be your go-to spread at Tio Fun, a Tex-Mex spot in North Nashville that's ideal for a casual, delicious, and extravagant lunch that won’t cost you more than $30. Definitely come with another person (or five) and split all of that, plus whatever else looks good on the menu—we’ll be back for you, mexican pizza and torta de chilaquiles. The dining room is super colorful, the staff is mighty friendly, and there’s even a small parking lot out back.
photo credit: Casey Irwin
When meat-and-three staple Arnold’s announced it’d be closing in January of 2023, the ripple of grief throughout Nashville was felt. The good news is that, like Westley in The Princess Bride, Arnold’s was only “mostly dead,” and its revival only took about a year. The food and experience are just the same as those legendary glory days, if not better, now that our hearts have grown fonder from their momentary absence. Anything sliding toward the register on those red plastic trays is the standard to which we hold all Southern cooking. The roast beef with collard greens and mac and cheese are paramount, but the fried catfish mimics the beef in tenderness and melt-in-your-mouth texture. Whatever you do, be sure to leave with a slice of spicy chocolate pie.
photo credit: Casey Irwin
Sora, a rooftop spot in The Sheraton downtown, is all about the sushi and the view—360 degrees of windows overlooking the city transport you, especially at night, to somewhere more like Seattle than Music City. It’s the perfect place to sip cocktails with cheeky names like the Super Freak, a jalapeno, tequila, and pineapple number that’s sweet but not too sweet, and step outside the california roll comfort zone. The Bride roll comes generously draped in a yuzu crab mix, and they do a really good vegetarian maki full of hearty sweet potato, a silky corn creme brulee, and tempura fried carrot roll that we kept talking about long after we left.
Donelson is quickly becoming a hub for new restaurants, and this operation from the Martin’s BBQ team picked the perfect time and place to open this new brunch spot. Sweet Milk is a light and airy space to get serious about a stack of sweet potato pancakes with cinnamon butter. You might be left to be alone with your thoughts for a while before you can get a seat at this walk-in-only cafe, but what awaits are hassle-worthy scoops of pimento cheese grits, and plates of biscuits doused in farmhand gravy that you should share with nobody—not your best friend, your practical Aunt Mary, or even the curious hand of your toddler.
If Bad Idea ever takes the scallop crepe off the menu, we will riot. And by riot, we mean continue to go back to this Lao wine bar, ask passive-aggressive questions about that fluffy mollusk mousse rolled in thin wrappers with chili fish sauce, and drink something from their 3,000-bottle cellar, pondering life. Hopefully, that never happens, but even if it did, there are plenty of interesting Southeast Asian dishes here to get excited about. We’re talking about soy caramel-braised chicken breast and a mile-high mille-feuille layered with durian, caramelized milk, and earl grey custard. Bad Idea is, yes, a good idea for date night, a solo hang at the bar with a glass of madeira, or a rare option for late-night snacks like golden curry corn dogs that don’t involve any regret the next morning.
