Nashville has long been the best lunch town in the South. Come midday, you can’t miss at a meat-n-three like Silver Sands (liver and onions, porky collards) or Arnold’s Country Kitchen (fried green tomatoes, black-eyed peas, fried cornbread.) And if you want to do the ladies-who-lunch thing, Martha’s at the Plantation stacks a stellar pimento cheese sandwich.
But dinner has often been a disappointment. There have been exceptions, as in: When Joe Shaw manned the stoves at Watermark, dishing up sweet potato ravioli with ham hock broth. When Sean Brock was working liquid nitrogen magic at the Capitol Grille, serving barbecue “Dippin’ Dots.” And, still, at Margot Café, over in East Nashville, where they dish a great fennel-perfumed poussin with pan gravy.
More often I’ve been subjected to overly fussy continental fare of that sort that Calvin Trillin once ascribed to the continent of Antarctica. (Recently opened in Nashville is Andrew Chadwick’s, an inheritor of the trend, albeit one far more accomplished than its predecessors.) But enough pussy-footing around; I’ll cut to the chase:
I just had a damn fine dinner at City House, the kind of dinner that makes you believe that dining after dark in Nashville has a bright future.
City House is a hip new restaurant in the Germantown neighborhood, just north of downtown. Husband-and-wife proprietors Tandy Wilson (chef) and Anne Kostroski (pastry and wine) are vets of Margot.
The charms are many: A Jameson’s and orange cocktail called the Petey. A wine list that skews cheap and includes a raft of Austrian Reislings, including a dyn-o-mite 2004 Gobelsburger.
And a lusty kitchen aesthetic that gets you a potato-gorged frico that looks and tastes like it was cooked by Lydia Bastianich, soon after she completed a stage at Waffle House. A cornflour-coated catfish filet, tarted up with a relish of garlic, mint, chili, and orange. A wood-fired pizza, topped with housemade salami and rounds of pineapple, inspired by that soak-up-the-alcohol college standard-bearer, the Papa John’s Canadian bacon and pineapple special.
This is a serious restaurant. Run by serious folks. They just don’t take themselves too seriously. Thank you Jesus. And thank you, Anne Kostroski, for the best dessert I’ve tasted in a year: creamy rice pudding, studded with a pleasantly bitter—almost tannic—brittle of benne seeds.
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