In the Where to Eat: 25 Best series, we’re highlighting our favorite restaurants in cities across the United States. These lists will be updated as restaurants close and open, and as we find new gems to recommend. As always, we pay for all of our meals and don’t accept free items.
Audrey
East Nashville | Modern Southern
For more than 20 years, Sean Brock has been insisting that Southern cuisine is both what you think it is, as well as an ideal medium for exploring the unknown. On the one hand, you have fried green tomatoes, lettuces tossed with hot ham fat, and chicken and dumplings served directly from their cast iron pot. On the other, you have top-of-the-line ingredients — tomatoes and watermelon, bucksnort trout and lion’s mane mushrooms — inspiring leaps of imagination that veer toward the avant-garde. That is the terrain covered at Audrey, the flagship restaurant Mr. Brock named after his grandmother. The food braids together supposedly opposing impulses — the sincere and nostalgic versus the resourcefully inventive — in a restaurant that is sedate, stylish and comfortable with its own gravitas. BRETT ANDERSON
809 Meridian Street; 615-988-3263; audreynashville.com
Bad Idea
East Nashville | Lao, Wine Bar
Bad Idea may well be what many seasoned diners thought when they heard there was a wine bar specializing in envelope-pushing Lao food opening inside an East Nashville church. But given the level of cooking here, the name turned out to be a self-aware joke, rather than a self-own. The concept coheres in the hands of the owner, Alex Burch, a seasoned sommelier and first-time restaurateur. He had the good sense to bring on Colby Rasavong as executive chef. A former top lieutenant to Sean Brock, Mr. Rasavong grew up working in his Laotian family’s Thai restaurant and invests the weight of his life experience in food that stretches the boundaries of Southeast Asian cooking to the edge of Appalachia. And the wine list is wise beyond this restaurant’s years, mixing tantalizing obscurities, affordable crowd pleasers and connoisseur selections you’ll rarely find poured by the glass. BRETT ANDERSON
1021 Russell Street; 629-729-4332; badideanashville.com
Bastion
Wedgewood-Houston | Tasting Menu