Spent the past week in Nashville and had some really terrific food experiences. Notably:
Fried green tomatoes. Which I've had before, but only ones I've made plus a garnish on a dish of shrimp and grits I once ordered in Charleston. Had them twice last week, at the Bluebird Café which were good but the best, at Puckett's Grocery in Franklin, came on a puddle of pimento cheese.
Pimento Cheese: something I didn't think I liked, but I absolutely LOVED it at Husk (yes, Sean Brock has opened one in Nashville). Smoked cheddar, serrano chiles and a good dose of vinegar made it interesting, not to mention the lasagna noodle-thin house-made crispbread.
Delta Tamales: at Superico, a superb and sophisticated Tex-Mex restaurant in Nashville's Gulch neighborhood. Here, they were mixed meats nominally clad in a cornmeal outer shell and served in a bowl of "spicy tomato gravy" with soda crackers on the side. Didn't take the crackers seriously until I realized how useful they would be to sop up all the leftover gravy once the tamales were gone. YUM! Loved this restaurant so much we went twice.
Fried chicken: the first time at Monell's, a fantastically fun boarding house style restaurant wherein as guests arrived they're accumulated into groups of ten or twelve and then seated together at one of several big tables in the various rooms of this grand old house. Once you sit down, here come the bowls of food as per the day's offerings from the kitchen, and servers strictly admonish guests to pass to the left. No alcohol, just lemonade, sweet tea and unsweet tea. The second, and best, was at Puckett's grocery mentioned above on a plate with flatiron beans, mashed potatoes, white gravy (you get to choose white or brown), and cornmeal pancakes quite unlike anything I can remember having. Everything was beautifully cooked and seasoned. No, I didn't have any Nashville hot. Wasn't avoiding it, I love hot food, but just didn't get around to it.
Catfish: Out here we only see it frozen, never fresh. We had an outstanding plate of blackened catfish with chipotle butter, puffy in-house made flour tortillas, grilled shrimp wrapped in bacon and charro beans at Superico, and another day ordered catfish nachos at a honky tonk on Broadway.
Every single thing we ate at Rolf and Daughters in Nashville's Germantown. Rolf's menu is brilliant in the new style of things I've run into just a few times: just lists of ingredients. Except for desserts, the menu isn't divided into categories. It's just an egalitarian list of things you may order. The delightful part is you don't necessarily know exactly what's going to show up, but based on the ingredients you can be pretty darned sure you're going to like it. "toast, straciatella, blood orange, pistachios" was one such dish, and from the dessert list "sourdough, sunchoke, coffee" turned out to be sourdough ice cream with a savory sunchoke foam and crispy crumbs made out of coffee oil cooked to a crisp in a cast iron skillet. We were just wild about every single bite of everything we ordered. This was not just the best meal in Nashville it was by far the best restaurant meal of recent memory, and not only was the food geeky the wine list was the geekiest wine list I've seen in ages, too. Looked like something my local wine geek friends would put together--stuff was really Out There, like Cruse sparkling Valdigue. I finally told my waiter to just pick one of three different wines for me, I couldn't choose. One of those would have been a chardonnay from a Japanese winemaker in the southern Rhone. Cuckoo stuff, but GOOD cuckoo.