What to Eat in Nashville: The Complete Southern Food Guide

Nashville Hot Chicken: What It Is and Where to Order It

Hot chicken is fried chicken coated in a cayenne-heavy spice paste, typically served on white bread with pickle chips. That combination of textures and heat is the whole point. The dish originated in Nashville's Black community, with Prince's Hot Chicken Shack widely credited as the originator. It remained a local specialty for decades before exploding nationally in the 2010s.

Prince's Hot Chicken Shack is still operating and still worth the wait. Expect a no-frills environment, cash preferred, and lines that can stretch long on weekends. The chicken comes in multiple heat levels, typically ranging from mild and medium up through very hot options like extra hot. Ordering extra hot on your first visit is a mistake most people make exactly once. Start at medium unless you have a genuine tolerance for spice.

Hattie B's is the other major name. It has multiple Nashville locations and shorter average waits than Prince's, which makes it the more practical option for most visitors. The heat scale runs from Southern (no heat) through Shut the Cluck Up. Plates with two sides typically run $15-$22. The quality is consistently high, though locals will debate endlessly whether Prince's or Hattie B's is the real deal. Both are worth trying if you're spending more than two days in the city.

• Prince's Hot Chicken Shack The original. Cash-friendly, no-frills, and worth a pilgrimage. Multiple Nashville locations, with the Charlotte Pike spot drawing slightly shorter lines than the original.
• Hattie B's Hot Chicken The more polished chain option. Consistent quality, multiple heat levels, and locations across the city including Midtown and The Gulch area.
• Bolton's Spicy Chicken & Fish Another beloved local institution. Also serves spicy fried fish, which is excellent and often overlooked by visitors focused on chicken.
• Party Fowl A sit-down restaurant format with hot chicken in multiple styles. Good if you want a full meal with cocktails rather than a counter-service experience.

Meat-and-Three: The Real Nashville Everyday Meal

Nashville restaurants downtown get most of the visitor attention, but the meat-and-three tradition is where Nashville's food identity actually lives. The format is simple: choose one protein from a short list (usually fried chicken, country-fried steak, pork chop, or catfish), then pick three sides from a rotating selection that typically includes mac and cheese, collard greens, black-eyed peas, mashed potatoes, and cornbread.

Arnold's Country Kitchen is the most recommended meat-and-three in Nashville, and the reputation is earned. The line moves quickly despite the constant crowd. Everything is made fresh daily, the sides rotate, and a full plate with drink usually comes in around $15-$20. It's generally open only for lunch on weekdays, which catches some visitors off guard. If you miss it, Swett's Restaurant has been serving similar food since 1954 and operates on a slightly more flexible schedule.

The meat-and-three format predates the current food-tourism wave by generations and remains the most honest expression of Nashville home cooking. For more on how to structure your eating around the city's neighborhoods, the Nashville walking tour guide covers routes that pass several classic lunch spots.

Southern Sides, Biscuits, and Breakfast Worth Waking Up For

Nashville's breakfast and brunch scene has expanded considerably, but the best reason to eat breakfast here isn't the trendy spots. It's the biscuits. Southern-style biscuits are a genuinely different product from what most international visitors know: flaky, butter-enriched, and served with sawmill gravy (a thick white gravy made with sausage drippings and black pepper) or alongside country ham and red-eye gravy.

Biscuit Love started as a food truck and became one of Nashville's most consistently praised breakfast spots. Their bonuts (biscuit doughnuts with lemon mascarpone and blueberry compote) are genuinely good but also the item that gets Instagram attention, which means they're always available. More relevant to understanding Nashville biscuit culture is their straightforward biscuit with gravy, which demonstrates why this format is taken seriously here.

• Sawmill gravy (sausage white gravy) on biscuits: the classic Southern breakfast pairing
• Shrimp and grits: more common at brunch-focused restaurants, usually $14-$22
• Country ham with red-eye gravy: intense, salty, and an acquired taste for non-Southerners
• Banana pudding: the go-to Southern dessert in Nashville, served at many meat-and-three spots
• Cornbread: served as a side with most Southern meals, sometimes as a muffin, sometimes in a cast-iron skillet wedge

Nashville Barbecue: Underrated and Worth Seeking Out

Nashville doesn't market itself as a barbecue destination the way Memphis or Kansas City do, which is part of why visitors overlook it. The city has several serious barbecue restaurants that deserve attention independent of the hot chicken hype.

Martin's Bar-B-Que Joint is the standout. Pitmaster Pat Martin runs a whole-hog operation out of multiple Nashville locations. The pulled pork is slow-cooked for 24 hours and has genuine smoke depth. A plate with two sides runs $12-$16 depending on location and current pricing. The original location was in Nolensville, Tennessee, and maintains the most consistent quality, though the downtown and Belmont locations are convenient for most visitors.

For something different, Peg Leg Porker on Rosa Parks Boulevard focuses on dry-rub ribs in the Memphis style. The owner Carey Bringle is a competitive pitmaster, and it shows. Ribs, brisket, and pulled pork all appear on the menu. This is not a tourist-facing novelty operation. It's a working barbecue restaurant that happens to be very good.

Where to Eat by Neighborhood

The downtown Nashville corridor along Broadway is convenient but oriented almost entirely toward tourist traffic. You can eat well downtown, particularly at places like Acme Feed and Seed which has decent food alongside its rooftop bar scene. But restaurants downtown charge a premium for location, and the ratio of quality to price generally favors eating elsewhere.

East Nashville, across the Cumberland River, has become the most interesting food neighborhood in the city. You'll find independent restaurants, chef-driven concepts, and lower price points than downtown. The Five Points area is the main commercial node. Germantown, just north of downtown, has a concentration of quality restaurants along Madison Street and Germantown Avenue, including Rolf and Daughters, one of the city's most acclaimed dinner spots.

The Gulch skews upscale and tends toward steakhouses and cocktail bars. Midtown, around Vanderbilt and the 12 South corridor, has casual neighborhood restaurants and some of the better brunch spots. For visitors staying multiple nights, building an eating plan around neighborhoods rather than a single list of destinations will produce better meals.

Food Tours and Structured Tastings

Walking food tours are worth considering for first-time visitors who want context alongside their meals. The format typically runs 2.5 to 3 hours, covers 4-6 stops, and costs around $70-$90 per person. Walk Eat Nashville is the longest-running and most frequently recommended local operator. Their tours focus on Southern food history alongside the tastings, which adds genuine depth to what you're eating.

The main limitation of food tours is timing: most run in the late morning or early afternoon, which means they work best as your primary meal for that day rather than an add-on. If you're planning a full itinerary, the 2 days in Nashville guide has a day-by-day structure that integrates food stops without trying to cram too much in.

Distillery tours offer a different kind of tasting experience. Nelson's Green Brier Distillery and the Ole Smoky operation on lower Broadway both offer tastings. For something more serious, the Nashville distillery tour guide covers options ranging from the Jack Daniel's Distillery day trip to smaller craft operations in the city proper.