The Best Hole-In-The-Wall Restaurant In Tennessee
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Perched on Highway 100 as it dips into country farmland, mere minutes from the glam of downtown Nashville, a weathered, vintage, neon sign lazily beckons to anyone craving down-home Southern cooking. It's the Loveless Cafe, open as a restaurant for more than 70 years. If you blink, you might miss the simple, roadside farmhouse — but don't. It's one of the most beloved eateries in Nashville, taking the Tennessee slot in our Tasting Table round trip of the best hole-in-the-wall restaurants in every state.
Rocking chairs beckon from the front porch, while creaking screen doors usher guests into the warmth of a yesteryear Southern kitchen and cozy dining room. Eagerly scooting chair to table, they watch as piled-high plates arrive, laden with crispy fried chicken, hot-off-the-pit barbecue, and country ham with pooling rivers of Southern red-eye gravy, made the Loveless way with country ham, black coffee, and brown sugar. But many folks make the pilgrimage to Loveless Cafe for the plates of soft, fluffy biscuits, steaming hot and plopped mid-table — to the tune of 10,000 biscuits per day.
If all that's not reason enough to hightail down Highway 100, there's the Loveless rendition of what's arguably the city's most famous cuisine: Nashville hot chicken. Plenty of restaurants dish out the extraordinarily spicy specialty, and we showcase quite a few on our list of 15 best spots to get hot chicken in Nashville. As the Southern saying goes, "you can bet your britches" that Loveless Cafe perches proudly on that list.
The little cafe that could
The Loveless Cafe crew calls their menu a love letter to Southern flavors, saying the experience "feels like coming home." As a born and raised Southerner myself, often crossing the Tennessee/Mississippi state line, I can attest to that flood of nostalgia when entering the Loveless universe, reaching for those like-mama-made hot biscuits. This cafe really started with a mama in a kitchen, Annie Loveless, making extra plates for visitors. Along with husband Lon, they started peddling buttermilk biscuits and fried chicken to travelers on Highway 100, hardly imagining their humble home-turned-restaurant would someday become the sole reason for the journey.
They eventually added a 14-room motel, which now houses a collection of shops selling country-style gifts and foods. The Hams and Jams country market offers smoked meats and homemade jams — a nod to its cookbook, "Southern Country Cooking from the Loveless Cafe", subtitled "Fried Chicken, Ham, and Jams from Nashville's Favorite Cafe." Loveless is almost a rite of Nashville passage for locals, but also for celebrities, politicians, food writers, and international visitors.
The cafe is plenty happy sticking to its roots, though the kitchen team once spread the goodness to New York City by invitation of the renowned James Beard House, serving a five-course meal of no-frills Southern dishes. Thousands of online reviews sing the Loveless praises, earning a 4.3-star overall rating on Yelp. We've placed it on our list of 14 best barbecue restaurants in Nashville, confirming that whatever these folks cook, they do a darn good job of it.