1 day Ago By Ellen Fort
New Orleans has always been known for its hospitality — it’s a city where the party never stops and the good times are always rollin’. Likewise, Nashville has long drawn creative types to town for good music and — more recently, for good or ill — a Lower Broadway bar scene that’s begun to rival that of Bourbon Street. Little Miss Mao 2635 Gallatin Pike, inside Skinny Dennis Instagram: @ littlemissmao Turkey and the Wolf Ice House 800 Meridian St.
turkeyandthewolficehouse.com Now a trickle of New Orleans restaurants and their people has turned into a bigger stream, bringing Nashville some of its most exciting new cuisine, from funky, spicy dishes at Little Miss Mao to towering bologna sandwiches topped with potato chips at Turkey and the Wolf Ice House. It’s a welcome break from what can feel like a stream of revenue-driven choices made for a city that’s still experiencing an “It City” hangover .
Many of Nashville’s new businesses are fueled by developers — big hotels are being built, and they need to feed people at breakfast, lunch and dinner. But what is it that’s drawing critically acclaimed chefs from New Orleans to Nashville? Four distinct seasons, easy access between the two cities, and respite from the increasing threat of hurricanes and other coastal disasters are part of the answer. But according to recent transplants, it’s the welcoming members of Nashville’s restaurant and bar scene that ultimately lured them here.
Turkey and the Wolf Ice House Sitting on the breezy patio at Turkey and the Wolf Ice House in East Nashville’s McFerrin Park neighborhood, James Beard Award semifinalist chef Mason Hereford and his wife and business partner Lauren Agudo say they are settling in nicely. They opened a Nashville version of their hit restaurant in March — in a newly constructed cement-block kitchen on what was a former dog park — offering outdoor seating (covered and non) only. A steady stream of lunch guests stops in for burgers, collard melts and the aforementioned bologna sandwich, all of which helped launch the duo’s mini empire of restaurants all over New Orleans.
For Agudo and Hereford, it took several years of visiting Nashville, getting to know and love it, before deciding to make the leap to their corner lot in McFerrin Park. “I think that Nashville has a lot of the shared values that New Orleans does, between the music scene and a laid-back culture, that Southern, slow and intentional way of doing things,” says Agudo. “A different flavor of it, but a lot of overlap,” Hereford chimes in.
“And people are dining out [in Nashville], that’s for sure.” Little Miss Mao Over on Gallatin Pike, New Orleans-based chef Sophina Uong is bringing a menu of bold flavors to Skinny Dennis , a newly opened honky-tonk with country Western dive-bar vibes. Uong was nominated as a James Beard semifinalist for Best Chef: South in 2024 for Mister Mao, the restaurant she co-owns with her husband in New Orleans.
The flavors at Little Miss Mao inside Skinny Dennis pull from cuisines around the globe — including Uong’s own Cambodian background — and offer Music City diners a step away from the usual honky-tonk fare, hot chicken in particular. “We could have made a hot chicken, we could have made the same chicken,” says Uong. “But Nashville is full of hot chicken.
” Instead, Uong encrusts her chicken in cheese rinds before it’s fried and dipped in za’atar oil, then served with a refreshing Turkish salad. Elsewhere on the menu is prahok ktiss, a Cambodian dip of curried pork, fish and shrimp, served with shrimp chips and crudites. Little Miss Mao and Skinny Dennis have turned out to be an excellent if unlikely pairing for the East Nashville music venue, which leans heavily into a hipster country vibe.
Cold beer and shots go well with Ethiopian beef tartare and garlic noodles with Alabama crab, it turns out. “It’s a trip, because I didn’t grow up on country music — I like West Coast hip-hop,” Uong says with a laugh. “It’s an adventure.
” LeBlanc + Smith is the restaurant group behind Barrel Proof and The Chloe, a boutique hotel that’s slated to open its first location outside of New Orleans in Nashville’s Hillsboro Village neighborhood this year. The project will include 19 guest rooms, plus a restaurant, bar and pool in a space once home to two craftsman-style houses. In a part of the city that’s become almost unrecognizable in its new, developed form, the team decided to keep as much of the neighborhood’s style as possible while undergoing a remodel.
”Nashville is a town of craftsmen and artisans, and the way that we approach our projects is not big-development-driven,” says LeBlanc + Smith’s Robert LeBlanc. “It’s a much more artisanal approach to how we create our places.” Barrel Proof opened in Germantown a little over a year ago, delivering a Nashville version of the original New Orleans bar heavy on whiskey and hospitality.
Nestled up alongside Brooklyn Bowl and the Nashville Sounds’ First Horizon Park, it’s intended to be a neighborhood spot where classic cocktails, frozen margaritas and high-end whiskeys mingle on one menu. “Culturally, Nashville and New Orleans have a lot in common,” says Barrel Proof co-owner Jason Sorbet. “New Orleans’ [food and drink scene] was very underappreciated for a very long time, and Nashville was the same way.
” No one is ignoring Nashville’s booming restaurant scene these days. And at least as far as the New Orleans transplants are concerned, they’re not trying to change what is already a distinct culinary community by bringing New Orleans cuisine to Nashville — you won’t find gumbo on these menus. Turkey and the Wolf Ice House Despite Nashville’s growth, all these restaurateurs agree that the culinary scene still has a small-town feeling of camaraderie.
“Some hospitality markets are hypercompetitive, and everyone’s trying to undercut everybody else,” says LeBlanc. Here, at least for now, it’s a feeling of “rising tides lift all ships” among chefs and restaurateurs. “The amount of different chefs or bar leads giving us their purveyor list has been touching,” says Turkey and the Wolf’s Agudo.
Hereford and Agudo aren’t taking their warm welcome for granted. “We have a neighborhood dinner tonight — like 50 people from the neighborhood are coming out so we can get to know them, and we can thank them for being so welcoming,” says Hereford. As the Scene speaks with Hereford and Agudo, a crowd of young guys holding brown paper bags steps onto the patio — clearly a group of line cooks from another restaurant, sent to provide family meal for the crew at Turkey and the Wolf Ice House.
Hereford greets them jovially, briefly disappearing and reappearing with handfuls of icy PBRs and inviting the group to grab a seat on the patio. It feels like Old Nashville, a melting pot of creative folks whose paths crossed in pursuit of their own dreams — whether that means music, hospitality or otherwise. “It’s just a Nashville thing,” says Hereford.
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