I’m waiting for Gaither.com to publish my piece on Homecoming Radio on Monday before I can then tell you guys MORE about it– they get first dibs this time– so I thought in the meantime I’d tell you about this great little place I just discovered!
I love finding out about new restaurants, and my favorite kinds are the small, family-owned ones. Since I live in Tennessee, a lot of those kind of places are ‘meat-and-threes.’ For my non-Southern readers, that is what we call places that serve good ol’ Southern soul food. You choose a meat selection, usually from a list that includes things like fried chicken, pork chops, ham, bar-be-que, meat loaf and pot roast. Then you choose up to three vegetables or ‘sides’, and that’s where it really gets good. We Southerners cook our vegetables beyond all reason and they are always liberally seasoned with too much salt, butter, pepper and quite often, a pinch of sugar. That list will contain wonders such as mashed potatoes with red-eye or cream gravy, glazed carrots, fried okra, turnip greens (which are fabulous with a little vinegar or Pick-a-Pepper sauce sprinkled on top), country style green beans, all manner of casseroles like squash, tomato and bread, broccoli or sweet potato (with melted marshmallows on top), creamed (sometimes called ‘fried’) corn, purple hull peas and lima beans. We also inexplicably count things like macaroni and cheese, dumplings and dressing as vegetables, which makes no sense but works for me. The breads have to be homemade and if you’re lucky there will be biscuits, yeast rolls, skillet cornbread and hoecake cornbread to choose from. Desserts need to be guilt-producing and huge– fudge pie, banana pudding, lemon, coconut or chocolate pies with sky high merengue, and all manner of fruit cobblers (my personal favorites are blackberry or peach.)
OK, now I am seriously hungry.
If you have ever eaten at a Cracker Barrel restaurant you may think you have eaten ‘real’ Southern cooking, and to be fair, they do an OK job of it. But a chain restaurant will never be able to produce on a massive scale what comes out of the hot, cramped kitchen of a small family-owned meat and three, complete with waitresses that call you “Darlin'” as they repeatedly refill your sweet tea, gray-haired bus ‘boys’ that have worked there for 30 years, and the family matriarch or patriarch sitting on a stool behind the cash register. Some of my all-time favorite meat and threes around here are Arnold’s Country Kitchen, Barbara’s Home Cooking, Bell Buckle Cafe, Dotson’s, Sylvan Park Restaurant, and of course, the famous Loveless Cafe.
Hold up. What you have just read so far may be one of the biggest rabbit trails in the history of this blog, though Lord knows I am capable of getting off-topic at the drop of a hat. I just went off on a Southern food tangent when what I REALLY WANTED TO TELL YOU ABOUT was a completely different kind of small family-owned restaurant– an Italian one!
I have heard about Nana Rosa’s for months– mostly on Twitter, from my friends Joe Bonsall of the Oak Ridge Boys, and Kelly Burton, who is married to gospel singer Rod Burton. They have waxed rhapsodic about this little cafe in a strip mall in Hendersonville, TN. They love the food, they love the owners, and they keep telling me I just “HAVE to go!” Well, I’ve been waiting for Russ to get home so we can go check it out as a family, but the other afternoon when I found myself on that end of town, I decided to pick up some food to go.
I got there at kind of a weird time, in that lull that comes between the lunch and dinner crowd. It’s a charming, cheerful little place incongruously sitting in the middle of a nondescript strip mall. Skip the owner could not have been nicer. He came out of the kitchen to talk to me when I came in and offered me something cold to drink ‘on the house’ while I waited for my order. I wandered around the empty restaurant, looking at all of the family pictures on the wall and asked if I could take some pictures. Skip graciously agreed and then disappeared back into the kitchen. This is a chef who clearly loves cooking, and I could tell he was a little crestfallen when he realized I would be schlepping his piping hot, perfectly prepared food all the way across town to Brentwood. He was so concerned that it would still be just right when I arrived home that he gave me detailed instructions on the best way to reheat my veal piccata (with a smidge of olive oil in a saute pan, NOT the microwave!) Everything was so carefully packaged that it arrived home beautifully. Our salads were crisp and fresh, with a good solid vinaigrette house dressing. I LOVED my veal piccata, it was thin and tender and cooked to perfection. Charlotte devoured her fettuccine Alfredo, so I’ll just have to assume that it was equally good. We will most definitely be back to eat there, and if any of you are in the area, you should too. Check out their website, it shows an array of specialty cakes, gift baskets, homemade biscotti and toffee that you have to see to believe– I cannot WAIT to get my hands on some of that!
By the way, though this certainly sounds like a commercial for Nana Rosa’s, I am doing this all on my own–sadly, I’m not getting paid off with $$ or biscotti, so my integrity is intact. I just love good food (and non-chain restaurants) and every once in a while I enjoy telling you guys about them.
So here are a few shots…
**Over the entrance
**So bright and friendly inside… and oops, I left my purse on the chair.
**Family photos all around
**Skip, the owner/chef
**As good as it looks.
Now tell me about some of YOUR favorite little places!
