Nashville eats, 2023 edition.

Lyra was by far the best meal I had on the trip, serving “modern Middle Eastern” food along with a solid menu of wines and cocktails. I followed my server’s suggestions and ordered the hummus with roasted jalapeños, the octopus with big-ass white beans (not the actual name) in tomato broth, and the cabbage fattoush. The hummus was actually the best dish, in part because it came with a very warm, soft pitta that I carefully parceled out so that I wouldn’t end up with either pitta or hummus left over at the end. The octopus itself was perfectly cooked and had that flavor of the grill top that I think octopus is uniquely able to capture, but the astringent broth didn’t work well with it and the beans were just unnecessary. (I realized I just don’t love shellfish with tomato sauces or broths. They fight each other too much.) The cabbage fattoush was excellent, served with a date vinaigrette, feta, caraway seeds, and walnuts, a cold dish that worked well with its balance of saltiness, acidity, and a little sweetness in the dressing, although the toasted pitta on top of it, which you crush into the dish, never softened because there was just enough dressing for the vegetables. It’s located right next to the Pharmacy and across from Mas Tacos, two of my other Nashville favorites.

Joyland is a fast food-inspired spot from Sean Brock of Husk and Audrey, serving burgers and fries in a sack along with breakfast sandwiches on massive, buttery biscuits. I did indeed get a breakfast sandwich, which came with some sweet/peppery bacon and a brick of eggs scrambled with cheese that stood out as the one part of the sandwich that wasn’t freshly cooked. I’d go back for the biscuits, though.

I went with a basic tuna salad sandwich from Eastwood Deli, as this trip promised to have me eating about twice as much meat/poultry as I usually would, and it was … a solid tuna sandwich, just on very good sourdough bread. It’s in a whole complex of restaurants and such where you’ll also find the great izakaya Two Ten Jack and an outpost of Jeni’s Ice Cream.

HiFi Cookies has two locations, serving a handful of large cookies with interesting ingredients and flavor combinations, named after legends of rock, soul, and jazz. I went with the Etta, a peanut butter cookie with peanut butter chips and Cap’n Crunch peanut brittle; and the Johnny, a fudgy cookie with dark chocolate chips and a Cocoa Krispies/cacao nibs topping. These are good, rich cookies, and both screamed their core flavors; I think in the end I’d pick the Etta, because it was more than just a peanut butter cookie in flavor and texture, while the Johnny was just a chocolate chocolate chip cookie with crunchy but flavorless stuff on top.

Zulema’s Kitchen is buried among office buildings and hotels quite close to the airport, but does a perfectly cromulent lunch, although I would concede that here it was much more about taste than anything more hifalutin – I got a “chipotle chicken” sandwich that had chopped, grilled chicken, grilled peppers and onions, and a mildly spicy mayo on ciabatta bread. I don’t know what cuisine it was supposed to be, and maybe I was just famished after the flight but it was delicious – just the right amount of salty and spicy. I wouldn’t go out of my way to eat here, but if I worked in one of those buildings I’d be there pretty often.

I went to Hattie B’s for the second time and went with Hot, which I think might be my limit. I’m ¾ Italian and the rest is Irish and English, none of them cuisines known for our heavy use of capsicum. I think it’s an achievement that I’ve gotten this far. Damn Hot! might be beyond my capabilities.

Two duds from the trip: Sky Blue showed up on some list of the best breakfast spots in Nashville, but it was kind of a big disappointment; the home fries I got were cold and the “omelette” was nothing more than a scrambled egg folded over some barely cooked fillings. I also grabbed take-out on the first night of the meetings from a Thai place called Bit-a-Bite that was similarly underwhelming, as the pad see ew didn’t have a lot of flavor and came with more carrots than anything green (broccoli or gai lan would have worked, or even bok choy).