When a man is tired of Nashville, he is tired of life

Nashville is awesome.

It has music, it has friendly people and it has great food. What more do you want?

Nashville at 1 p.m. on a Saturday during COVID panic is about as happening a place as I’ve ever been in. Down Broadway and down Printer’s live music abounds, played through the windows so that you can sample it and decide if you want to come in.

This is Broadway. (This picture was not taken at 1 p.m.)

I usually don’t like live music in bars. It tends to be played ear-splittingly loud. The bars I went to in Nashville were not like that – it was loud enough to enjoy but quiet enough so that with a little effort you could actually talk to people.

And here’s a helpful sign to help you get to Printer’s Alley (admittedly, a bit hard to read in the photo but boring the truth into your brain in real life). No, this is not a clever trap to lure tourists down dark alleyways to be waylaid. Or, if it was, I unknowingly outsmarted it.

COVID panic, though less of an issue in Nashville than most other plays I’ve visited, did do a nice job of keeping crowds to a reasonable level.

Now that’s what I call reasonable.

Just about every meal I had in Nashville was delicious – and not only the foods one would tend to associate with Tennessee. (Hot chicken and … grits and so on, I guess.) The Nashville hot chicken was indeed hot, and flavorful as well. Let’s swipe through the chicken, but DO NOT touch your eyes afterward.

  • Party Fowl hot chicken with side of chips. Very hot! I finished the half-bird but not unscathed.
  • I needed some of this soothing banana pudding to help me through my Party Fowl.
  • Most locals say that Hattie B’s is the best hot chicken in Nashville. They’ve got a good case for it. The medium was flavorful and not too hot, and the hot did just fine in a sandwich.
  • Prince’s is the chicken shack that invented Nashville hot chicken, and their hot chicken was my favorite. Fear? That’s the other guy’s problem.

There other food was great, too! Let’s swipe through again – and this time, what the hell, touch your eyes as much as you want! More, even!

  • Dino’s bar, a pretty chill outdoor place …
  • with a great burger.
  • Big Al’s was the winner for cheap and for big eats.
  • That’s Al in the corner, losing his religion. He’s quite affable.
  • And here is some of the ridiculously oversized food Al sold us.
  • Nashville, it turns out, has a sizable Kurdish population. This is the lamb from Best Kabob House.
  • I highly recommend a gyro from Gyro Kings.
  • Cute mini donuts from Donut Distillery.

We also went out for a fancy Italy-meets-Nashville meal at City House, and it was GREAT. It gets its own montage:

  • White bean soup with greens
  • Apple and cabbage salad, spicy and crunchy :). I forgot to take a picture before we ate most of it :(.
  • Strangely-shaped pasta with pumpkin seeds
  • Cornmeal crust catfish, rice grits and cucumbers
  • Lemon cake with lemon ricotta sorbet
  • Peanut butter cake. Surprisingly amazing.

And now, of course, some distilleries. While Tennessee makes some phenomenal whiskey, Nashville, I’m sad to say, does not – at least not that I found. Still, some of their distilleries are adequate. Let’s adequate away.

  • Tennessee Legend, which has lots of flavored whiskeys to get you through your sorority party. Points for free tastings.
  • Nelson’s Geen Briar Distillery – nice people and nice ambiance but the whiskey is just too yong.
  • Standard Proof, with their infused whiskeys to help with your other sorority party.

The best of the bunch was Tennessee Craft Distillery. They have quite a variety, including vodka, gin, bourbon, liquor made from honey and other liquor made from sorghum. And they make an absinthe which they’ll serve to you in a fancy glass.

Now let’s get serious for a moment. I go to a lot of distilleries, and it drives me nuts when people there don’t know basic things about liquor. I’m going to have to start calling out these distillery knowledge fails.

distillery knowledge fail

Naturally when the server mentioned that theyy have a sorghum liquor, I said, oh! like baiju! And the server never at Nashville Craft Distillery had never heard of it. He thought his distillery invented sorghum liquor, or something.

Baiju is a liquor made from sorghum popular in China. It is the world’s best-selling spirit, with sales more than those of whiskey, gin, vodka, rum and tequila combined. Maybe you can be forgiven if you didn’t know that – but if you work in a distillery that makes sorghum liquor, and you are trying to tell people that this is new and innovative – not knowing about baiju is a major distillery knowledge fail! (Hey, I just came up with a great idea for a drink made from malted barley … I think I’ll call it … Scotch!)

OK, onto drugs that are apparently still legal – I guess only some strains of weed are illegal, and there are legal ones that still get you high. At least that’s what this guy says, and he sells it right out in the open on Broadway, so maybe he knows what he’s talking about:

Small powerlifting update: I did my second powerlifting meet just outside Nashville. Squat 358, bench 292, deadlift 463. Total 1113. PRs in all three lifts. Nashville made me strong! Probably all the good hearty food I was eating. Or the weed guy was right that the THC nervous system was the foundation of all the other nervous systems in the human body.