Anniversary Trip: Nashville

While Nashville one of the husband's favorite cities, I had never been before. He's raved about how great the city is and I'll be honest I was a little skeptical at first. I mean, just in case you haven't looked at a map recently, Nashville is nowhere near the ocean. In order to be classified as a great city in my book there needs to be an ocean . 

Well, the husband wins this one. Nashville is awesome. 

The music is great. You can hear live music anytime every day of the week. Once you're downtown, it's a walking city. Park your car and walk to where you wanna go. And the food... oh the food, but we'll get there.

I don't always like playing tourist in new cities. I don't like people knowing I'm visiting. It's okay to judge me it's a super odd quirk. I think it has something to do with living in a vacation city where we made fun of tourists. However, for this trip I put my weird fears aside and fully embraced the tourist role. We checked out the Ryman Auditorium and the Country Music Hall of Fame. Both pretty obvious stops for us since we love Nashville (James has a serious crush on Hayden :) and country music.

Let's get real honest here. I judge cities by the food. It's gotta be good and not just the fancy resaturates, but the little hole in the wall places too. Nashville did not disappoint at all.

Puckett's Grocery and Restaurant:
Puckett's is a restaurant downtown that I'm assuming was at one point a grocery (hence the name), but has since been converted into a restaurant. It's southern BBQ and it's good. We went for breakfast and lunch and were impressed with both. For breakfast James got the "Southern Stack." Stick with me for a second, it's a sweet potato pancakes, fried apples, bbq pork, a fried egg, and home fries. It sounded awful. It was wonderful. I hate sweet potatoes, but I loved these sweet potatoes pancakes.

Cantina Laredo:
Probably my newest favorite restaurant. The tuna tacos are to die for and fish tacos that rocked my world. I need them to open one of these in Atlanta ASAP. There really aren't adequate words for this restaurant other than we're still raving about this meal.

Yeast:
Great bakery! They serve Kolaches, a Cezch pastry most often served sweet with some fruit filling, but sometimes made savory. Think doughy yeasty goodness. James stuck with the fruit variety and I got a savory one with sausage, jalapenos, and cheese. My mouth is watering just thinking about these.

Husk:

I had to give a nod to one of my favorite cities and check out Husk for our anniversary dinner. There other location is in Charleston and I've always wanted to try it out, so I'm glad we got to here. It was everything we hoped for. The drinks were incredible, the charcuterie appetizer was our favorite part, and our entrees were really good. Farm to table restaurants always get bonus point in my book.

My entree: Southern Veggie Plate: embered okra, heirloom tomato salad, sea island pea succotash, fried squash blossom stuffed with cheese, and mushroom grits with a poached egg. So much food and so good!

We went against tradition and didn't eat our wedding cake. It accidently got thrown out when dad was cleaning out the elk freezer (don't even ask) a week before our anniversary. Whoops! Oh well, makes for a good story :) and who needs tradition anyway.

It was such a wonderful trip and the prefect to celebrate being married for a year!