Arnold's Country Kitchen

Arnold's runs the meat-and-three format the way it's supposed to work: a cafeteria line, steam trays, a menu that changes by the day, with the quality staying consistent. Fried chicken, roast beef, mac and cheese, black-eyed peas cooked to actual doneness, cornbread with a blistered crust worth fighting over. Chess pie closes it out, and it's the real thing, not a version of it.

The room does the rest of the work. Downtown suits, contractors mid-errand, tourists who found the address on purpose — everyone eats off the same trays at the same speed, and the service keeps that line moving without ever feeling rushed. This is what a genuine Nashville institution looks like when it hasn't been prettied up for anybody: the food is the whole pitch, and it holds up meal after meal.

A brief closure a couple years back could have been the end of it. It came back exactly itself, cafeteria line and all, which says something about how little Arnold's needed to fix. The James Beard Foundation named it an American Classic back in 2009, and Michelin has it on the current Nashville list — both facts point at what's obvious from the tray: this is a meat-and-three doing the job better than almost anyone else in the format.