Monell's opened on Thanksgiving Day, 1995, when Michael King, unemployed and new to the restaurant business, bought an old house in a struggling stretch of Germantown and turned it into a family-style boarding-house restaurant. The name came from his early business partner, Bill Monell, who left after two years; King has run it ever since, and the restaurant has since grown into a Nashville institution with multiple locations, though the Germantown house — a cozy 72-seat space — remains the original.
The format is built around shared tables: guests sit family-style and pass serving plates of Southern classics to whoever's beside them. The menu changes daily but runs through skillet fried chicken, biscuits and gravy, cheese grits, cornbread, pork chops, and pot roast, with sides like green beans, corn pudding, and cole slaw filling out the table. A set price covers the meats, vegetables, and salads of the day, plus drink and dessert. Reviewers also point to the corn pudding, cinnamon rolls, meatloaf, ham, stuffing, and collard greens as regulars on the rotating spread.
Monell's has been named to Eater's list of essential Nashville restaurants and is featured in The Infatuation's Nashville guide.
The format is built around shared tables: guests sit family-style and pass serving plates of Southern classics to whoever's beside them. The menu changes daily but runs through skillet fried chicken, biscuits and gravy, cheese grits, cornbread, pork chops, and pot roast, with sides like green beans, corn pudding, and cole slaw filling out the table. A set price covers the meats, vegetables, and salads of the day, plus drink and dessert. Reviewers also point to the corn pudding, cinnamon rolls, meatloaf, ham, stuffing, and collard greens as regulars on the rotating spread.
Monell's has been named to Eater's list of essential Nashville restaurants and is featured in The Infatuation's Nashville guide.