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While it's true that Nashville's dining scene is having a 'big city” moment (countless restaurants opening, interest from big-name chefs, and influx in wide-reaching chains), we also seem to be holding onto our small-town charmswhich the opening of East Nashville's new Peninsula exemplifies.
The restaurant comes by way of a trio from Seattle: Chef Jake Howell, general manager Yuriko Say, and bar manager Craig Schoen all relocated to Nashville specifically for its small-town energy.
'The restaurant saturation in Seattle is high,” Howell explains, noting Schoen pitched them Nashville after a friend who was living here raved about it. The team knew it wanted to open a small, neighborhood spot serving up Spanish and Iberian-inspired cuisine, and Nashville gave them the means to do it.
After arriving here in September 2016, Howell, who had worked with James Beard Award-winning chef Renee Erickson at The Walrus and the Carpenter, as well as Bar Melusine, was immediately struck by the friendliness of the locals. 'There wasn't any weird competitionother chefs and restaurant people were really welcoming and helpful. It was very easy for this to feel like home,” he says.
The team quickly found their spota small, 38-seat space inside The Eastland, a new development off of West Eastland Avenuewhich was well-suited for their mission to provide a small list of shareable dishes and a tightly curated bar program, all from within a small footprint. Howell's intent on using every scrap of food that comes into the kitchenthey produce very little compost and their walk-in is 'probably one of the smallest in the city,” he notes with pride.
Maximizing the use of ingredients is a cohesive collaboration between bar and kitchen. Schoen, who's dreamed up an extensive list of gin and tonic cocktails, often roots through Howell's ingredients to produce cocktails, like the Second Deadly Sin, made with Spanish brandy that's been fat-washed with serrano ham; the ham is leftover from a dish made of ham, tomato butter, and toast. For the gin and tonics, of which there are eight that pair different gins, tonics, and flavor-enhancing ingredient, Schoen might pull cucumber, cardamom, mint, or tarragon from Howell's stash, too.
That cozy, sharing atmosphere extends into the dining room, too. Although it's set in a new building, Peninsula feels lived-ina trait that Howell attributes to the team's own involvement in the build-out process. Working with local carpenters, the team helped construct the bar, back bar, and banquettes in the space, and filled it with simple, wooden furnishings. Books line a few shelves in the bathroom, and there's a series of hanging, vine-y plants set between the open kitchen and the dining room, bringing a natural touch to the room.
What to order:
Cucumber broth, celery, shrimp, $12
Tomato toast, chicken liver mousse $11
Chicken thigh, herbs, onion, $13
Morcilla crepe, sweetbreads, onion, $17
Orange panna cotta, sherry, vanilla olive oil, $7
On the menu, Howell pulls from Spanish and Portuguese ideas, but he isn't attempting to 'carbon copy” what you've eaten elsewhere. His own preference is to taste a lot of dishes and pass things around a table, so he has purposefully put together a menu of small plates that are meant to be sharedit works for most of the dishes, in theory, but if you're not one to dip your spoon into another person's soup, several of the broth-based items might be better suited for one.
Of the shareable successes, the tomato toast is a hitunder a thin bed of French sorrel, the tomato sauce mingles with a good schmear of chicken-liver mousse over a thick slice of sourdough bread. The chicken thigh dishshredded meat that's been braised in duck fathides under a layer of fat, along with a scoop of grits. A morcilla crepe, inspired by the traditional Spanish blood sausage, gets draped over a small pile of tender sweetbreadsHowell believes that offal needs to be used, both because it's a part of the animal that doesn't normally get used, and, it the right hands, it can be delicious.
But, then, there are dishes that are a little tougher to split, like a cucumber broth that's spiked with pea shoots, radish, and tender pieces of shrimpwe wanted to slurp it down like a juice but grudgingly shared it with separate spoons. The same went for the braised rabbit, which sits in a garlic broth and gets a big dap of aioli to the side. It's a great dish, just hard to split in two.
More appropriate to share are the desserts, including an exceptional orange panna cotta set in a small, shallow dish and floated on top with a vanilla olive oil. Beneath the shimmering green small pool swims a dollop of sherry, creating a smooth and creamy flavor bombone that will tempt you to try drinking the olive oil on its own.
Most tables of two will be well fed with a range of about five to six dishes; hungrier groups might want to order the whole menuand they'll be rewarded for it, too. Very few items miss the mark, thanks to Howell's careful attention to flavor and seasonalityand the voices of his diners.
'It's important to me that the menu be dictated by the customers,” he says. Here in Nashville, he adds, those customers are as surprising as the city's still intact small-town charm. 'Never in my life did I think our biggest seller would be rabbit,” he says. 'But that's what people here like, and so we're going to keep giving it to them.”
1035 W Eastland Ave, 615-679-0377; peninsulanashville.com