Nashville's Rebirth Starts with the Stomach

Nashville's resurgence resonates with Atlanta's and Charleston's before it, as "one of several midsize cities whose food sensibilities (and hipster quotient) are growing as people leave the dog-eat-dog cities on the coasts in search of more affordable, pleasant places to live and eat," writes Severson.

For a town long known for its musical culture, Severson tells the story of Nashville's recent rise through its food culture, and its "two totem foods: a meat-and-three lunch and an order of hot chicken," which "are a distillation of Tennessee's agrarian roots and Nashville's working class."

In Severson's culinary travels across the city, she witnesses the development of, "a different Nashville food scene, where the ethos of community, culinary adventure and democratized kitchen culture are uniting to define a new kind of Southern cooking that doesn't forgo its roots, but allows chefs to transcend them. As one chef told me, 'You don't have to cook pork if you don't want to.'"