Southern Cookin’

When it comes to tasty vittles, Nashville can dish it out with the best of them, but two restaurants represent the scope of Southern dining at its best. Arnold’s Country Kitchen is a concrete-block, lunch-only meat-and-three where fried chicken and macaroni and cheese — the quintessential hillbilly vegetable — are served cafeteria style by various and mostly friendly members of the Arnold family. Generations of regulars pile in Monday through Friday, taking up the few tables available, and the fried oysters on Friday can get a line going out the door. A few blocks away, in the ultra-trendy Gulch area, Watermark sits high atop 12th Avenue in a red brick building that previously was a print shop. With chef Joe Shaw at the helm, grits never had it so good, starring in a stone-ground soufflé with apple-smoked bacon butter sauce. And with entrees like cornmeal-crusted flounder and bacon-wrapped pork tenderloin to boot, Watermark hits the highest level of dining in the city, with both feet planted firmly on the farm.

Arnold’s Country Kitchen: 605 Eighth Ave. S., 615-256-4455
Watermark: 507 12th Ave. S., 615-254-2000, watermark-restaurant.com