Pastured hen
Look out most entrance doorways in Nashville and also you’ll see a neighborhood modified by 15 years of inhabitants development, largely outlined by new residents’ wealth and previous residents’ departure. Zero in on a neighborhood and also you may get Sylvan Park; zero in on a restaurant and also you may get 4410 Murphy Highway, the previous residence of McCabe Pub.
Chef Robbie Wilson — and a big crew of buyers — spared no expense reworking the decades-old mainstay into Lion’s Share. Greater than a decade in the past, Wilson helped steer culinary course for the forerunning M Road Hospitality crew that introduced Virago and Kayne Prime to The Gulch. Final 12 months, Wilson returned his penchant for fashionable restaurateurship to Nashville after manning a number of top-flight locations in San Francisco and California wine nation. Now, at Lion’s Share, a surf-and-turf menu asks patrons to spare no expense on dinner, which comes with heaping West Coast luxurious and mockingly modest parts.
A reported $4 million reworked Sylvan Park’s iconic neighborhood restaurant over the previous six months into Wilson’s maximalist new outpost. The thousands and thousands purchased hundreds extra sq. ft, cut up between a soft bar, an ethereal kitchen, a standard eating room and a non-public occasion house. An unique upstairs lounge is restricted to buyers and folks with “cool vibes,” based on one workers member. From outdoors, it gave the impression to be empty.
Hardscape renovations changed sidewalk entry to the restaurant with a moat-like ditch separating Lion’s Share from Murphy Highway, that means walkers should weave between freshly mulched shrubs or enter by a large driveway. By means of darkish chateau doorways, a impartial carpeted seating space punctuated by a unusual mixture of wall hangings completes the inside scheme. Uncozy, the house is denlike solely in how design selections appear to replicate a single male particular person. Earlier than any snacks or bites, diners settle into the general sense that Lion’s Share is a self-contained fortress deliberate from the surface in, touchdown the restaurant nearer to a Twenty first-century nation membership than the ageless patina earned by Sperry’s or BrickTop’s.
On a cool Tuesday evening, the self-proclaimed neighborhood gem struggled to attract hordes of undersized baseball gamers and their hungry households previous Edley’s Bar-B-Que close by. Because the clock struck 7 p.m., Nashville’s fine-dining-curious trickled in, complementing the waitstaff’s matching inexperienced sweater vests with fits and ties and diamonds.
Drinkers can peruse 5 Champagnes, six chardonnays, seven cabernet sauvignons, and no beer. (This final deficit might be corrected by press time, based on an apologetic bartender.) Purple wine begins at $80 per bottle, whereas white wine climbs sharply from $70.
Lion’s Share
Featured cocktails, listed on a weighty gold metallic clipboard, are heavy on blends and set the menu’s precedent for inventive twists on classics. Spiked iced tea — the Home Tea — strikes a satisfying middlebrow swizzle, mixing cognac, liqueur, Southern Consolation, Captain Morgan and a fats, juicy lemon wedge. Go up with the Cocchi-featuring knockout Vesper or Cotswolds Spritz, or down with a Mezcal Negroni or Bowmore Boulevardier. The environment friendly bar crew nails every one, they usually come out fast and chilly.
Lime and truffle flavors plump slices of kanpachi (amberjack) the scale of matchbooks. The seafood cuts are a standout choice among the many menu’s uncooked openers, which embody tuna, scallops, oysters and sea bass. Whereas nice eating has broadly adopted Japanese exports like sashimi and seaweed, Wilson’s jus mastery and high-quality sourcing rating extra cross-Pacific hits, together with a petite, expensive and ideal ponzu-bathing avocado hemisphere smeared with wasabi.
Fluffy bread and chewy pasta could look like easy pleasers, however handmade doughs are simple to mess up. Wilson’s delicate agnolotti, filled with ricotta and topped with tender Alabama blue crab, may be the menu’s can’t-miss order. Towering milk bread combines Hawaiian roll sweetness with cascading butter ribbons for an umami distinction — contingency carbs with sauce-mopping functionality. Ribbons of cultured butter — just like the flavored, savory crushed ice that comes with an in any other case sorry shrimp cocktail — are amongst a number of menu gimmicks which can be extra charming earlier than the examine arrives.
Lion’s Share
When you arrive anticipating to indulge, caviar and beef can rapidly develop into the default. As an alternative, discover the five-star produce that carries a number of wonderful flame-grilled small plates and easy salads that crunch, all important souvenirs from Wilson’s extremely regarded Bay Space stint. A small bowl of Calabrian-chile-garnished sugar snap peas and a superbly cooked maitake bundle may simply end off a meal right here. The Appalachian half-trout barely swims above its lemony butter sauce, whereas the filet mignon narrowly beats nugget allegations (listed on-line as 8 ounces and on the restaurant as 6). Amid so many fastidiously deliberate multistep balancing acts, the most important shock is the kitchen’s obvious stinginess with salt, notably on meat and fish — suggestions that got here unsolicited from a number of diners.
Getting much less for extra may be essentially the most succinct strategy to describe no matter profitability technique now grips town’s cutthroat restaurant scene. As in any jungle, the sturdy nonetheless survive, and it’s not going {that a} seasoned veteran like Wilson has gone into this newest enterprise with out doing the numbers. His latest undertaking is a licensed apex predator — led by a well-connected and charismatic principal cooking spectacular meals, serving sturdy drinks and claiming buyers throughout Belle Meade — and it already threatens extra Sylvan Park casualties in close by Lola and Park Cafe. There’s solely a lot to go round.
