Arnold's Country Kitchen | Nashville Traveler

Nashville's most beloved meat-and-three. A cafeteria line, cash only, with rotating daily specials of Southern classics. The cornbread is legendary, the turnip greens are perfect, and the line out the door is part of the ritual. Open weekdays through mid-afternoon only.

Jack Arnold started serving meat-and-three out of a concrete block building on 8th Avenue South in 1983, after years managing the Vanderbilt cafeteria and working his way up from dishwasher. His son Kahlil now runs the kitchen, and the format hasn't changed: a cafeteria line where you grab a tray, pick a meat, and choose from a wall of daily-rotating vegetable sides.

The vegetables are the real reason Arnold's has a citywide reputation — long-simmered turnip and mustard greens, fried green tomatoes, squash casserole, and cornbread made to order rather than held under a heat lamp. Fried chicken shows up on Wednesdays and is the single most fought-over item on the line; roast beef and country-fried steak stay in steady rotation the rest of the week.

The James Beard Foundation named Arnold's an America's Classic, an award reserved for beloved regional restaurants with timeless appeal, and the room still runs like it did decades ago — fluorescent lights, shared tables, a line of regulars in scrubs and suits alike. It's cash only, closes mid-afternoon, and skips dinner and Sunday service entirely, which is part of the appeal: it's built around a workday lunch crowd, not tourists, even though tourists now make up plenty of the line.