Monell's Dining & Catering | Nashville Traveler

Communal dining, Southern style. You sit with strangers at long tables and pass heaping platters of fried chicken, biscuits, and country ham — all you can eat. It's the purest expression of Nashville hospitality. Brunch at the Germantown location is one of the city's great rituals.

Monell's operates out of a restored 1880s Victorian in Germantown, and the format is the whole experience: you're seated at a long communal table with strangers, and servers bring out platters — fried chicken, a rotating second meat, several vegetable sides, salads, biscuits, and dessert — that get passed around family-style until everyone's full. It's a fixed price per person rather than a menu you order from, and seconds are expected, not an upcharge.

Breakfast, lunch, and dinner each have their own price and format: breakfast runs roughly $18 a person on weekdays, lunch follows the same all-you-can-eat model through the afternoon, and dinner runs Tuesday through Saturday with a slightly higher price on Friday and Saturday nights. Children 3 and under eat free and older kids eat at a reduced price, which makes it one of the few sit-down Nashville restaurants genuinely built for family groups rather than just tolerating them.

The Midnight Country Breakfast on Saturdays, 11pm to 3am, is the singular thing about Monell's — a full fried-chicken breakfast spread served to the late-night bar crowd and early-morning shift workers alike, in the same communal format as every other meal. It's worth experiencing once, but the regular breakfast, lunch, and dinner seatings are just as good and considerably easier to get to.