Still Crazy (Good) After All These Years

There’s no doubt Joe Galante has eaten at some of the world’s most esteemed dining establishments—the Sony BMG Nashville chairman travels all across the country, has a West Coast getaway and vacations in Europe. But last Wednesday night, the country music kingpin and his glamorous wife Phran could be found enjoying one of their frequent dinners at an unassuming little restaurant tucked between a Jersey Mike’s and a Shell station in blue-collar Berry Hill. What is it that keeps bigwigs like the Galantes coming back to The Yellow Porch?

The same thing that appeals to Joe’s longtime assistant Donna Duarte, who dined there the night before with her boyfriend. And to Ombi’s Kim Totzke, seated this night at a four-top with her husband, son and sous chef. And to a quartet of suited-up investment bankers, a girls’ night out, and all the other members of the large and loyal following the Porch has built in the nearly nine years it has been open. While some restaurants strive to blow diners away with eye-popping decor, flamboyant delivery and tricked-out menus, The Yellow Porch wraps its guests in a warm embrace of comfort and familiarity, consistently delivering good food and service at a good price. Owners Katie and Gep Nelson have a knack for hiring chefs and staff who not only excel at what they do, but clearly like what they do.

Yellow Porch announces its priorities from the parking lot, where several raised beds are dense and fragrant with vegetables from spring through fall, and where a lone rosemary shrub is clinging stubbornly to the fallow dirt in late November. On the small patio, yellow-and-white striped umbrellas are closed tight for the winter, but a half-dozen copper wind chimes still ring a musical welcome in the chilly air. Against the pale-yellow exterior, garlands of evergreen are a homey harbinger of the season.

While the Nelsons will trade parking spaces for a garden, they make no such concessions to an imposing front desk, typically home base for a maître d’ or host, positions that are fairly ambiguous at Yellow Porch. Diners are as likely to be greeted and seated by a server as by the manager, who likewise will do double-duty as water pourer and table clearer. It’s a level playing field at the Porch, where pretension is a big no-no. There is a small bar almost flush against the back wall, but there’s no actual bartender—servers pour wine and mix cocktails. While roles among the staff aren’t clearly defined, The Yellow Porch itself suffers no identity crisis—it is a restaurant that also serves alcohol, not a bar or club that happens to have food.

The Porch makes the most of its modest square footage with a combination of tables, booths and banquette on the dining room’s partially carpeted wood floor. Linens are black, matching the attire of the staff and a good portion of the clientele. Lighting is low in the evening, though at lunch, sunshine pours in through the large windows. Cutlery, glassware and china are standard bistro issue. The menu displays food on one side, the wine list on the other, with specials listed on a chalkboard.

The postage-stamp-sized kitchen, partially visible from the dining room, crowds quite a few people into a minimal space. Executive chef Guerry McComas is not a small person, but he gracefully and efficiently steers the back of the house, assisted by Mandy Nevill and Mario Angeles.

The Porch is McComas’ first leading role, but one for which he was well prepared. Like many Nashville chefs (including The Yellow Porch’s first chef, Martha Stamps), McComas points to his time at the late Corner Market as a formative culinary experience, and cites the market’s resident chef, Steve Scalise, as an important teacher. “The Corner Market was just a fun, creative, energetic place to be,” McComas says, “and Steve was so encouraging of the kids who worked for him.”

While attending University of Tennessee, McComas worked at Knoxville’s The Orangery, an upscale French restaurant, where he was exposed to classic cooking techniques. By then completely bitten by the cooking bug, he attended the Culinary Institute of America in upstate New York. Ironically, his externship brought him back to East Tennessee, at Blackberry Farm, where he found his biggest mentor in John Fleer. “He was such a believer in local sourcing and regional cooking long before it became trendy,” McComas says. “His food straddled that fence between rustic and elegant. That’s what I try to do.”

From CIA, McComas made the peripatetic journey of a chef on the rise: to Nantucket, to Napa Valley, back to Blackberry, then to Switzerland, then Vermont. While in New England, he got a call from his sister telling him she was pregnant, which lured him back to Nashville to be near his family. After stints as sous chef at Tayst and Bound’ry, he felt ready for his own kitchen, and The Yellow Porch position was fortuitously open.