Setting a New Standard

Faithful to their 19th century origin, the dining rooms at The Standard restaurant have no plasma-screen TVs, no back-lit wine coolers or other contemporary restaurant accoutrements. Steeped in restrained Victorian elegance, the subdued rooms herald a different era, one recalled by period trappings such as a pendulum clock, gas lamps and pink cabbage-rose china. But for all the owners’ efforts to spit-shine the stately address into a dutiful time capsule, the Smith family only recently banished a most glaring anachronism from the premises—store-bought mayonnaise.

Until a few weeks ago, the chicken salad and shrimp salad—Southern staples that defined the ladylike luncheon menu—were made with standard mayo from a jar, a product that would not have been widely available until 1912, when the Hellmans began bottling their sandwich spread of emulsified oil and egg yolk.

When chef Joe Shaw stepped into the kitchen in March to help overhaul the lunch and dinner menus, he 86’d the jarred stuff and began making chicken salad the old-fashioned way—or, as he puts it, in a way that’s too damn hard for anybody to bother doing now.

A diligent student of Southern food and a protégé of Birmingham restaurant impresario Frank Stitt, Shaw came to Nashville in June 2005 as opening chef of Watermark restaurant in The Gulch. There, he juxtaposed a menu of classically inspired recipes and regional ingredients against an ultra-contemporary architectural tour de force. Now, in the painstakingly restored Smith House—formerly known as the Savage House—he is working to craft a menu of Southern fare worthy of its historic surroundings.

Step into The Standard for lunch or dinner, and chances are you will encounter a member of the Smith family, who bought the townhouse in October 2005, installing the restaurant on the ground floor and a private residence upstairs. At any given meal, Joshua Smith, who owns several businesses and properties along Eighth Avenue, might be dining with his wife and infant at one table, while his mother Sharon—who lives upstairs—greets guests at the gorgeous carved front door.

With the slightest encouragement, Joshua will discuss the restoration of the sculptural medallion on the dining room ceiling, his plans for a wine room or the history of the carved mantelpiece from the house where Andrew Jackson was married. Meanwhile, chef Shaw will offer a similarly intricate accounting of the chicken salad process, which starts with boiling birds for the salad and ends with a scrumptious by-product meal of chicken and dumplings made with the leftover rich brown stock.

With old-school favorites including a four-piece fried chicken basket, chicken salad on a croissant, veal meatloaf, pan-fried rainbow trout and intensely garlicky shrimp over ground Anson Mills grits, The Standard may not offer a flashy lunch, but it offers a solid and comforting one. The combination of location, ambiance and menu draws a brisk and lively downtown lunch crowd, with regulars including former Mayor Bill Purcell.

Dinner, on the other hand, has been a harder sell. On two separate occasions, we were virtually the only diners in the restaurant. At our first meal—on a Saturday evening before Shaw’s arrival—it was little surprise that The Standard was not a hopping joint. The menu read like a tired primer for Gourmet Food 101, with heavy—and expensive—clichés such as veal Oscar and stuffed Atlantic salmon, plated with sculpted piles of rice topped with the textbook flourish of a single chive balanced across the top. With no bar scene attached and no cocktail menu, the food alone did not merit a trip.

Fortunately, things have changed dramatically.

If you were one of the handful of people who actually dined at The Standard between November (when the dinner menu launched) and March (when Shaw took over), forget everything you saw. Cleanse your palate of the institutional desserts and cold bread. Even the frilly funeral home flowers on the table are gone. These days, the tables are set with playful bowls of vibrant limes and kumquats, and the dinner menu offers a surprisingly innovative and economical range of Southern-inspired cuisine.

Most noticeably, Shaw cut the rambling list of entrées in half and lowered the price points significantly. Eight main dishes now range from an $18 chicken to a $30 blue cheese-stuffed filet. He also introduced warm homemade yeast rolls. Watermark fans will recognize glimpses of Shaw’s flair in dishes such as the appetizer of pounded beef tenderloin carpaccio plated with creamy horseradish sauce, peppery arugula and fried capers, which offers a streamlined modern counterpoint to the Victorian surroundings.

On our second dinner visit, the most enticing appetizer on Shaw’s menu—squash blossoms stuffed with ricotta and Parmesan with pickled peach relish—was unavailable. Instead, we opted for the fried mirliton, also known as chayote squash, a fruit indigenous to Louisiana. With texture akin to a fried green tomato, the mirliton was breaded and topped with crawfish, hollandaise and thick chunks of chewy bacon. (The andouille sausage listed on the menu was unavailable.) The rich combination of salty and creamy flavors and smooth and gritty textures was unexpectedly decadent, and the bacon-for-sausage swap was a happy accident, as far as we were concerned. This curious dish alone is worth a trip.