Dining
By Nicki Pendleton Wood
Has there ever been an industry more unpredictable than the restaurant business? Great product, good atmosphere, reasonable business acumen—in any other industry, if you had all those elements, you’d have a success. But in the restaurant business, it can all come tumbling down with just one incident, one bad employee, one rough patch.
It takes something extra—some fairy dust, luck, prayer, magic spells. Whatever it is, it seems like Martha Stamps has it. Her existing eatery, Martha’s at the Plantation, teems with happy customers, from lucky tourists to Ladies Who Lunch. And her new place, Molly P, brings the same creativity and finesse to eats for the café crowd.
Stamps shares the newly built space at 85 White Bridge Road with Belle Meade Drugs, her own furniture and art nicely warming up the somewhat sterile space of the drugstore.
“There is so much stuff from my house in there,” Stamps says, “I want it to feel like a nice sanctuary.”
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Stamps carefully picked the menu with Mandy Nevill, her talented kitchen manager from Martha’s. The soups, salads, sandwiches, pizza and desserts rise far above the expected café fare, from clever titles to imaginative flavor profiles.
Take the pizzas ($8.95), for instance. No pepperoni and mushrooms here—these are baked on chewy whole wheat crusts and topped with roast chicken or seared shrimp (for the domesticated diner), or roasted apples, pumpkin-seed pesto or smoked butternut squash tapenade (for the culinary yeti inside you). Our Girl From Ipanema pizza featured chorizo and pumpkin-seed pesto with crumbly, salty queso fresco and sliced avocado.
And then there are the baked goods. Put down that cardboard muffin and go for Molly P’s thick, glorious slabs of chocolate chip pound cake, butter cookies so rich the dough has to be piped from a pastry bag, or coffee-spiked cookies just begging to be dunked. (Tip for the thrifty: they sell the day-old goodies in boxes for $3 and you could be the office hero tomorrow.)
We picked up sandwiches ($5.95 to $8.95) for dinner, digging into the Lexington (smoked turkey and horseradish cheddar with homemade apple butter) and the Santa Fe (roast chicken with pumpkin-seed pesto and cilantro, plus chipotle-lime mayo).
Generous entrée salads ($6.95-$9.95) offer snappy combinations like jerk shrimp with melon in minted mango vinaigrette, or lemon-roasted chicken breast over field greens with blue cheese and cranberries. Choice-of-two and choice-of-three salad plates let you try a little Club Med antipasto salad, Tan Popo sesame noodle salad, Molly Please pimento cheese or Bridge Club egg salad.
Stamps calls herself “my own clientele—busy mom, picky kids,” so the kid’s menu offers grilled cheese, PBJ and “not-scary cheese pizza” ideal for the picky 8-year-old who’s just not going to eat a pizza with roasted eggplant and rosemary oil, even if you pick them off and blot the top. You know what I mean.
Molly P, it turns out, is the light at the end of the tunnel for Stamps, who has endured both the everyday disasters of restaurant work and her own personal struggles. Besides the usual headaches (“My head chef quit the night before Mother’s Day one year. People call in sick with hangovers. I’ve had employees leave to smoke crack in their cars. The fire alarm goes off. People are getting deported all the time”) there’s her own long waltz with alcohol, that favorite restaurant industry medication.
“I’ve always been trying to find who I was. I think it’s the case with a lot of restaurant people—you feel there’s something elementally not right in your life,” she muses.
Her search for identity has taken her through some noteworthy Nashville eateries, including both Sunset Grill and F. Scott’s, years of catering with Emily Frith, followed by years with Frith and Steve Scalise at Corner Market. She was part of the opening team at Yellow Porch, then left to write the first of four cookbooks. That was when Belle Meade Plantation called.
At Belle Meade, her cooking and books widened her reputation. But the search continued, and by the time she found herself, she turned out to be a brand name. She calls the fun, funky Molly P an extension of herself, and it’s not just a turn of phrase: Molly P is her childhood nickname. Go looking for yourself and end up with two restaurants named after you—how’s that for a happy ending?
Molly P is open 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. Monday through Friday and 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. Saturday.
Kay West, at work finishing a book, will return here in a few weeks.