Dining
The Pineapple Room, 1200 Forrest Park Drive, 352-4859
Kentucky Hot Brown $9.95
Blackened chicken sandwich $9.95
Faucon salad $6.95
Maple-pecan salmon $12.95
Apple-caramel bread pudding $6.95
photo: ericengland.net
You seldom get a second chance to make a first impression, which is why Cheekwood’s restaurant, The Pineapple Room, has remained firmly in the low-calorie, ladylike section of Nashville’s dining consciousness—on a doily, somewhere between aspic and cottage cheese. But recent trips to the hilltop sanctuary of arts and gardens have revealed that one of Nashville’s most picturesque restaurants now has a menu worthy of the scenery.
Anne Clayton, who took over Cheekwood’s food and beverage service six years ago, has been saying as much to anyone who will listen. A veteran of the restaurant industry—her family founded Sperry’s and Maude’s Courtyard, and she was one half of the erstwhile Clayton-Blackmon restaurant and catering equation—Clayton has been shouting from Cheekwood’s grand, English-style rooftops that The Pineapple Room is at last a dining destination and no longer just a gift shop with a chicken salad afterthought.
But a $10 admission fee stands between us nonmembers and the ladies who lunch. So it wasn’t until we heard that Darrell Manhold, the former chef of MacK & Kate’s in Kingston Springs, had taken over the kitchen that we finally climbed the hill for a peek.
And how the view has changed.
That’s not to say that there are many more men in the picture. No, Cheekwood’s pretty dining room is still a haven for the fairer sex—and, frankly, for the elder members of the fairer sex. But they’re not nibbling on crustless sandwiches and fruit cups. Nor are they eating Jell-O, says Clayton, who remembers when she first came to the sylvan lunchroom and watched the staff scoop gelatin from plastic cups directly onto the plates—with the brand name imprinted on the jiggly surface. “Guys,” she told them, “this is not good.”
With the help of kitchen manager Manuel Melgoza and a recent brief stint from Manhold, who left after just three months, Clayton has developed a roster of soups, quiches, salads, sandwiches and entrées that are both more contemporary in flavor and more generous in bulk than many Pineapple Room luncheons of yore. (Clayton-Blackmon fans will recognize the lemon-artichoke soup, which occasionally graces the roster of specials.)
The meal starts out graciously with a basket of warm muffins—banana-nut, blueberry and poppy-seed—served with honey-cinnamon butter. More of a retreat than most lunchtime restaurants (we saw an unusual number of guests lingering leisurely over glasses of wine), The Pineapple Room is not exactly a spot for an express meal. Depending on the crowd, those muffins might be all you get for a while. On one of our visits, our server appeared to be a one-woman show, and we waited an unusually long time for our food. But when it came, it came in spades. All the plates were piled with generous servings.
Maybe it’s the backdrop of rolling green hills and towering trees, or maybe it’s merely the association with botanical gardens, but the salads at The Pineapple Room seem unusually bountiful and fresh. We enjoyed the spinach with grilled chicken, strawberries, mandarin oranges, cucumbers, feta cheese, candied almonds and sesame vinaigrette. And the Faucon salad—a large crisp wedge of iceberg topped with chunky Roquefort dressing and hearty, crisp squares of flavorful bacon—was an ample meal.
Our favorite item was a sandwich of blackened chicken and goat cheese with arugula, sautéed red onion and pesto mayonnaise on a whole-wheat bun, served with deliciously unfeminine onion rings. With generous layers of warm and cool, tangy and sweet, crisp and gooey, the sandwich offered a bracing combination of flavors and textures.
With Manhold’s recent departure, Clayton has tinkered with the menu, restoring some items that predated him. The expensive lobster BLT, which buried the sweet lobster flavor under a schmear of goat cheese, has been replaced by a blackened chicken quesadilla with homemade salsa and guacamole. Sweet-potato fries have returned to some plates, and pumpkin mascarpone crepes have—wisely—left the dessert menu. But we were sorry to see the disappearance of the arugula salad topped with a deep-fried cube of luscious, beer-battered brie and sprinkled with plantain chips, sweet-and-sour dried cherries and sesame vinaigrette.
There are several hot meals, including the traditional Kentucky Hot Brown with ham, turkey, bacon and tomatoes over Texas toast and topped with Mornay sauce. The brie-and-portobello quesadilla with roasted red peppers was an unexpectedly large plate of food that could easily—perhaps advisedly—serve two people. On our visit, crab cakes arrived plump with shrimp and lump crab meat, with little filler, but they were plated beside a monotonous pile of red beans and rice that overwhelmed the crab. Since Manhold’s precipitous exit last month, the detracting side dish has been replaced with jasmine rice.
To our surprise, we enjoyed the busy combination of maple-pecan salmon with mascarpone sweet-potato cake, sautéed spinach, and pineapple with bourbon cream sauce. While the menu’s description of cream and fish initially made us shudder, the fish was gently cooked and the nuts were browned to a flavorful, crisp crust. We found ourselves scraping the last traces of sauce off the plate.
For dessert, we couldn’t help but order the peppermint sundae, a simple parfait of ice cream and chocolate sauce, but the better choice by far was the apple-caramel bread pudding. The large structural affair—cakey slices of rum-tinged pudding, doused in caramel sauce and vanilla-bean cream and plated with a scoop of cinnamon ice cream—is large enough for a bridge foursome to share.
While our food was fresh, creative and well-prepared, there’s no accounting for how much the serene setting played into our visits. On two splendid fall days, we sat on the outdoor deck overlooking the rolling lawns of the Cheekwood estate. For that luxury and privilege we can almost stomach the entrance fee, which will remain an inevitable toll unless Cheekwood situates its dining facilities outside the boundaries of its nonprofit domain. But we have a hard time swallowing the addition of a 17-percent gratuity to parties of any size. On two trips, without knowing it, we double-tipped our server, who blithely let us add 20 percent on top of 17 percent, for a combined tip on a pre-tax bill of more than 38 percent. It was not until we came home and studied the menu that we saw our mistake. So beware: it’s a meal that can add up, especially if you’re paying the entrance fee and not paying attention.
The Pineapple Room serves lunch 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. Tuesday through Sunday.
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