International Market

2010 Belmont Blvd. 297-4453

Hours: 10:30 a.m.-9 p.m. daily

“Hi, how are you, my friend?” Patti Myint sings out to a middle-aged man who has arrived at International Market for a late lunch one weekday afternoon. The restaurant’s owner for nearly three decades, she sits at an orange booth with a large bowl of noodle soup before her; to it she adds some sliced peppers, some chili sauce and then another, hotter sauce. Every diner who walks past her table stops to say hello. “My customers are my friends,” she says. “They come here to eat, and we get to know each other. They come here when they are children, they grow up, they come back with their little ones. That makes me feel so good.”

Thirty-four years ago, when she came to Nashville as a young woman from her native Thailand to study business at Trevecca Nazarene University, Myint had no friends, knew little of American culture and was puzzled by Southern cooking. “I stayed with an American family when I first came here,” she recalls. “I had never eaten turnip greens. I could not get used to them. I didn’t know why they cooked their vegetables for so long. They cooked them until they weren’t crispy anymore. And [in Thai food], we never eat a whole steak or a whole chicken. We cut meat up small, in pieces, and add to the dish.”

After getting out of school, she met her husband, Win Myint, who had emigrated here from Burma to become a teacher. The couple moved to a house on Linden Avenue and Belmont Boulevard, in what was then considered a very transitional neighborhood. “I would walk up and down Belmont,” Mrs. Myint says. “I saw this building, it was all boarded up here, and there was a sale sign on it. I thought maybe I could do something with it. I was lucky because my husband worked and had a salary.”

The building, which sits at the curve where Belmont University now looms, had been an H.G. Hill grocery. The company donated it to the YMCA, and the Y, in turn, sold it to the Myints. The couple did all of the renovation work themselves, and in 1975 they opened the International Market, a lunch-only, cafeteria-style restaurant. Though Mrs. Myint is Thai, she stuck at first mostly to Chinese dishes—egg rolls, fried rice, some veggies—as they were slightly more familiar to Southerners. Even so, it was a tough sell.

“There was nothing like this in Nashville back then,” she explains. “I had to get my family to send me ingredients from back home. Anybody who came in said 'What is this?’ It was very hard to get people to try new things. Besides that, we were the first restaurant on Belmont. It was a very different neighborhood back then. Even the Belmont students stayed to themselves. They did not come to eat here back then.”

When she opened, Mrs. Myint had a couple of steam tables and about seven items daily. An order of any one item was 35 cents. “The first day, I sold $40,” she says, shaking her head. “It is very, very hard to do a business when you are small and no one knows you. You have to put down deposits, you have to pay COD for everything. And if you are making just $40 a day, how do you pay an employee? I worked very, very hard...no social life, no family life. It took two years to get busy, get customers.”

Early on, she was discovered by struggling young musicians, many of whom rented apartments in the dilapidated duplexes that populated the neighborhood. “They could come and eat here for a dollar or two. I began to know them. Sometimes they came in and said they had no money. I said, 'You have to eat, so eat. Don’t worry.’ ”

Before long, she began staying open for dinner and added more dishes to the steam table. She also started stocking groceries, with the idea that getting them wholesale, she could cut her own food costs and sell a few items as well. “When people began liking my food, they wanted to know how to cook it themselves. But they would look at our shelves and not know what to do with any of it. Some customers would call me at home, from their kitchens, with questions. I am always happy to help.”

She is also happy to make something special for her stable of regulars, which seems to be nearly everyone who comes in. “My customers trust me; they say to me, 'Just give us what we want.’ And they know I know what they want, even when they don’t know!” Architect and longtime International Market customer Manuel Zeitlin confirms that. “A long time ago, Mrs. Myint told me just to ask for whatever I wanted her to fix. I always get food cooked to order instead of the buffet. But her chicken noodle soup with garlic is great for cold season. When people in my office get sick, that’s what I tell them to get.”

The hot steam tables these days offer nearly five times more items than when she opened 28 years ago, and they’re still less than $2 an order. Mrs. Myint has also added a cooler for fresh salads, and desserts are arrayed at the end of the line. “We make everything fresh. We make it all every morning, and when it is gone, it is gone. We don’t use oil in our salad dressing, we don’t use cornstarch to thicken. Look at our grapefruit!” she urges, pointing at a plastic-wrapped plate of glistening pink sections. “When we have time on our hands, my staff peels grapefruit. No one likes to peel grapefruit, but everyone likes to eat it!”

The view from Mrs. Myint’s window onto Belmont Boulevard is quite a bit different than it was in 1975. Across the street today are Bongo Java, Tabouli, Salon Stephen and Book Discoveries. Kote’s, the restaurant owned by Dawn and Gene Kote, sits in the nearby building that for five years served as home to International House, the upscale version of International Market. “It just became too much to have two restaurants. That is my building, and I wanted to be sure the people who came in were honest and hard workers. Dawn and Gene, they were my customers for a long time. They work very hard and are good for the neighborhood.”

International Market’s corner of the neighborhood is increasingly dominated by Belmont University, which is currently adding a huge building right across from the Market, at Belmont and Bernard Avenue. “We are just about part of their campus now,” Mrs. Myint says with a shrug of her shoulders. “They want me to sell my building to them. They have come to me two times now, but I don’t want to sell. I work hard, but not as hard as I used to. Now things are good. When I go home to Thailand and see my friends, I have to call to make appointments; they are very busy in their offices, they are running their companies. They ask me what I do; I say, 'I make egg rolls and chicken on a stick!’ But I have a good life. I love my customers. Love and care, that is what I have for them.”