Otto’s New Menu Is 100 Percent Gluten-Free

Otto’s, the West Nashville restaurant, bar and frequent Best Neighborhood Bar winner, has offered a number of gluten-free dishes over the years. This September, Otto’s unveiled a fully gluten-free menu.

Some staff members and many regular patrons are gluten-intolerant, and Bode Craig, Otto’s general manager, realized it wouldn’t be that hard to go all-in on creating options everyone could eat. A few years ago, he made sure all the spice blends were gluten-free, giving the kitchen more flexibility to accommodate customers. So this year, they stopped serving seitan, opting instead for a marinated tofu made in house. (Seitan is a plant-based meat substitute made with gluten.)

Craig says it’s not hard to do this kind of menu change at scale. “It’s tedious, but not hard. I’ll dedicate four-and-a-half or five hours once or twice a week to prepping everything. We have gluten-free soft-shell tortillas, hard-shell tortillas, and all our spices are gluten-free, so the tofu was icing on the cake.”

While many people think of Otto’s as a bar (see the Scene's Best of Nashville categories), Craig says, “We are a restaurant first, even though, if you walk in, you wouldn’t necessarily know that. We straddle this liminal line of, 'Are we a dive bar or are we kind of like an upscale something?' Our cocktail program is high-end. I take it very seriously, so might as well take our food just as seriously.”

Otto’s has a small menu and limited storage space, so Craig and his team are creative with what they offer. The idea is to keep dishes on the menu for a long time. There are occasional chef’s specials, but the focus is on good tacos and nachos and drinks. Tuesdays offer a two-for-$5 taco special, which in this economy sounds like a typo, but it is not.

Otto’s introduced three new cocktails to the menu as well. Veneer! (with rum, oloroso sherry, lime and grapefruit) is a play on an episode of the TV show Frasier, when the characters invent a drinking game around the show Antiques Roadshow and drink whenever the word “veneer” is uttered. Craig claims he’s not good at naming drinks, so Blonde Spritz #6 (made with an Italian botanical aperitif, Sarti Rosa aperitivo and cava) is the next numerical option in a line of blond spritzes. Midnight Kazoo Festival (made with bourbon and forest herbal liqueur, finished with cinnamon) is what Craig describes as “an Old Fashioned, just beauty and simplicity.”

Otto’s also added a permanent mocktail to the menu. The Wildflower Spritz is an option for the increasing number of folks who are choosing not to drink alcohol. 

The menu changes came from guests, and Craig says Otto’s clientele is more than just customers.

“Everybody is welcome here; it’s a no-judgment zone," says Craig. "That’s how we quickly became everybody’s home away from home. We’ve had many engagements, many engagement photos. We had one wedding. We have just a ridiculous amount of regulars and some that we kind of just call family now. This employee will go to this book club with this customer and that employee will go to this movie with this customer. We just inadvertently started a family.”