Date Night is a multipart road map for everyone who wants a nice evening out, but has no time to plan it. It’s for people who want to do more than just go to one restaurant and call it a night. It’s for overwhelmed parents who don’t get out often; for friends who visit the same three restaurants because they’re too afraid to try someplace new; and for busy folks who keep forgetting all the places they’ve driven past, heard about, seen on social and said, “Let’s remember that place next time we go out.”
When my family moved from Pittsburgh to Franklin in the late ’70s, my grandparents wondered aloud if we’d have running water. All they knew of the South was the TV series Hee Haw, in which actors in overalls told jokes in a cornfield and used empty moonshine jugs as musical instruments.
When Grandma and Pap Pap Antrilli visited, the vast green spaces around town unnerved them thanks to a lifetime of city living. But they braved the wild to walk Music Row and have lunch in Franklin, where my mother took her mother to Miss Daisy’s Tearoom in a nook of shops called Carter’s Court.
Miss Daisy, who died at 80 in 2025, was known for her hot baked chicken salad (topped with potato chips) and the idea that every customer would leave as her friend. My Grandma — a full-blooded Italian who had never been outside of southwestern Pennsylvania or had a glass of tea punch in her life — took this literally. As the family story goes, Grandma met Miss Daisy on one visit, then returned years later, beckoning her from across the room, “Miss Daisy, it’s me! Julie Antrilli from McKeesport!”
In the same vein, this Double Sean Brock Date Night — a fun concept for which I cannot take credit (thanks to my friend Cara) — isn’t built on the idea that Chef Brock is on site, or even all that connected to the restaurants he started anymore. In this stage of his career, Brock creates restaurants, we flock to them, and he moves on to the next restaurant to which we’ll flock. Unlike Grandma Julie, I don’t need him to remember me from his James Beard practice dinner at the Hermitage Hotel’s Capitol Grille in 2005. Or the vegetable plates I loved at Husk. If I did, I would’ve mentioned it one of the many times I’ve seen him at the White Bridge Road Trader Joe’s, where he’s just another guy with a red basket, gathering the makings of a meal.
Upstairs at Audrey
Stop 1: Upstairs at Audrey
When I first visited Audrey a couple years ago — trusting Brock and his team with a one-night-only dinner with well-traveled friends from California — I blew right past the foyer. This time I noticed the hanging quilt and dried bunches of lavender, plus the soundtrack of chirping crickets — all meant to set the tone for a modern Appalachian experience based on the style of cooking he learned from his grandmother.
My Grandma — and Brock’s — would likely balk at $19 for strawberry pretzel salad, even if it was the most genius version ever made. But that’s what fine dining costs in our country these days, with all the rising costs of running a restaurant baked in. It’s also what makes Upstairs at Audrey, a 30-seat bar that shares the top floor of the building with the currently defunct June and a research and development lab, refreshing in more ways than one.
One flight up, surrounded by art, plants and dried flowers hanging from the lights, everything (except the $15 burger) is $5. My husband Dom and I paid $30 plus tip — the price of two cocktails in most Nashville bars — for a bourbon drink with mint and lime; a super-cold green chile tiny tini in a small glass bowl; a plate of perfectly salted tallow fries with ketchup; three meat-and-cheese-filled hushpuppies with comeback sauce; a silver ramekin of room-temp pimento cheese plus flatbread crackers; and four pickled egg halves, which we dipped in Audrey’s creamy hot sauce that should be bottled and available for sale.
How wonderfully rare to not overpay for well-made, well-executed food. It wasn’t enough for dinner, nor was it supposed to be — but it was just enough to sustain us through Stop 2.
Stop 2: Grimey’s and Anaconda Vintage
The nine-minute drive from Stop 1 to Stop 3 includes the stretch of East Trinity Lane home to Grimey’s New & Preloved Music. Brock has no stake in one of Nashville’s most beloved record shops, but he’s incorporated vinyl into many of his concepts, most notably the 5,000-album library at the defunct Bar Continental at Grand Hyatt Nashville and a hi-fi lounge at his L.A. spot, Darling.
Grimey’s, which moved from its Eighth Avenue South location in 2018, feels like walking into a church of vinyl for good reason. Formerly the Point of Mercy Church, it’s 4,000 square feet of new and used records, CDs and books with a stage for live shows in the sanctuary, plus all the extras you want in a record store — T-shirts, postcards, magazines and free posters.
I love a good record shop or bookstore in the middle of my Date Night, because Dom and I get to uncouple for a while and explore on our own. He can debate whether he needs Oasis’ (What’s the Story) Morning Glory? on vinyl while I stare at a Joan Osborne album cover, trying unsuccessfully to remember what her popular song was in the ’90s. Then we reunite by a basket of cassettes, where Dom opens Guns N’ Roses’ Lies to show me the naked people on the liner notes.
We did the same thing at Anaconda Vintage, which sits directly behind Grimey’s, past the wall of album cover murals. Dom asked if I needed an Ice Cube “Today Was a Good Day” T-shirt. I shook my head no when he pulled out a men’s tank top with the bars of Key West drawn on the back. We tried on sunglasses that covered our whole faces. He said mine weren’t even touching the bridge of my nose but were being held up by my cheeks, which is such a Dom thing to notice.
Caesar salad, spicy marinara pizza and mushroom pizza at Sho Pizza Bar
Stop 3: Sho Pizza Bar
If I had to bet on which of Brock’s current Nashville concepts will hang around the longest, I’d put my money where my mouth is, was and will be again in the near future — Sho Pizza Bar in Riverside Village. I say this not only because it’s difficult to get a reservation between 5 and 7:30 p.m. any day of the week, even weeks in advance, but also because, top to bottom, it just feels right.
Even if you don’t understand what Tokyo-inspired, neo-Neopolitan pizza is — or care that the dough is fermented for three days, or want to bog down your brain with the origin story of the name (short for the Japanese shokunin, meaning “master of your craft”) — Sho is a solid, slightly elevated neighborhood pizza joint where anyone could feel comfortable having a solo Italian sausage pizza with Taleggio cream at the pizza bar on a Tuesday, or sharing bruschetta, olives and slices of a bianca, salumi and mushroom with a group on Saturday night. Sho pizzas are served whole, so you’ll cut those slices yourself with scissors from a utensil crock on the table, which isn’t as messy as it sounds.
The Japanese influence is subtle: katsuobushi (thin slices of dried, fermented and smoked skipjack tuna) in the Caesar; a raw bluefin tuna appetizer over puffed rice served with purple-tipped gem lettuces for wrapping; a few sakes on the wine list, including from Nashville’s own Proper Sake; and the unconventional addition of yuzu to an Arnold Palmer.
It’s hard to imagine Brock ever feeling like he’s mastered his craft. This is a good thing. I don’t want to see him stretching dough at Sho; I want him out in the world, tinkering and tweaking, dreaming about what to feed us next.
