Date Night: Pont Neuf, Hattori Nori and Harding House Brewery

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.”

Don’t let the following sentence turn you off: After seven years in its current incarnation, L&L Market on Charlotte Avenue is still figuring itself out. It’s not a food hall, but there are restaurants and bars. It’s not a mall, but there are shops. It’s not a workout facility, but there are places to exercise. It’s not a co-working space, but it has one — plus a coffee shop and plenty of tables for your laptop and latte. 

Built in 1929, when the electric streetcar line on Charlotte started losing customers to those newfangled automobiles, the building originally housed the Se-Ling Hosiery Mill, then two different factories. Years later, it was L&L Restaurant Equipment, where you could buy everything from dining chairs to your very own Chinese buffet. 

Whatever L&L Market was, is or isn’t, the vibe sometimes feels off at night because all the shops and some of the eateries are closed. That’s unfortunate and possibly unavoidable. But I’ve been quietly rooting for this beautiful old brick building to find its footing for years, and now — thanks to a couple new tenants — a diverse, super-local Date Night (with free and plentiful parking!) finally feels worth a rec.

Stop 1: Pont Neuf

If you could ask questions to anyone, living or dead, who would it be and why?

This was the first question I pulled out of Tell Me More, a tabletop get-to-know-you game at Pont Neuf, the Parisian-inspired wine bar in L&L. My husband Dom, who was focused on the crossword-solitaire game Q-Less (which was invented by a Nashvillian), told me he’d like to chat up his maternal grandfather, John Colombrito, who died when Dom was a kid. Then he asked me what life situation has contributed to my strength or resilience, and I tried very hard not to cry in public. And for an hour or so on a recent Saturday night, we sat across from each other at a communal table, trading questions and creating crosswords while drinking wine, dipping sourdough bread in olive oil and snacking on a $5 bowl of mixed candy. 

(Why aren’t more restaurants and bars offering me bowls of candy? It’s so freaking cute.)

It’s no surprise that the owners of Pont Neuf — who also have Amelia’s Flower Shop down the hall — wanted the southwest corner of L&L. The combination of high ceilings, exposed brick and natural light through almost floor-to-ceiling industrial steel-frame windows makes it a stunning place to have a drink as the sun sets. It threads the needle between comfy and chic with draped mauve, burgundy and gray material along one wall, bud vases and tea lights on tables and a tiny flower truck in the corner with buckets for flowers all around. It’s a feminine space, but not so much that customers of a less-feminine variety would feel out of place having a lager or picking a glass of wine. Wines are listed with relatable descriptions, like the “gluggable” Field Recordings Pizza Nights California red or the “you’re a better person after you drink” Borgo Paglianetto Terravignata. 

Stop 2: Hattori Nori

What embarrasses you? 

In an effort to keep connecting, I looked up a long list of interesting questions a married couple could ask each other. This is how I learned that Dom is embarrassed when I don’t eat my hand roll fast enough at Hattori Nori, the hand roll bar that opened in July in what was formerly Culture + Co. (the conveyor belt cheese spot). 

To be fair, our server did mention that hand rolls are made to order and should be eaten as soon as the chef places them on the paper mat in front of you. This is likely because the nori, or seaweed wrap, absorbs moisture from the fish and rice inside and gets rubbery quickly, making it hard to bite through. This is exactly why I’ve stuck to cut sushi rolls in the past, and exactly why Hattori Nori is such a cool experience for all of us hand roll virgins. Though I took a few seconds to look at (and take a terrible picture of) my spicy tuna hand roll with chili garlic crunch and chives, I had no problem biting right through it or the salmon, yellowtail, scallop, snow crab and toro hand rolls that followed — all part of the $42 Kimono set. When I think of what a sushi roll costs these days, it strikes me as a bargain. 

Each hand roll is about three bites long. At first I worried that I wouldn’t feel full, but the way the meal is paced helps. Whether you order two hand rolls or a set, and whether you’re dining solo or there with a group, every hand roll is made to order. I got a hand roll, then Dom got one, then I’d get my next one a few minutes later, and so on. Everything comes with ginger and a whisper of wasabi, plus soy sauce. As we ate and talked, the lights went out in Kardes Turkish Grill & Bar behind us, women in ball gowns and tiaras left their event space and walked the hallway, and I pretended not to stare. 

Stop 3: Harding House Brewing

What season of our marriage do you think shaped us the most? 

Dom didn’t hesitate: moving to New York, back when we were first married. Leaving our Nashville hometown and living over a bagel shop. Everything, including rolling our dirty laundry down the street in a cart, was new and exciting. 

At the time, there were very few new experiences to have in Nashville, which was part of the reason we left. Now something as simple as walking through a door in this town can open up a new world. That’s what happened the first time we explored the brand-new home of Harding House Brewing. I knew the door to the left of the brewery entrance led to an L&L patio — I didn’t know it led to a vast, two-tier patio at the base of a 70-foot smokestack that previously connected to the coal-burning furnace in the original hosiery mill. So we sat among the string lights with our questions and two pints of Harding House’s Church Parking Lot lager (God, I love that name), trying to learn something new despite our history.