Date Night is a two-part 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.”
On one of the many nights recently when strong winds huffed and puffed and tried to blow the house down, my husband Dom and I shared a tasty plate of poutine made by Southern Grist’s new in-house food concept, L by Lauter, in the Nations.
What we really wanted to do was hit the couch with a pizza and a blanket, spend too long deciding on a movie just to fall asleep halfway through. But our child was at a slumber party so we forced ourselves to leave the house. Just as trivia night was getting started, we left for Redheaded Stranger. But when Ellington Parkway dumped us off at Dickerson Pike, all the streets were dark. The East Nashville taco joint and everything around it had lost power. So we took it over to Chopper at Gallatin and Stratton to try Maiz de la Vida, the acclaimed Mexican food truck stationed out front — but it was a 45-minute wait for a table at Chopper, then another 45-minute wait for food.
We decided to punt. I’d heard good things about the recently opened Noko, so we headed down Eastland to Porter. The hostess at Noko said we were welcome to stalk people for their seats at the bar, but there was very little chance she could find us a table before they closed. She was genuine about it, which is hard to pull off when you tell 25 people in a row the same thing, so I couldn’t even summon the energy to be pouty. We settled for a big salad at Greko on Main Street, went home and slept while our trash cans tumbled around outside in the wind.
Of all the restaurants in our progressive non-dinner around East Nashville, I was most curious to return to Noko, which bills itself as “Asian-inspired and wood-fired” but also has a prosciutto grilled cheese, burrata over focaccia, a Caesar salad and fries on the menu. Is that odd or awesome?
It’s both. More on that in a sec.
A few Tuesdays later, I pulled up Noko’s online reservations for Friday night: OpenTable offered me their first available table three weeks later. When I called to ask about walk-ins, the founder, Jon Murray, said he could seat us right at 5 p.m. There was no awkward “early bird special” feel when we arrived at 4:59 p.m. We weren’t even the first, second or seventh people at a table. The wood-fired oven had already filled the smallish space with gentle notes of smoke, and the sound system was pumping out “Welcome to the Jungle” to “I Wanna Sex You Up.”
I was fascinated by the guy behind us in his Jeffrey Dahmer glasses; the parents and adult son next to us on their phones and the young woman on a date wearing a blazer with gold sequins up and down the lapels like she’d just left an audition for A Chorus Line. Who are these people and why are they eating so early? I guess the cool kids eat when they can get a reservation, just like the rest of us.
The bar was a little underwater to start, and our tuna crispy rice arrived well in advance of my ube colada. Ube is a purple yam with a subtle taste and rich color showcased perfectly in a pineapple-shaped glass.
If I were the kind of girl who enjoyed drinking games — which I am not — I could’ve made one out of the number of tuna crispy rice orders that came consistently out of the kitchen. Noko’s version of this ubiquitous appetizer has slices of serrano on top of each piece that give it a really nice, noticeable heat, but I wish they didn’t take such a heavy hand with the sweet soy sauce drizzle on top. The over-sauce-ification of sushi in this town makes me sad.
I asked our server, Kylie, to recommend one sleeper hit on the menu — something most people don’t order but should. She gushed about the Caesar, and I thought, Damn it, now I have to order a Caesar salad in an Asian restaurant.
But besides the crab fried rice, which made me forego chopsticks for a fork so I could get as much of it in my mouth as possible, Noko’s Caesar blew my mind. Instead of gloppy, mayo-like dressing, their version incorporates kimchi. Instead of oversized, overbaked croutons, they use a light dusting of panko. When I return, I will order the Caesar again, and this time I will not share. I will, however, share everything else, because that’s the best way to work a night at Noko. Instead of appetizers and entrées, their menu is broken up by flavor profile: fresh and bright; rich and savory; wood-fired; and smoked. Within those, 80 percent of the menu has a fire element.
Bring friends and choose a few dishes from each category to pass around. In that context, dishes like the burrata and fries, which have Asian-ish elements, make more sense. Also, almost everything is super rich and not really meant to be a meal. You want the Gifford’s bacon, with its spicy ssamjang for dipping. And you want beef burnt ends wrapped in beautiful Bibb lettuce. But if you have too much of either, you might feel, to quote Dom, a little “overly fatty-meated.”
Everyone’s excited about Noko, which opened in early March in what was previously Pomodoro East. This includes the cashier at Dirty Livin’, the gift shop a few doors down, who was beside herself that we hadn’t tried the District Sando, a prosciutto-and-white-cheddar grilled cheese with truffle aioli.
“Y’all,” she said, in the way Southerners do when they mean to bold-face, underline and cover what comes next in verbal yellow highlighter. “Y’all, it’s so fucking good.”
Rice Vice
We left Noko, drove a few blocks west, parked on Chapel Avenue and walked the quiet sidewalks, stopping at the corner of North 16th Street and Sharpe to look at the first house I bought, and where we spent the first year of our marriage. We do this every blue moon: stand in the street and make judgments about the current owner’s choice of paint colors and landscaping, then beat ourselves up for selling the house long before sleepy little East Nashville blew up.
An eight-minute drive later, we walked into Rice Vice, the world’s best-named sake bar. It’s a sliver of a space covered floor to ceiling, and I mean that literally, in various forms of light-colored wood. Nas on the record player. My Neighbor Totoro on the TV. Charmingly goofy thrift-shop art on the walls.
Rice Vice
Don’t like sake? Me either. I’ve tried, I really have, but I just don’t. And still I felt fully welcome to sit on my little cushion (because plywood benches aren’t super comfortable) and pet Moo — the long-haired dachshund at the next table — take a few obligatory sips of my drink and hang out. If we hadn’t just eaten a questionable amount of food at Noko I would’ve had some Instant Ramen, pizza bagels or a rice bowl from the Two Ten Jack pop-up just inside the front door.
If you do like sake, Rice Vice offers six sakes they make in house under the Proper Sake Co. label and six Japanese imports, plus two highball options — one with sake and one without — and a lager named Koji Gold.
There’s something very sweet and disarming about Rice Vice. It’s the only sake brewery in Nashville, and an award-winning one at that, but it oozes humility, not hype. It’s exactly the kind of spot you might stumble into while walking through a Los Angeles or Brooklyn neighborhood and 100 percent not where you’d expect to spend a lovely evening between warehouses and machinery shops off East Trinity Lane.
That’s the beauty of East Nashville: You never know where the wind will blow you.
