Dane Carder
Dane Carder, by his own description, is a “one day at a time” kind of guy. So the fact that his long-dreamt-about business — selling small batches of a family-recipe spaghetti sauce — is launching just when Nashvillians who are stuck cooking at home need it? Well, it’s serendipity, not prescience.
As you order a pint ($11) or a quart ($20) of comfort-food-style frozen Jim’s Spaghetti Sauce to make dinner for your family in week eight of quarantine, know that what you’re serving may be new to the city, but has a multigenerational tradition of serving families behind it.
For years, Dane and his family talked about replicating the spaghetti sauce served at Jim’s Steak and Spaghetti House, the Huntington, W.Va., diner his grandfather opened in 1938. The sauce is a thing of local legend: The restaurant was given a James Beard America’s Classics Award in 2019 and sells 60 to 70 quarts of frozen sauce daily, in addition to kits of spaghetti-to-go and sit-down meals. (The restaurant has been closed due to stay-at-home orders and is looking at a gradual reopening plan, starting with frozen sauce only.)
As popular as the sauce is, it has never been mass-produced or shipped. The only way to get it was to go to Huntington, W.Va. For years, Dane and his three siblings — all Nashville natives — would talk about how “someone should do something about the sauce.” But other than drive to Huntington to dine on it for special occasions, no one did.
Then, last year it was time. An accomplished painter, Dane had tired of the art world and wanted to do something he felt would be of service to his community. He also wanted to give his mom Jimmie Tweel Carder, who at 79 is still running the restaurant, an eventual opportunity to return to Nashville, and he wanted to preserve the legacy of his grandfather and his mother.
So he hit the road, making more than half a dozen trips to Huntington (five hours each way), learning the process that his family has used for more than 75 years. He knew it would be tricky to source the exact same ingredients in Nashville — looking for tomato paste that matches what they use at the restaurant, finding ground beef that is exactly the right consistency. He cooks at East Nashville food-business incubator and commissary kitchen space Citizen Kitchens using the same kind of 40-gallon steam kettle they use up at Jim’s, and in April, he got approval from the USDA inspector to start selling.
“Dane and I have been discussing the production of Jim’s Spaghetti Sauce for over a year, even before our East Nashville kitchen opened,” says Laura Karwisch Wilson, partner and founder of Citizen Kitchens. “The center of every discussion has been how to duplicate the sauce exactly in a different environment than the original. It is to the point that I can’t tell the difference in a blind test.” She notes that changes along the way have included everything from the beef (specifically how to get the fine ground) to tomatoes to cooking and cooling times.
Jimmie describes the sauce as “simplistic.”
“It has no chunks of meat or onions, and people like that,” she says. “It is a nice combination of sweet with a zing to it.” The sauce itself, like her father’s restaurant, has humble beginnings. “It started out as, we would give sauce if someone did us a favor. The way we would say ‘thank you’ is we would give a quart of sauce. And then people would ask for it.”
Other popular items on the restaurant menu include a grilled white-bread cheeseburger that Dane describes as being similar to Rotier’s. But the spaghetti sauce is the draw. With Dane and his three siblings all still in Nashville, he felt that the four of them had large enough circles of friends in town to sell enough sauce to bring Mom home and act on the family dream. The focus now is the original gluten-free, dairy-free beef sauce, and Dane is considering a vegetarian option.
Dane’s older brother Shawn is a trained accountant and a partner with Jimmie and Dane in Jim’s Spaghetti Sauce. Dane’s the creative one, the cook — and the “most sentimental” of the Carder kids, according to Jimmie. But Shawn isn’t immune to the pull of nostalgia.
“Our grandfather is one of the greatest men I have ever met,” says Shawn. “He was genuine, compassionate, hardworking and treated people well.” After college, Shawn considered taking over the restaurant, but his then-girlfriend — now wife, Macie — wasn’t in Huntington. So he came back to Nashville to be with her.
Macie plans to sell the sauce at The Factory at Franklin when retail businesses are back to normal. Other possible retail outlets include The Produce Place and Citizen Market, but for now, it is available by online order for pickup or delivery.
“People are hoarding ground beef right now, and that is what this product is,” Dane says. “It is something that in a pinch can be packed away in the freezer. It feels like a valuable item to have at this time.”
All of the Carders agree on one thing: For your first taste of Jim’s Spaghetti Sauce, eat it as Jim intended — on a non-fancy plate of spaghetti. Even so, Shawn confesses that he recently mixed things up: “It has always been on spaghetti for dinner and then leftover for chili dogs the next day. But I just discovered it as a base sauce on a pizza. It is one of my new favorite things.”
Order Jim’s Spaghetti Sauce online via jimsspaghettisauce.com. Walk-ups may be available at the pickup options, which include Dane’s studio at 438 Houston St., Black Abbey Brewery at 2952 Sidco Drive, and Backyard Outfitters at 4411 Franklin South Court in Franklin. A weekly schedule, which may include additional pop-up locations, is posted each Sunday. Delivery is also available.
