Southern Ingredients and Global Influences at 21c’s Gray & Dudley

“I ate at my hotel.” 

If you want to disappoint someone, tell them you did that on your last vacation. Whether it’s Bellagio or Budget Inn, eating at the “hotel restaurant” sounds lackluster, even if it’s not — and increasingly, it’s not a lackluster prospect in Nashville. 

There’s Marsh House in The Thompson; Henley in the Kimpton Aertson; the Capitol Grille in the Hermitage Hotel. These are very good, very different restaurants. So when boutique hotel and art museum chain 21c announced that chef Levon Wallace would helm the restaurant at its Nashville outpost, I got excited. Wallace got a lot of acclaim at Proof on Main in Louisville’s 21c, and I loved his food at Cochon Butcher, the closure of which is still deeply embarrassing to our city. (Nashville can keep 45 different Panera Bread locations afloat, but not a single Cochon? For shame!) But even at Cochon Butcher, I wondered how much of the menu was Donald Link-driven and how much was what Wallace would actually cook if he could cook anything he liked. Now I know — Gray & Dudley is the anything.

At least 13 different cuisines appear on Gray & Dudley’s dinner menu alone. I started with lumpia, an Indonesian egg roll with a thin crepe pastry wrapper, which Wallace stuffs with boudin. It’s a brilliant way to add crunch to the soft, rich pork-and-rice mixture, though I’d prefer spicy mustard to sweet pepper jelly for dipping. The Southern smoked catfish dip is creamy and piquant, with zesty celery crackers that are a perfect snack on their own. The dry-aged tartare is unusual: buttery fried peanuts, salty preserved lemon and impeccable steak spiced with berbere, an Ethiopian chili/garlic/ginger mix. I’ve had a lot of good tartares, but memorable ones are few — and this is a memorable one. The fresh shrimp noodles are made with juiced jalapeños and topped with chopped shrimp and garlic-lemon crunch. Think shrimp scampi meets rattlesnake pasta but, you know, classy. The octopus was the only small plate that didn’t work for me. Buried under potatoes, olives and bagna cauda (garlic/anchovy sauce), the meat lost its crunch. If you’re going to do Italian octopus in Nashville, you better be prepared to compete with City House. This version could not. 

Whatever you like, we have a bit of that — the message is clear at Gray & Dudley. The space itself offers something for everyone. The dining room is bright and mirrored, with a hearth that’s used to cook but isn’t made a gimmick of. Its brass-work harkens back to the era when the building was constructed: the year 1900. The bar, on the other hand, is all dark wood, dramatic ceilings and delightfully grotesque art. (I am deeply unqualified to describe Beth Cavener Stichter’s work, but the aesthetic struck me as what it might look like if Tim Burton were to sculpt animal fetuses, and I dug it.) However dark or light your mood, you can sit somewhere in the room that will match. It makes sense. Hospitality is 21c’s business, whether they’re providing room service to a tourist, dinner to locals or drinks to a bro stumbling in from the Hooters across the street. 

All of the aforementioned would likely enjoy the burger: grass-fed beef, American cheese, charred onions, pickles, special sauce. If a Husk burger is Arnold Palmer, the GD Burger is heyday John Daly — a bold, messy, all-American winner. I wish the cheese came melted, but I quit caring about that as soon as I tasted the perfect fries and malt-vinegar mayo. Rich, tangy and full of umami, that mayo could be the new ketchup were we Americans not already double-chin-deep in an obesity epidemic. To wash it down, I tried a fishbowl-sized Party Juice (rosé, vermouth, mint, bubbles). It was too sweet. The Aviation, however, was delicious and distinctive: gin, maraschino, lemon and crème de violette. On paper, I hate half those ingredients, but together they worked. I drank that purple stuff down.

To me, the only misstep was Gray & Dudley’s take on shrimp and grits. I am a peel-and-eat, suck-the-head seafood lover, but shrimp is tricky. Heads and shells impart flavor, and tails work as “handles,” but if I’m using a cloth napkin, I should not also be using my hands to rip heads and shells and tails off shrimp. I had whiskers and legs snapping off, mixing into every bite, so I couldn’t even taste the intriguing fennel/grapefruit sauce. You know those teachers who refuse to grade late papers? That’s me with needlessly shell-on seafood. Food that frustrating doesn’t get a grade. 

The crispy pork shank reeled me back in. The Flinstonian leg rests on a thick bourbon soy sauce you just want to drag roasted things through. The celery root soup with yuzu (Asian citrus) was bold, complex and not wholly reliant on cream, the way a lot of pureed soups are. But the beets were the sleeper hit. 

How well can you do a beet salad? Mind-bendingly well, it turns out. Gray & Dudley salt-roasts them on the hearth until bursting, then dresses them with orange, pistachio and chicory, a woody dandelion also used to make bitter coffee. (New Orleans-style coffee is spiked with chicory.) Without using cheese, the dish hit every note: rich, juicy, earthy, salty, sweet. Wallace doesn’t seem very West Coast to me, despite the fact that he grew up in California, but if his early years out West begat this salad, more Left Coast, please. 

To finish, I enjoyed baked-to-order chocolate chip cookies with sea salt and milk ice cream. It’s the only dessert I had in the past year that’s as nostalgic and satisfying as The Catbird Seat’s deconstructed “Snickers.” If you don’t smash it all together into an ice cream sandwich, you are a monster. 

Variety. There’s plenty at Gray & Dudley, and it makes me wonder: How good can you really be when you have to be good at everything? Wallace isn’t “rustic Italian” or “modern Greek” or something easy to peg. He likes meat, Asian elements and Southern sourcing, but mostly he’s cooking his greatest hits. If I did the same, you’d get dip, gumbo, ceviche, meatballs and a margarita. That obviously wouldn’t work as a menu. Wallace’s does, and that’s a skill in itself. Other local spots including Bastion, The Treehouse and Urban Cowboy Public House reference as many cuisines, but people see them as global, not unfocused. We should see Wallace the same way.

Bring me your best, whatever your best is. It’s what I want to eat, whether or not I’m at a hotel.

Email arts@nashvillescene.com