Several meat-and-threes have taken up shop at 1200 Buchanan St. in North Nashville over the years — Wade’s Chat & Chew Diner, Mai-Bees Southern Cuisine, Chief’s Family Diner. While those businesses are long gone, locals still walk through the building’s doors every so often, looking for a lunch of crispy fried chicken, macaroni-and-cheese and turnip greens.
“We have people who blindly walk in here [and ask], ‘Is the chicken white meat or dark meat?’ ” says Tiffany Hancock, co-owner of 1200 Buchanan’s current tenant, The Southern V. She laughs. “We’re like, ‘Neither one. Neither one, sir.’ ”
Everything at The Southern V is vegan. Their Fried Chick’n and Nashville Hot Chick’n are house-made with seitan, and their “tuna” melt actually consists of chickpeas. The secret to their barbecue sliders? Shredded jackfruit. But some folks — folks who for decades have been eating similar dishes made with actual pork, beef and chicken — still don’t pick up on all the clues when searching the menu for their favorites.
Chick’n and Waffle
“We have all these little labels, especially when you’re checking out — ‘Everything is vegan,’ ” Tiffany says with a laugh. “They still order, and there’s some people who don’t even know the difference! It’s very funny. And sometimes people do get angry. Like, did you see the way we spelled ‘chick’n’?”
Southern comfort food is a polarizing, powerful thing — it’s what people turn to when they want something familiar, something that recalls an especially warm memory or reminds them of home. And The Southern V’s owners — Tiffany and her husband Clifton, a Nashville native — know that to keep customers happy and coming back, they need to meet those expectations. Their first trick: Make the vegan version look as good as the original.
“If it’s visually all that you expect it to be if it’s not vegan, and I just put a little vegan sticker on it, I feel like you’re not gonna question it,” says Tiffany. “You’re at least gonna try it.”
“We understand that at the end of the day, as humans, we’re really simple at the core,” adds Clifton. “We enjoy the simple things. That was one thing [Tiffany] always wanted to keep pushing. Let’s not be flamboyant, let’s not be out-there — just simple. Give them macaroni, give them baked beans, give them fried chicken. For non-vegans, let’s win them over with the aesthetics. For vegans, let’s win them over with the nostalgia.”
Which brings us to their second trick: Make it taste as good as the original.
The Hancocks weren’t always vegans — they first gave veganism a try when one of their daughters was struggling with food allergies. And like so many people who make that switch, they still had their weaknesses — Clifton especially missed queso and frozen yogurt, he says. As Tiffany started to cook vegan dishes at home, the most important thing was that it reminded them of the food they enjoyed in the past. Hot-chicken purists will be happy to hear that The Southern V’s birdless version of Nashville’s most famous food export is inspired by a very familiar source.
“We grew up on Prince’s,” says Clifton. “For us, hot chicken was Prince’s. I introduced her to Prince’s when we were dating. When she tried it that first time, she was hooked — she was trying to go like every other day.”
“I have a taste-bud system that memorized exactly how it used to taste,” says Tiffany. “I remember exactly the flavor it gave me. I would just play around and create that flavor until I was like, ‘OK, this mimics that.’ ”
“So thank you, Prince’s!” adds Clifton with a laugh.
While The Southern V’s vegan hot chicken is too spicy for me (a wimp), the original fried chicken is everything I’ve been wanting for years. Fried chicken is the one thing I haven’t been able to replicate since becoming a vegetarian decades ago. And as a former Germantown resident who used to have to walk through Monell’s fried-chicken scent cloud on a daily basis, I find it to be the one food that has haunted me, made me question my meat-free choices.
My first bite of the Chick’n and Waffle — the moment I experienced that long-lost light and peppery crunch — left me absolutely giddy. The breading is thick and flavorful — deep-brown peaks and jagged ridges that you can break off and pop in your mouth. And the seitan inside has a hearty bite to it, but isn’t too chewy or spongy. It absorbs the flavors, not the oil it’s fried in, so you aren’t left feeling like a greasy mess at the end of your meal.
The jackfruit is also wonderful. Jackfruit, a member of the fig and breadfruit family, has long been used as a meat alternative — it shreds up just like pulled pork — but only in recent years has it started to make its way into Nashville’s dining scene. Maneet Chauhan’s latest eatery, Chaatable, offers it as a protein option in its biryani, and the Southern V prepares it like traditional Tennessee barbecue. The stringy fruit is smoked and covered in a tangy tomato-based sauce, piled onto either slider buns or nachos. The sliders, made with baked-in-house buns, come stacked with a generous mound of creamy coleslaw, while the nachos are topped with back beans, nacho “cheeze,” tomato, onion and dairy-free sour cream.
As far as the sides go, The Southern V does those right, too — the macaroni-and-cheese is rich and creamy, just as rib-sticking as any butter-and-milk version, and baked beans, sweet with brown sugar, have a deep, smoky flavor that will leave meat-eaters hunting for that hunk of white pork fat that’s usually bobbing around.
Though their menu is deeply rooted in comfort-food tradition, the Hancocks say they have a few surprises, too. “There are a couple things we have in the stash that we’re not gonna bring out yet,” says Clifton, grinning.
And the couple isn’t afraid to step away from familiarity to experiment every so often, either — in January they celebrated Martin Luther King Jr. with the Luther Burger, a veggie burger patty on a homemade doughnut with vegan cheddar, tomato and vegan bacon.
“For me, when it comes down to it, simple is best,” says Tiffany. “I can get extravagant. But still, at the end of the day, simple is where it’s at.”
