Handvo
Tailor is a sleeper. Chef-owner Vivek Surti’s sleek little dining room in Germantown, serving cuisine that he calls “South Asian American,” has been open for a full year, but it hasn’t gotten the kind of local buzz you might expect for a restaurant of its high caliber.
The national food community, however, has definitely taken notice. Tailor was honored as one of the top 10 new restaurants in America by Bon Appétit magazine in September. Just last month, Thrillist also ranked Tailor highly in its list of best new restaurants in the nation.
Happily, business at Tailor is good — not surprising, since the food is a revelation. Tailor isn’t your typical restaurant, though. It evolved from the supper club pop-ups that Surti ran for several years, and it’s still modeled after a dinner party: The menu is preset, and Surti is the warm, avuncular host of the experience, explaining each dish with an entertaining tale, mostly about his family.
The operating hours at Tailor are more like a regularly scheduled dinner party than the grueling schedule of a high-volume restaurant. Tailor is open Thursday through Sunday only, with two nightly seatings: 6 and 8:30 p.m. Dinner is a convivial experience that lasts about two-and-a-half hours. As at a pop-up, dinner must be prepaid, but it’s well worth the slight hassle of booking and paying for your ticket in advance. (Most of Nashville’s hottest restaurants require reservations these days, so you’d probably have to get on your computer or phone to set up dinner anyway.) And $60, plus tax and tip, doesn’t seem extravagant for a roughly eight-course meal.
Tailor's Kohlrabi, 2020
Tailor’s dining room is off a separate, larger restaurant, Saint Stephen, at Third Avenue North and Monroe Street, though Tailor has its own entrance off Monroe. The decor is partially industrial, with dark walls and exposed ductwork, but a giant crystal chandelier adds sparkle and glamour. (I hear the chandelier is actually a donation from the Surti family household.)
For Vivek Surti, his restaurant is more than a business — it’s a calling, albeit a fun one. He was born in Manchester, Tenn., but his parents are from the state of Gujarat in India. Surti explains that authentic Indian cuisine is found in private homes, not restaurants, and can’t easily be found in the U.S. market. The children of immigrants often don’t realize that they are the ones who must preserve the foodways of their families. “We take for granted that our parents will always be around,” says Surti, “but it’s up to us to carry on the traditions of our families.”
Indian food — which is multifarious, hailing from 29 states and many more cities, villages and family traditions — is one of the world’s great cuisines, but sorely underappreciated. Surti says he sees it as his job to “honor our heritage, where we came from, be a representative of Gujarati food.”
“I realize I grew up with so much great food, made fresh with love and care,” he adds. “This is what Gujarati food is. This is what Indian food is.” Surti wants people to visit Tailor to “come look, learn and appreciate — and understand how important Indian cuisine is to the world.”
It’s an ambitious goal, but Surti’s food does it justice. Because it’s a small restaurant that serves only a few dozen people each night, Surti can go all-in with sourcing his ingredients from small local farms. Those relationships started when he was running his pop-up, VEA Supper Club. He forged close ties with local farmers, in particular Eric Wooldridge of Bells Bend Farms.
Tailor’s menu rotates quarterly, though there may be slight variations based on available ingredients. I was lucky enough to visit twice with my dining companions. Here’s my rundown, which applied to both visits.
The meal began with bafeli singh, kind of a signature dish. It’s boiled peanuts seasoned with a thick red paste of kashmiri chiles and coriander. Surti told us that the dish symbolizes family trips of his childhood. They would load up the minivan and drive all around the American Southeast to visit aunts, and every gas station featured a sign advertising boiled peanuts, the classic Southern snack. Then every other year, the family would visit the other side of the family in India, and would always be greeted by vendors selling … boiled peanuts. It’s like snack-time destiny.
Chicken biryani
Personally, I’ve never been a fan of peanuts in the shell, but I’ve never had them so richly spiced, and it was a charming way to start a meal. On one visit, I sampled the drink pairings — it’s an additional $50 for cocktails and wine chosen by Surti, a former executive at the Nashville Wine Auction, to match each course. The first cocktail was a fruit tea punch — again featuring a dual Indian and Southern reference. Surti explained that “punch” comes from the Hindi word paanch, or five, for the five basic ingredients: water, sugar, lemon, alcohol, and tea or spices. Tailor’s version features bourbon, and the base consists of Nashville-style fruit tea. It perfectly moderated the spicy heat of the peanuts.
The second appetizer was one of my favorites of the meal: handvo. This was a bit of a trickster, looking for all the world like a corn muffin. But it actually consisted of finely ground lentils and rice, with fresh grated zucchini, baked in a muffin tin. Topped with sprigs of cilantro, it was so much more savory than an ordinary corn muffin, though the crisp crust reminded me of the Southern staple.
Next came kohlrabi prepared in a novel way: very thinly sliced and slathered in house-made yogurt and dotted with Meyer lemon chunda, a pickled condiment. While kohlrabi can often be bland, it was the perfect delivery system for the creamy yogurt, with the chunda (bright red from Kashmiri chilis) as the savory counterpoint.
Possibly the most gorgeous dish was the plate of fall squash — butternut and spaghetti squashes in shades of flaming orange, mixed with house-made chile vinegar, peanuts and golden raisins and flavored with aji dulce pepper, and an orange essence made from the entire fruit, with the pith adding just a hint of bitterness on the palate. It was all topped with purple, frilly mustard greens, again contributing a bit of bitter to balance the sweet. Not only was it beautiful and delicious, it made me feel like I was eating every vitamin in the fresh-vegetable pharmacopeia.
Then it was time for proteins. Black grouper was in honor of Surti’s dad — grouper is his favorite fish, in this case line-caught in the Gulf of Mexico. The fresh, flawless fillets floated in a soup called rasam, in this instance featuring a rich tomato base seasoned with limdi, or curry leaf.
Next in the lineup was chicken from Wedge Oak Farm in Lebanon, Tenn., served two ways. The breast was roasted and spiked with cumin, coriander, fennel, fresh ginger and most importantly, fenugreek leaves grown locally, which added a delightful nutty, sweet, herbaceous flavor. (This is another botanical believed to have health benefits as an anti-inflammatory.) On the side were greens like bok choy and on one of the nights, fresh spinach.
The chicken thighs, meanwhile, were served braised in a bowl of chicken biryani, a highly aromatic dish, with the chunks of chicken nestled atop basmati rice. We were encouraged to mix up all the ingredients in the bowl, which also included pistachios and browned onions, plus a hit of flavor boost from rose and saffron. Surti told us biryani is considered a dish for celebratory events, and before tucking in, the whole dining room joined in toasting the occasion.
The meal finished with a special version of apple pie served in a bowl, followed by mugaj, a little sliced sweet made with chickpea flour, ghee (clarified butter) and cardamom. It reminded me a bit of halvah.
One note about the menu: Surti says he wants to be a restaurant of “yes,” not “no,” so he’s happy to accommodate vegetarians and vegans and people with other special diets. Just let the restaurant know when booking.
For me, each night at Tailor represented a hugely satisfying and mind-expanding meal, and I hope to go back soon and to keep returning for each new quarterly menu.
This week, however, will be a little different. To mark Tailor’s first year in business, Surti will be serving a special menu Dec. 5-8, with a single seating at 7 p.m. He plans to offer around 12 courses for $120, constituting a sort of “best of” lineup drawn from the entire first year. It sounds like an occasion well worth toasting, with the avid hope of many more years to come.
