Coppa with jam
The bartenders at Nicky’s Coal Fired may be tired of “Second Hand News” blasting as they shake cocktails, but no one else is. Upbeat Fleetwood Mac seems like the right soundtrack for icy, herbaceous Italian drinks. My coupe comes brimming with dry gin, vermouth and strega (a golden botanical liqueur I had to Google), and it’s just stiff enough to soften the edges — something Nicky’s is pretty good at doing already. Plus it’s called the “More Than This,” and I’m a slut for early-’80s soft rock.
The convivial atmosphere at Nicky’s is no accident. When chef Tony Galzin and his wife and partner, Caroline, left Fifty-First Kitchen & Bar last year, they dialed back the formality, naming their new place after the second of Galzin’s three younger brothers. The menu reads upscale, but sitting in the bright industrial space before a 4-ton oven emblazoned “ENRICO” (after Galzin’s great-grandfather), you know comfort food is coming. I’ve lived just off Charlotte for years, itching for a place that’s not too stuffy, where I could get a good drink and a meal that doesn’t come in a basket or on a white tablecloth. It took a while, but I believe we’ve arrived. So let’s talk food.
Nicky’s daily antipasti include house-made charcuterie, cheeses and bites ranging from warm citrusy olives to raw fish (always order the fish). Nothing costs more than $10, and you can kamikaze everything for $65. The can’t-miss is the coppa (think richer, meltier prosciutto), which is made from Wedge Oak Farm’s pork, and the strawberry jam it comes with is a sweet counterpoint for the salty, fatty spread.
The "More Than This" cocktail
For small plates, go veggie. (The lemon-fennel chicken is good, but Adele’s is still better.) The stuffed artichoke is tasty, but that’s largely due to a fancy Italian cheese sauce I wouldn’t hate drowning in. The asparagus and baby potatoes, though, are a slam-dunk. The potatoes are roasted until the insides are tender and the skin is charred. The green garlic-anchovy butter underneath melts into sauce just as it hits your table. The cured egg yolk — something I’d all but written off as a party trick — gives the veggies an addictive Caesar quality.
The secret to the dish above, and to many more at Nicky’s, is Enrico. One side of the oven cooks pizzas in 30 seconds at 900 degrees; the other burns low for vegetables, fish and meat. Galzin chose coal over wood because it cooks more slowly and gives off less smoke, which gives you more temperature and char control. The Galzins fell in love with charcoal cooking at Coalfire, their favorite neighborhood spot in Chicago, and Tony mastered the technique doing pop-ups when they moved to Nashville in 2012. So for Nicky’s, he knew what he wanted: a 10,000-pound Big Green Egg. It would work for both protein and dough — a big deal since he started as a pastry chef — and it would show off “Bert,” a sourdough starter so precious the Galzins moved it to Nashville seatbelted between them in their U-Haul.
And Bert earns his keep. Galzin’s fermented pizza crust is crisp, chewy, tangy and impossibly thin. The pepperoni pizza is perfect: salty meat, acidic sauce, gooey mozzarella, thin red onion. I abhor raw red onions, but the crunch is crucial here. The spicy pie (pea shoots, hot peppers, spicy sausage, fermented chili sauce) sounds like a diabolical Korean combination, but the heat is warm and balanced. The anchovy pie, however, is a bridge too far for me. Fishy and salty are my favorite flavors — I’ve been known to lick a bouillon cube or two — but the anchovies and capers blew out my palate.
When it comes to white pies, let me say this: Without red sauce, pizza is just flatbread. If our president gets to not believe in global warming, I get to not believe in white pizza. That said, Nicky’s white pizzas are good if you like that sort of thing. The potato/pancetta/fava bean pesto pie is herby enough to overcome the heaviness white pies can have. The seasonal mushroom pie is earthy, if not quite the umami bomb I want it to be.
For pasta, the showstopper is the bucatini nero — squid ink pasta, red-wine-braised octopus, spicy tomato sauce and capers. The charred, meaty bites of octopus stand up to the briny red sauce, which begs to have leftover bits of pizza crust dragged through it. The canestri (sunchoke, bacon, spinach, egg) is Nicky’s version of carbonara, and it delivers on grown-up mac-and-cheese flavor. The red wine campanelle (rich pork gravy, tender ruffled pasta) is off the menu for spring, but put it on your fall to-do list — it’s spectacular.
The whole fish is simply that: whatever’s fresh with a zesty caper-fennel relish. We had black bass, and it showed how juicy Enrico can keep seafood. For dessert we tried the affogato — which means “drowned” in Italian — and unfortunately it was just that: The burnt-honey gelato couldn’t stand up to the espresso, though the amaretti cookie was melt-in-your-mouth outstanding. We also tried the strawberry conserva gelato, which was a creamy, jammy delight.
Whatever you order, don’t take it too seriously; this is a place where you can eat poached snails while playing foosball, after all. The Galzins learned a lot from their partnership at Fifty-First (presentation, quality, sourcing), but at Nicky’s they do what they want and love where they’re doing it — smack in the middle of a neighborhood that wasn’t even on their radar when they decided in 2010 that Nashville would be a more hospitable place than Chicago to start a business. They say they’re here for the long haul, and I hope that’s true. More importantly, I believe it is.
Email arts@nashvillescene.com
Enrico, the oven at Nicky's Coal Fired
