Beet Salad
The one thing you can't do when you walk into Pinewood Social is think about it.
Don't think about the absurdity of smashing a restaurant, cyber cafe, bar, karaoke room and bowling alley into a single place. Don't think about the uniform turquoise shoelaces for the servers. Don't look outside and think about the pool and bocce courts they're adding below high-tension power lines with a scenic view of a scrapyard just across the river.
Just don't.
Because the more you think about it, Pinewood Social seems utterly and completely ridiculous: a kind of artisanal Dave and Buster's for the "in crowd"; a rustic Chuck E. Cheese fever dream for foodie hipsters who prefer sweetbreads and oysters to fried cheese and nachos when they lace up their bowling shoes.
But taken in pieces, Pinewood Social is outstanding and sometimes brilliant in its execution, and chef Josh Habiger's take on comfort food is deeply satisfying.
On its face, the decision for Habiger to leave the seemingly endless creative freedom at The Catbird Seat for the fried cheese curds and grilled pork chops of an Americana menu appears odd. The challenge here is one of scale, and it is enormous.
Pinewood Social has 19 different services a week off of four menus, opening at 7 a.m. on weekdays and 9 a.m. on weekends, and closing at 1 a.m. daily. To be sure, there are common pieces across the meals — the beef tongue Reuben, sliced almost paper thin, has incarnations at all times of the day, as does the grilled pork belly and the pot roast, which showed up in a wickedly good breakfast hash — but that shouldn't diminish the accomplishment. The task is more akin to the sprawl of a hotel operation than a fine dining establishment — it even feels like you're checking in for the night upon arrival, with a team of well-appointed Pinewood Socialites behind a long desk ready to meet your needs.
But this isn't hotel food at all. From the chicken and biscuits in gravy at breakfast to the turkey sandwich with cranberry and charred onions at lunch to the melt-in-your-mouth pot roast at dinner, Pinewood Social displays a substantial amount of finesse for what is seemingly "simple" food.
The pot roast ($18) in particular — a bit deconstructed without being pretentious — dazzles.
Yes, there are carrots and parsnips and a little bit of gravy, but unless your mom used an immersion circulator instead of an oven, it was never this tender. There's something just glorious about beef so soft that your knife is never needed.
In fact, across the dinner menu are delicious items that have appeared in homes for a hundred years. There's a grilled bone-in pork chop ($18) with glazed cabbage, spaetzle and apples. Fried chicken ($13) comes as a generous half-chicken, crispy on the outside and tender within. The smoked trout casserole ($17) with noodles and crushed potato chips is the kind of dish Betty Crocker dreams about (if indeed fictitious brand names do dream).
Does that sound boring? Is it not what you were expecting from one of the most anticipated restaurants of the year? It's a fascinating tightrope for Habiger and crew to walk. There's a reason these flavor combinations have held up over a century or more, but if you're just a slave to the original preparation in a restaurant — like some sort of retro food fantasy or hipster diner — the dishes become stilted. Push a classic beyond recognition, though, and you've just created Catbird Seat Two, with 10 times the diners and a hundred times the space (and something utterly unwieldy). The reason Pinewood Social's food works is because it occupies that space in between, where familiar flavors are elevated by impressive technique.
The egg salad sandwich ($10) is a nearly perfect example of that on the lunch menu. Egg salad? Yup. Egg salad.
For all of the bad versions I have tried over the years — awash in onion powder or drowning in mayonnaise — this one was redemption, with the clean taste of finely chopped boiled egg on whole-grain bread and just a bit of seasoning. This egg salad was a clear middle finger to every prepackaged horror show I've ever tried. I'd order it again and again.
There's not a lot of sex appeal on the lunch menu, but it doesn't matter, because the execution is so good. The cheeseburger ($13) and the aforementioned turkey with cranberry and charred onions ($12) are credits to their species, enhanced by good bread. The lobster roll — done properly on a split-top bun — was good, if a little steep at $17.
The salads are a well-considered alternative for either lunch or dinner. The standard romaine lettuce was replaced by kale on the Caesar ($7, or $12 with chicken), but never missed. (Is it on the menu so that someone in the kitchen can yell "KALE CAESAR!"? Just me? Let's move on.) The marinated beets ($9) are both beautiful and sublime, while the pork belly on frisée with poached egg ($12) seems like a way to do ham and eggs and call it a salad. For the record, I am 100 percent in favor of this, especially since it means I get an egg yolk salad dressing.
After skipping it a few different times, I finally had the beef tongue Reuben for breakfast, this time as a Benedict ($13). If you haven't tried tongue, this should be your introduction (and if you think you don't like tongue, give this a whirl). It's shaved thin, so you get that great corned beef flavor but without any textural issues. The lunch version trades the eggs for swiss cheese, but frankly, I'd rather have the eggs, soft and runny and mixed in with very subtle sauerkraut and an interesting Thousand Island hollandaise.
There's also a greek-yogurt-based granola ($8), buckwheat pancakes ($9), a variety of very fine omelets (goat cheese, bacon and avocado, smoked trout) and a hash made with that fall-apart pot roast on the breakfast menu, but the thing I will go back for again was the chicken and biscuits ($9). It's the best bargain on the menu, with two pieces of fried chicken inside golden biscuits, covered in sawmill gravy.
The question remains, though ... how exactly does one "do" Pinewood Social? Walking into that massive hall — 13,000 square feet divided between a main room and a bowling alley, it takes up an entire Trolley Barn — it's a bit overwhelming. Mainly, I gawked at the modern-but-not-too-modern lighting and how it played off of the interior brick walls, half whitewashed and half exposed. Think of it as the most comfortable high-tech office you would ever eat, bowl or sing in.
A friend described Pinewood to me as "a bar with upscale food." I think it's more than that, but when you first enter the room, the massive bar dominates the space and gives order to everything. On a weekend night, jammed with people, the restaurant revolves around it.
On the menu, cocktails are given the same thought and consideration as the food, with stellar riffs on old classics like a Pimm's Cup and Sazerac. (It's not surprising that the people responsible for Patterson House know their way around a mixed drink). Pair one of those concoctions with something from the starters menu — we were big fans of the delicately fried broccoli ($6) and the appropriately named "Things on Toast" ($12 for six, including tartare and an insanely good white beans and parsley) — and you could easily while away an entire evening just at the bar.
Given the time — and not a small amount of money — you could even spend a full day in the place. Arrive for breakfast, retire to the cyber cafe to work (all the while drinking coffee from Crema, which has its own coffee bar just inside the front door), bowl a few frames in the afternoon (at $40/hour, prorated; not a cheap pastime but certainly a fun one), meet friends for drinks at the bar followed by dinner and a little late karaoke. I'm certain that Benjamin and Max Goldberg, the restaurateurs behind Pinewood, Catbird, Patterson House and more, would love for you to do just that.
In the summer, there are plans for a pool and bocce courts with cabanas and an Airstream pool bar. This is where they lose me just a little, because while I don't have anything against any of those activities, I'm having a hard time envisioning how it all works together.
Does fried chicken go well with bowling? Does mushroom pot pie work for karaoke? I don't know and it makes my head hurt. That's why you can't think about it.
I gave up trying to figure it out and just leaned into it. As long as the food and drinks are this good, you can outfit everyone in laser tag vests or give them paintball guns for all I care. I just want some more pot roast.
Email arts@nashvillescene.com.
