B.B. King's Blues Club & Restaurant
152 Second Ave. N.
256-2727
B.B.King's credentials as a musician and cultural icon are impeccable. The blues singer and guitarist is a member of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, a Kennedy Center honoree and winner of the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award. He has performed all over the world and sold millions of records.
But until recently, the magic that the King of the Blues cooks up with his guitar Lucille did not extend to the kitchen of his Nashville nightclub, located in a historic building on Second Avenue North. One of three outposts nationwide, it's a fine blues club. The shotgun room is brick-walled and wooden-floored, and its long bar and wooden tables are filled with an impressive diversity of races and ages.
When the club opened two years ago, its menu could have been culled from the Fern Bar Hall of Shame: chicken tenders, a sausage-and-cheese plate, wings, Caesar salad, burgers, grilled salmon, New York strip steak, fried catfish, fried shrimp. Some of the descriptions—"limited portion of veggies," "hand-breaded-style chicken," "whole kernel corn," "cornmeal-dusted bun"—were curious, but not in a fashion that compelled me to pay a visit. About a year later, I got word of a new "and improved" menu. That news, along with the memory of a great night at the flagship B.B. King's Club in Memphis, sent me and a lively party of eight to check it out this winter.
As it turned out, we did have a great night, drinking and dancing till the wee hours of the morning—but it was in spite of the food, which proved nearly inedible. The menu had not changed so much as doubled in size; the beneficiaries of that expansion were not diners, but the frozen and prepared food purveyors supplying the restaurant. B.B.'s "favorites" were marked with a guitar, but after sampling the horrendous fried chicken livers, gummy gumbo, rubbery fried bologna sandwich, tasteless pulled pork sandwich and greasy South of the Border salad, I couldn't help but wonder whether he had ever been forced to eat in his own restaurant.
Thankfully, Brent Howard, who established his front-of-the-house creds during a long stint at Saffire, also sampled the fare while he was being courted for his current position as GM of B.B. King's. He immediately made a 911 call to his old pal Scott Alderson, a culinary hall-of-famer who made his name at 6° and Saffire, and persuaded him to take a crack at the menu.
With full confidence in both Howard and Alderson, I persuaded my original party to come with me and give B.B.'s another shot. What we discovered this visit was a total menu overhaul, and the result is something that will spark some déjà vû in those familiar with Alderson's food.
Among the Alderson signatures are the New South Caesar Salad, P&E shrimp cocktail, gumbo ya ya, a slightly modified version of his ribbon salad (now called Georgia Wedge), fish and grits, chicken-fried chicken and the addictive Sonoma white cheddar cheese-and-mac. These are fleshed out with a repertoire of simple but flavor-intense regional classics that follow the gritty, soulful route of the blues through the South: Bayou crab cakes fat with crab, shrimp and crawfish; baked-on-the-half-shell oysters with bubbly-hot corn sausage, smoked bacon and Romano cheese topping; jaw-stretching po'boy sandwiches dressed with Cajun rémoulade sauce; meaty dry-rubbed smoked ribs; crispy golden-fried Tennessee catfish; tender Cajun grilled steak. Alderson did a makeover on B.B.'s fried pickle chips, turning them into dilled cukes with pickled snap beans, red onion and mushrooms served with horseradish cream. A raw bar in the back of the room serves oysters on the half-shell; chilled blue-crab claw tossed in lime juice, cilantro and olive oil; and crawfish boil (during season, now ended).
Alderson is currently masterminding the Moroccan-inspired cuisine of the brand-new Layl'a Rul, but before he departed B.B. King's, he and Howard installed chef Seth Krasnove—formerly a member of the TomKats team—to keep the groove going in the kitchen, which Krasnove has done in stellar form. With him in the back of the house, and Howard expertly directing the bar and floor service in the front, B.B. King's Blues Club can now rightly call itself a restaurant as well, one that is finally playing perfectly in tune.
