The Food Scene in East Nashville

IN the way an abundant oyster bed indicates a healthy estuary, a neighborhood thick with hipsters is an indicator that good food is not far away.

Look for the signs: a fixed-gear bicycle shop, a coffee roaster run by fellows with scraggly beards, a bar with handmade bitters, food trucks and, perhaps, a paleta shop run by young women with advanced degrees.

East Nashville, a down-on-its-luck side of town being brought to life one great plate of food at a time, is the indicator species for this city, which has been climbing the charts as a new food star.

Like Atlanta and Charleston, S.C., before it, Nashville is enjoying the attention of a nation that sure likes the South these days. But even if you set all the Southern infatuation aside, Nashville is one of several midsize cities whose food sensibilities (and hipster quotient) are growing as people leave the dog-eat-dog cities on the coasts in search of more affordable, pleasant places to live and eat.

Nashville has long embraced its history as well as the newcomer looking to make a mark. And whether in music or in food, the new is informed by the old. So to really understand what’s new on the plate here, one has to first seek out Nashville’s two totem foods: a meat-and-three lunch and an order of hot chicken.

Both are a distillation of Tennessee’s agrarian roots and Nashville’s working class. The former expresses itself in the fried chicken livers, well-seasoned roast beef and braised turnip greens at Arnold’s Country Kitchen, part of the cafeteria-style concept of a protein and three sides.

The latter comes in the form of hot chicken, a dish unique to Nashville, made in cast-iron pans in the back of cinder-block buildings and strip-mall storefronts where cooks fry big pieces of cayenne-coated chicken, sometimes infusing even the oil itself with pepper. You eat the dish with white bread and pickle slices. It is both ecstasy and torture, a culinary expression of the pleasure-pain principle.

These are decidedly low-budget pursuits. There has always been the other end of the Nashville dining spectrum, the one the working class and aspiring musicians could rarely afford but music producers and politicians could. Its modern-day manifestation is a collection of bistros and white-tablecloth places that stars like Sheryl Crow and Nicole Kidman frequent without the press of paparazzi and fans.

Somewhere between the two lies a different Nashville food scene, where the ethos of community, culinary adventure and tattooed kitchen culture are coming together to define a new kind of Southern cooking that doesn’t forgo its roots, but allows chefs to transcend them. As one chef told me, “You don’t have to cook pork if you don’t want to.”

The restaurants, butchers and produce purveyors in the tight, tattooed East Nashville neighborhood are one place to find it. On blocks where a year or two ago you might have been mugged, you can now buy bars of locally made Olive Sinclair chocolate from Scott Witherow, a Tennessee native who collected résumé points from Nobu and the Fat Duck. He grinds his own cacao and uses brown sugar to give his chocolate a Southern character.

The surprises in East Nashville continue at Mas Tacos Por Favor, which Teresa Mason started in 2008 by selling well-rendered examples of Mexican street food from a 1970s Winnebago. The storefront is more recent, and decorated as if Ms. Mason had called her friends and asked them to scour their attics for tables and chairs. The fried tilapia tacos and carnitas are a draw, certainly, but the tortilla soup is perhaps best in show.

All over the Nashville hipster food kingdom, mention that broth — clear and bright with lime and unimaginably chickeny — and people close their eyes and nod.

Walk across the street and you’ll find a party at the Pharmacy Burger Parlor and Beer Garden, which opened in December. On a busy day, hundreds of hamburgers are ground from Tennessee beef and served on soft potato rolls. The backyard is a sea of picnic tables holding local beers and house-made ginger ale, filled sometimes until closing at 3 a.m.

People like Scott and Sara Gibson eat there regularly. They’re a couple in their 20s, attracted to the pretty and plentiful old housing stock in East Nashville. He sells toner to the government for a living. They’re far from hipsters. But they go to the local butcher because the meat tastes better, and they like living and eating close to home.