Forty-One Restaurants in America Made the List. One of Them Is on Gallatin Avenue.
National “best restaurant” lists tend to treat the South as a rounding error, and they tend to treat Mexican food in the South as something that happens in Texas. So it is worth sitting with this one for a second.
The New York Times published a list of the 41 best Mexican restaurants in America. Exactly one Tennessee restaurant is on it, and it is not in Memphis and not in a strip mall off a Texas interstate. It is Alebrije, on Gallatin Avenue in East Nashville — one of only a handful of Southern restaurants to make the cut at all.
A restaurant that has not been open very long
What makes it more remarkable is the timeline. Alebrije opened in 2025. A brick-and-mortar barely a year into its life does not usually turn up on a national list of the country's best anything, and yet chef Edgar Victoria‘s kitchen has been steadily collecting state and national attention since it opened.
The cooking is Mexico City street food — the fast, precise, deeply traditional register of Mexican cuisine rather than the Tex-Mex vocabulary most Americans grew up with. The stated emphasis is on preserving traditional Mexican techniques, ingredients and culture, which is a quiet way of saying the restaurant is not interested in sanding down its food to meet anyone halfway.
Why this is a Nashville story, not just a restaurant story
For years, the honest answer to “where do you get great Mexican food in Nashville” pointed south, to the taquerias and panaderías along Nolensville Pike — the corridor that has quietly been the city's most interesting eating for two decades, largely without national notice.
What is happening now is a little different. A restaurant working in that same tradition has landed on the east side, on a commercial spine better known for coffee shops and record stores, and it has been recognized on the same page as kitchens in Los Angeles, Chicago and Houston. That is a shift in how the country reads Nashville food — a city usually discussed in terms of hot chicken and meat-and-threes turning up in a category nobody had filed it under.
It is also a reminder that the most consequential thing happening in Nashville's restaurant scene is not the celebrity-chef openings downtown. It is immigrant kitchens doing specific, uncompromising regional cooking, in neighborhoods where the rent still just barely works.
If you go
Alebrije is on Gallatin Avenue in East Nashville. A national list has a way of turning a quiet Tuesday into an hour-long wait, so patience is advised — and going on a weeknight is, as ever, the move.
Hungry for more of the city's table? Start with our essential food and drink guide to Music City, and see the three restaurants that recently opened in Wedgewood-Houston.
