After Five Years, East Nashville’s Audrey Will Serve Its Last Appalachian Supper on August 16
Audrey will close.
The East Nashville restaurant that spent five years arguing that Appalachian cooking deserved white tablecloths and a wine list will serve its final dinner on August 16. After that, the dining room goes dark for good.
It is a quieter ending than the opening was. When Audrey arrived in 2021, it landed with the weight of a thesis statement. Chef Sean Brock had already spent a decade convincing the rest of the country that Southern food was not a novelty menu but a serious regional cuisine, and Audrey was the place where he turned that argument inward — toward the mountains, the hollers, and the kitchen of the grandmother he named the restaurant after.
A restaurant built as an argument
Appalachian cooking has always been the South's least-flattered branch. It is a cuisine born of altitude and scarcity: things pickled because winter was coming, things smoked because there was no ice, sorghum instead of sugar, heirloom corn ground coarse, greens cooked long, country ham cured in a smokehouse and sliced thin enough to see through. For most of the last century, the culinary establishment filed all of that under “poverty food” and moved on.
Audrey refused the filing. The room treated those ingredients the way a Parisian kitchen treats butter and shallots — as a foundation, not a curiosity. Wood, ceramics, and family photographs did the decorating. The kitchen leaned on Tennessee growers and millers who had been keeping old corn and bean varieties alive largely out of stubbornness. Diners who came expecting comfort food got something closer to an essay.
Critics responded. Audrey collected the kind of national attention that Nashville restaurants outside the honky-tonk economy rarely get, and for a stretch it was the answer whenever someone asked what the city's most ambitious kitchen was doing.
Why ambitious rooms are hard rooms
The gap that eventually closed Audrey is the oldest one in the restaurant business: acclaim and attendance are not the same thing. A restaurant can be the most-written-about table in town and still have too many quiet Tuesdays. Audrey was never a neighborhood spot people wandered into — it was a destination, and destinations depend on a steady supply of occasions.
The ownership picture had also shifted well before the closing was announced. Brock stepped away from his financial stake in the restaurant last year. Paul Mishkin — the founder of Southall Farm and Inn down in Franklin, and long the majority owner — took over operations and installed Sam Jett as executive chef. The restaurant that closes in August has been running under that arrangement since.
What it leaves behind
Nashville's dining scene in 2026 is unrecognizable from the one Brock walked into when he first brought a serious Southern kitchen to town in the early 2010s. Some of that is money and population. But some of it is the permission that a restaurant like Audrey grants everyone downstream — the cooks who now put sorghum, cured pork, and heirloom grits on menus without needing to explain themselves, and the diners who no longer need the explanation.
That is a durable thing to leave behind, even if the room itself doesn't last.
There are about two and a half weeks of service left. If you have been meaning to go, the calendar has made the decision for you.
Still deciding where to eat and drink while you're on this side of the river? Our complete guide to Nashville's honky tonks covers the other end of the spectrum, and our restaurant coverage tracks what's opening as fast as things close.
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