The Nashville Biscuit House

Nashville Restaurants and Food
The Nashville Biscuit House
805 Gallatin Rd.
Nashville
615-228-4504

When Nashville Biscuit House is your name, you’d better live up to the promise. And actually the biscuits are pretty good here. It’s the rest of the sides that fail to hold up.

The restaurant is probably best known as a Knife and Fork, which we reviewed and found kind of mediocre. Things didn’t improve much when it changed over to the Sylvan Park East and we visited. Bland, canned sides, and average meat and three fare caused a less than enthusiastic response. And now the Nashville Biscuit House, such promise in that name. Inside the place is cleaned up a bit. The wait staff is friendly and down home. Many of them have worked at all three of the recent restaurant incarnations. The menu is revamped a bit. Aside from the usual meat and three options they have a line-up of specialty burgers, including the Big John, a one pounder named after the new chef and owner. If you eat it, and the sides, they’ll put you on a wall of fame.

The biscuits are hot, flaky, buttery and with nice flavor. The fried chicken was better at the previous joints. Here it suffers from a blandness issue: well cooked and moist, just lacking any distinction. The mashed potatoes are okay and the white gravy rather non-descript. It’s like everything on the plate is in some sort of food witness protection program: scared to come out and be noticed. And perhaps for good reason; the beans and yams point to the real problem: much of this stuff seems to be straight out of the can. The yams even have an unpleasant after taste.

Oh, well. Perhaps things will improve. The burgers may be a good option. I haven’t had a chance to try them yet, but they looked okay coming out of the kitchen. We had always heard this location serves as a breakfast spot for this part of East Nashville. We went out on a Sunday morning to see if this perhaps could be the real niche for the Nashville Biscuit House.

There are not many surprises on the breakfast menu. They have a line-up of combo breakfasts, like the Lumberjack which features two pancakes, three eggs, sausage, bacon, grits or home fries and toast or biscuit. You can even throw a pork chop or steak onto that plate for a buck or two more.

The chicken fried steak started the meal off well: crispy and nicely cooked. The same lifeless white gravy as the lunch meal didn’t serve it well. The grits are the flavorless, fine grain type favored in so many restaurants. Overall not a bad breakfast, but it wouldn’t take much to make a difference. The home fries seem like they are probably frozen and straight out of the bag. Making a few things from scratch would really help elevate the breakfast and lunch menus.

Veggie Eater: Not fantastic, not awful. Don’t think I need to return. I opted for the one egg over easy, home fries and toast. Even after confirming no meat sides needed, it still arrived with bacon. Meat Eater was happy to oblige. Home fries were non-descript. Egg was appropriately cooked. That’s about all I can say…

Meat Eater: Prices are reasonable with meat and three going for $6.75 and burgers in the five to $6.75 range. Breakfast omelettes run five to six dollars.