Seetee's Blog

Nashville : Friends, Food & Football

Groupon to the rescue! A really great vegan bakery & sandwich shop

One of the best parts about vacation is being able to eat your heart out. I’d say that was “mission accomplished” on this trip out to Nashville to visit Vickie. The first place we hit up was Fiddlecakes — and we used a Groupon that we bought a few weeks before to grub out on some delicious sandwiches. Vickie got the the “french toastie” which was all natural ham, tomato, brie, and blueberry mustard. I got “the standard” which was a panini with chicken, provolone, roasted red pepper, spinach and veganaise.

The Standard

After brunch/lunch Vickie gave me a quick tour of Nashville and we made our way to the Nashville Humane Society. Vickie found the love of her life in a cute puppy, and I became enamored by a room of adorable kittens. I’m pretty sure I could have sat in the kitten room for hours.

Then, I made Vickie go to Dairy Queen with me. Dairy Queen is one of those establishments that really reminds me of my childhood in Minnesota. When we first moved to Minnesota when I was 3 years old, our first apartment building was located across the street from a Dairy Queen. I always loved those nights after dinner where we would walk across the street and I would get a vanilla cone or a chocolate dipped cone and my parents would get a blizzard. We ate our ice cream and watched Family Feud on the in-store TV with some locals who were having lunch. It’s the small things in life that I absolutely love.

Soft serve ice cream on a humid Nashville day

We were exhausted, and took naps in the afternoon, woke up around dinner time and watched Diners, Drive-ins and Dives, and realized that we wanted Italian food for dinner. We found ourselves at Mafioza’s, which was packed, and sat on the outdoor patio, watched the Braves vs Cubs game on the tv and shared a free pitcher of beer, courtesy of Vickie’s softball league. Might I add, that the beer was drank out of mason jars!

After dinner we met up with Vickie’s roommate Diddy and some of Vickie’s friends at Red Door, a local bar. The atmosphere definitely reminded me of Portland and San Francisco. We made some friends at the table next to us who were helping their guy friend figure out what to text back to a girl that he was interested in and they wanted our two cents on what he should say.

Nashville has a pretty great food scene with some neat local restaurants, including one of Vickie and Diddy’s favorite, Mas Tacos. Mas Tacos started off as a taco truck but they were so popular that they they bought a small establishment in East Nashville and have been serving tacos and specialties such as gazpacho, tortilla soup and elote, and some creative tacos such as a pulled pork taco, quinoa and sweet potato taco, a fish taco, and a breakfast taco.

Mas Tacos por favor! A sweet little shack that started out as a taco truck! Elote, tacos, and aquas frescas (pineapple-cilantro and watermelon-lime). How cute is this outdoor seating?

Elote!! Corn with queso fresco and chili powder. SO GOOD.

Fish tacos and pulled pork tacos. They were so filling that it was hard to even eat 2 of them.

After lunch we hit up the Tomato Art festival in East Nashville. The festival was big! There was tons of vendors and so many people from the community gathered in one place. On our walk to the festival from the car, we passed people sitting on their porches having a great time, a little girl selling lemonade and brownies for 50cents–hollering at the top of her lungs, and a guy riding a vespa with a red helmet on — and the red helmet had a tomato stem coming out of the top

tomato art festival 2011! tomato art, tomato crafts, tomato food, tomato everythinggggg + music !

Some cool nashville screenprints done by a local artist

And then we passed this sign....Chiens = dogs ??? hahaha no wonder she loves dogs!

Later that day Vickie got asked to work the Titans vs Minnesota Vikings preseason game at LP field, and since I had never been to a football game before, I thought that it would be fun to go and watch her own it on the sidelines directing commercial breaks. I scoured craigslist and found some awesome seats in the lower section of the endzone, for $25 a ticket.

Tickets in hand and ready to roll!

My friend Nick who moved to Nashville a year ago to teach came along with a friend. We ate at the German brewhouse across from the Stadium before the game and the walked over afterwards. It wasn’t until we got to the stadium did we realize exactly HOW close the seats were. To top it off, Nick’s other friends had 4 season tickets to the game, and low and behold, their seats were right behind us. What are the chances of that?

Can you find Vickie on the Titans sideline?

After the game we walked around downtown Nashville and got to see some of the “honky tonk” bars. There’s nothing like walking down the street hearing country music everywhere you go. It was awesome. We went and visited the old bar/restaurant that Vickie used to work at called Baileys and met some of her coworkers and chatted upstairs on the patio. The other thing that I love about Nashville is that there is always so much outdoor seating at restaurant and bars.

On Sunday morning we went to The Copper Kettle for brunch. It was the most extensive brunch buffet that I had ever seen. Eggs benedict, prime rib, noodle salad, a million types of pastries, tomato mozzarella salad, etc. I wish I had a picture to post, but I totally forgot to take one. Then I joined Vickie and her former Bailey’s coworkers for their double header softball game where they CRUSHED the other opponents. I’m still getting over the ridiculous tan that I got that day. I did not think that I could get any darker than I was when I arrived in Nashville, but as it turns out, I was definitely wrong. These days, in order to get dressed for work, I put on different shirts and assess how much white skin vs tan skin can be seen and to what degree I may be embarrassed by the tan line that shows.

Nashville was so much cooler than I could have imagined in my head. It’s kind of funny how much I like the south. Until next time Nashville!

Next up, North Carolina adventures