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Meat ‘N’ Three Is Comfort Food in Nashville AreaBy Marian BetancourtMeat ‘n’ three is a traditional Southern family style meal especially popular in the Nashville area. Originally it was a midday meal of meat and 3 vegetables, but today’s restaurants are more likely to offer 2 or more meats along with 6 side dishes, biscuits, dessert, iced tea, and coffee. For a modest price, friends and strangers sit around a large table and help themselves to as much food as they want. Diners must adhere to one hard and fast rule: always pass the platters of food to the person on your left. The serving dishes are refilled as soon as they are empty. But enjoying meat ‘n’ three is not just about food. It’s a social occasion.
The boarding house is an old Federal style building painted white with a wide porch for visitors to congregate before or after lunch. On either side of the entry hall rooms are crowded with casually dressed people waiting to be seated in one of the three dining rooms. Rocking chairs, needlepoint seat cushions, and a deacon’s bench offer comfort while an old fashioned Victrola plays a song called “The Music Box Dancer.” Framed news clips from Southern Living, the New York Times, and others, line the walls along with of Miss Mary Bobo, who died in 1983 at the age of 102. A framed needlepoint wall hanging claims: Folks from all over the world come to our table as strangers and leave as friends.” Lynn Tolley, great grandniece of Jack Daniel, whose bourbon distillery is the town’s main industry, sits at a small table at the back of the entry hall with her reservation list. She has managed the boarding house since 1984. At 1 pm she rings a dinner bell and calls out the names of the guests. If no one answers immediately, she moves on to the next, so a seat can be lost despite reservations. Once everyone is seated, the food is brought from a kitchen staffed with three cooks. Tolley and two other hostesses greet guests in each room with a bit of homespun history. The boarding house was originally home to school teachers and government agents (revenuers) who came to check up on the distillery. A banker who lived there for 30 years died at 96. “So what does that tell you about the food?” Tolley asks.
Everyone around the table introduces themselves. Four retired teachers from Alabama chatted with a visitor from New York. Other guests were from Florida, New Jersey, and Chicago. Two men came from Springfield, Missouri because they had heard about the place. Tolley said “a man from California had a picture of the food on death row. He wanted it for his last meal.”
“The house found me,” said King, describing how he parked his car in front of the house one night on his way to a movie and noticed a for sale sign. King, a devotee of Deepak Chopra’s “laws of prosperity,” said, “I knew the house would be mine.” Depending on his own resources and the kindness of friends, King began Monell’s on Thanksgiving Day 1995, and is now expanding to more locations in Tennessee, including a café at the Hermitage Museum, home of Andrew Jackson. Monell’s offers a different meat each day, such as chicken and dumplings, fried pork chop, country steak and gravy, or ribs. Brunch included thick country bacon, ham, sausages, biscuits and gravy, scrambled eggs, potatoes, cheese grits, baked apple and a corn pudding to rival any fancy soufflé. Fried chicken is succulent under its crispy coating and is always on the menu. Without revealing any secrets, King said first they put the chicken in hot water. “We dredge it in Martha White’s self rising flour, some black pepper, and a little secret.” King said “slow cooking is the key to southern cooking.” For example, their green beans are canned, but they cook them for four to five hours. When they use fresh produce they get it from local farmers market.
King, now 40, originally came to Music City as a performer with Opryland. Then he ran a vegetarian restaurant called Slice of Life but was soon fired. When at 29 he opened Monell’s people wondered what a Yankee could possibly know about Southern cooking, but King wisely took his kitchen crew to Miss Mary Bobo’s to learn from the masters. We’re talking down home comfort food here so if you are watching calories, you’d best not go to a meat ‘n’ three. If You Go: Miss Mary Bobo’s Boarding House Mary Bobo table photo courtesy of Lynn Tolley; all other by the author |
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TM
“Nashville needed a place to bond around a table,” said
Michael King, 40, a former Massachusetts Yankee, who opened Monell’s, his family
style restaurant in an old historic house 10 years ago. “We call it the house of
love, laughter, food, and fellowship.” While Monnell’s attracts Nashville
locals, Miss Mary Bobo’s Boarding House, 75 miles to the south, began as a
traveler’s hotel in 1867. Today its traditional southern comfort food draws many
tourists to tiny Lynchburg.
“Under the cheese, is broccoli and rice,” says Tolley
pointing to a casserole dish. There’s also pork roast, potatoes, candied apples,
fried okra, and white beans with ham hocks. Chicken with pastry reminded one
visitor of a long remembered creamy chicken pot pie. The menu varies every day
but fried okra is always included. “It’s such a southern thing,” said Tolley,
who takes pride in preserving this tradition. The okra’s tenderness contrasts
with a crunchy cornbread coating, and there’s a spicy relish to eat with it. 
At Monell’s Saturday brunch the next day, cool jazz
provides the muted background for those waiting on line to be seated in the four
dining areas of this historic house. While there are no reservations here, there
is more than one seating and many people are willing to wait in a long time.
Murals of the building itself line the walls. A black cat patrols the yard and
garden. 
As everyone around one table begins passing to the left, a
woman says, “This is where you come after being stranded on an island.” Another
woman told a visitor, “We always bring out of town visitors.” Tracye Russell, a
director at the McGruder Family Resource Center said directors of all the city’s
family centers were coming for their Christmas lunch.