Up by three in the morning to stir the grits and chop the greens, she leads a crew of six, including her daughter Antynish’e Kunbor, son Osato Kunbor, and stepson James Bowen. Sophia Vaughn runs the show, rose-colored dreads piled into a swirling corsage, a welcoming smile masking the aches that come with her work. To fully know Nashville, it’s important to know Silver Sands Cafe, the lunchtime soul bunker set in the shadow of downtown, a vestige of the past going hard in the paint in the present. Tilt it one way and you see what the city is becoming. Around dishes like these, Nashville will gather for a long time. Ditto the steamed, smoked, and grilled eggplant, purple batons stacked in a shallow bowl like campfire logs. The dish marries Japanese precision to Iberian tradition and makes a subtle case that they complement.
That shows in a Spanish-inspired tortilla, a mosaic of eggs and potatoes, served with a mound of bright orange trout roe and an alabaster dab of aioli. Like novelists who skip transitions because they know readers are smart, Peninsula inspires diners to create their own narratives in the gaps between what the environment suggests and the menu promises. How does it all fit together? “Restaurants work better when they show a little mystery,” Howell says. Look close at the kitchen, though, and you see the lava lamp mounted at the pass, ectoplasm rising and falling in time to the rock that wraps the room in a downbeat chill. Playing to theme, scrolled iron chandeliers of seeming Spanish provenance hang in the airy space. “The peninsula gives us room to move around and traditions to sample,” Howell says.
All came with the belief that Nashville would get behind a restaurant that interprets the Iberian Peninsula, where Spanish, Portuguese, and Basque peoples and foods coexist. They moved from Seattle with chef Jake Howell. Spouses Craig Schoen and Yuriko Say handle beverages and service.
Peninsula, which opened in 2017 in a new-build four-story, showcases the best of what modern Nashville yields. That’s Mindless Nashville, a rickety state fair ride of a place that too often diverts attention from Mindful Nashville, a hub of creativity where new arrivals make art and commerce, a hive of beauty where the grace of working people disguises their grit. To make the point, let’s stick with Nashville, a fast-growing and sometimes bewildering city where three-story honky-tonks now line scooter-littered streets. And we recognize that the best path to knowing a town or a city often leads through a restaurant that reflects a place’s mores and appetites. Now we squeeze in art and games after lunch. (New Orleans was the exception that made clear the possibilities.) And Charleston visits demanded tours of house museums and knowledge of earthquake bolts and gib plates. Just as Atlanta trips revolved around Braves games and High Museum exhibits. We traveled to Nashville to see big and blingy concerts at the Ryman or small and raucous shows at Robert’s.
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