Bloody Marys in tall glasses skirted with frost hit the table almost as soon as we do. Onion rings follow, breaded in panko and rising from the plate like a stack of barrel hoops. Six deviled eggs, piped with so much mustard-yellow filling the white walls bulge, circle a pile of brown-sugar-lacquered bacon strips. Two years back, to mark our son Jess’s graduation from Belmont University, this is how our family began lunch at the BrickTop’s on West End Avenue in Nashville, the lodestar in a growing restaurant group with eleven locations now scattered across the South.
Toward the end of that celebration, after a Palm Beach salad layered with shrimp remoulade, pan-fried crab cakes with shoestring fries, caper-scattered trout in beurre blanc, and a sliced tri-tip striped with sauce verte, before a carrot cake robed in cream cheese frosting, our corner booth of six realized something: We wanted for nothing.
Over the past two hours, we had feasted and toasted while servers dressed in white shirts and black vests met every need. Our water glasses remained three-quarters full. So did our wineglasses. A question about the salad dressing manifested a silver gravy boat of blue cheese suspended in vinaigrette. An inquiry about a burger earned a quick lecture on the house chuck grind. We never looked up to catch a server’s eye in search of a bottle of Tabasco. It was just there. Diet Cokes in eight-ounce glass bottles appeared as if by legerdemain.
In the years since, Jess won a job at the Coral Club, an excellent cocktail bar in East Nashville, and the West End BrickTop’s has become our travel destination for Thanksgiving eve lunches and Sunday brunches and weekday happy hours. Our family returns for classic American dishes—bounteous salads, well-engineered sandwiches, grilled fillets of beef and fish—executed masterfully and served without pretense in a plush dining room. Set with butterscotch leather booths, lit by Japanese-inspired orb lanterns, BrickTop’s feels like a private club that went rogue and decided to welcome everyone.
Joe Ledbetter, the Nashville-based owner, borrowed the name from a Jazz Age club in Paris, run by Ada “Bricktop” Smith, a West Virginia–born singer and dancer and the daughter of a formerly enslaved mother, known to smoke a cigar and wear a feather boa. In the summer of 2006, when Ledbetter opened two BrickTop’s locations, one in Naples, Florida, then the West End Avenue spot, he installed brass plaques beside the front doors, incised with 66 Rue Pigalle, the address of her Paris club.
Ledbetter drew on something else, too: the basic formula he and two partners developed for Houston’s, the restaurant that opened in 1977 in that same West End location and expanded over the next quarter century to dozens more. (Ledbetter left that restaurant group in 2004.) The French dip I recently ate at the white marble bar in a suburban Charlotte BrickTop’s—sliced-to-order prime rib on a butter-toasted baguette, with a ramekin of au jus—tasted just as great as the French dip I ate while tucked in an oxblood leather booth at the Houston’s on Peachtree Road in Atlanta.
But BrickTop’s is more than a Houston’s scion. I recognized that on a run last fall to five of the former and two of the latter. Ledbetter’s take on dining out reflects a deeper commitment to everyday excellence and a doubling down on simplicity, both of which appear easy but are devilishly hard.
Many people I know in the industry respect that focus. “I wouldn’t have the guts to go that simple,” confessed Steve Palmer, the Charleston, South Carolina–based founder of the Indigo Road Hospitality Group, when I told him I was on the way to dinner at the BrickTop’s in Birmingham. A week later, Coral Club co-owner Matthew Izaguirre, who frequents the West End location for rib eyes with maître d’hôtel butter, told me: “Everyone else puts things on the menu to attract buzz. BrickTop’s doesn’t get distracted.”
Consistency of food begins with consistency of people. At the West End location, Luis Salas recently moved from the grill to assistant kitchen manager. He wears a white chef coat embroidered with three stars, one for every five years of service. When he made fifteen years, the restaurant wrote him a $5,000 check. Bartender Audrey Heisserer wears her three stars on a black vest. To mark her recent fifteen-year anniversary, she received the same bonus, plus a bottle of Dom Perignon from the year she began work.
While never a full dupe, each restaurant in the group is similar: When the front door opens, women dressed in smart black dresses or pantsuits, draped in faux pearl necklaces, look up from the host stand and smile. A U-shaped bar, topped in white marble, dominates the front. Leather booths frame the back room. Carpet tamps down the chatter and yelp of conversations. Monkeys doing silly things deck the walls in oil paintings, or they show up in the wallpaper that wraps the space.
BrickTop’s is a pleasure machine, engineered to deliver much the same experience no matter the location. But there’s something special about West End. When he’s not on the road scouting new locations, Ledbetter, a notebook in hand, often claims booth 42, opposite the kitchen, to survey his domain. For our family and a large cast of regulars, some who have been coming here since this address was home to the first Houston’s, his domain is a sanctuary that showcases the confidence and elegance simplicity affords.
Plus: Drive-Through Beacon
Burger up at Pal’s
As with BrickTop’s, good systems also yield good results at Pal’s Sudden Service. A thirty-one-unit chain founded in 1956 in Kingsport, Tennessee, Pal’s does business only in southwestern Virginia and northeastern Tennessee. Most locations, which present like pop-art tributes to idealized fast-food meals, operate without a dining room. Turn into one of the hyperefficient drive-throughs, buy a burger, fries, and a shake, and you’ll believe that fast food can be good food.
