Turkey and the Wolf’s Icehouse Keeps It Cool in East Nashville

At first glance, Turkey and the Wolf Icehouse looks like it was plucked from a Tennessee back road and dropped right into East Nashville’s Meridian Street. All manner of vintage signs cling to a grey cinderblock bunker of a building. Painted sheet metal, plastic ice banners, glowing beer lights, flags pledging loyalty to Duke’s Mayo, and a phone booth lined with colorful action figures adorn the covered patio. Near the entrance, a wood cutout of a thermometer, flanked by a cartoonish slobbering wolf and a turkey, vows it’s always 75º on the patio.

In the garden, guests sit back in mismatched chairs and at picnic tables with collard green melts, fried bologna sandwiches, and cheeseburgers served on plastic McDonald’s plates; frozen margaritas and French 75s fill 1973 Pepsi Collector Series glasses featuring Looney Tunes and Muppets characters. When a breeze rolls through the yard, toy guns, horses, and unicorns suspended from tree branches swing to and fro. 

Despite its lived-in feel, Icehouse only opened its two counter windows about a year ago. Mason Hereford, who owns and operates the eccentric New Orleans restaurants Turkey and the Wolf, Molly’s Rise and Shine, Hot Stuff, and Hungry Eyes with his wife, Lauren Agudo, became enamored with Nashville the more he visited over the past five years. “We fell in love with how closely knit the service industry is, and how welcoming it is to other chefs,” Hereford says. “It reminded us of New Orleans.” 

When a perfect spot came up for lease—a scarcely used former dog park with a sprawl of grass, tucked in a neighborhood shared by Nashville favorites Folk and Redheaded Stranger—Hereford and his team dreamed up how to make the restaurant work with Hereford and Agudo in New Orleans. “We set this unofficial way of expanding before, where a member of our original team would be a leader in the restaurant and have ownership,” Hereford says. Will Mondros, the team’s chef de cuisine, volunteered to move from New Orleans to Nashville and take the helm.

Next came constructing a restaurant from scratch on a budget. “We were only willing to do a new-build if it’s a shack,” Hereford says. The charmingly hodge-podge result is a square room with a kitchen, two service windows, and two bathrooms, all closed within whitewashed cinderblocks and framed around a gutted airstream and box truck that serve as storage and office space. The name Icehouse nods to one of Hereford’s favorite dives, Houston’s West Alabama Ice House, and the tradition of gathering at ice houses before modern refrigeration. 

With the build-out done and the name decided on, Hereford kicked into high-gear treasure “picking” mode. “We started finding stuff on the road between Nashville and New Orleans,” Hereford says. “We didn’t want to do something that felt like it hadn’t been there already.” The funky found-art style, populated largely by objects found around Nashville and “weird parts of Louisiana,” soaks the place in quirky, comfortable character. And while Hereford can’t resist a good deal, he’s hooked on tracking down something strange. “I know an issue I have is that I’m obsessed with buying dumb stuff I don’t need,” he says. “It’s a dream come true to buy all the stuff my wife doesn’t want in our house but that needs a good home.”

Weird things did in fact find a loving home at Icehouse: A smirking, child-sized red M&M balances daily drink specials on its head; the heavily-eyelashed costume head of a cow greets guests in line; a pair of snowmen wearing scarves, tophats, and mittens flank the order window; figurines of dinosaurs, panda bears, owls, and unicorns glued onto wooden dowels serve as table numbers. 

Pop into one of the two bathrooms, and you’ll see Hereford’s touch in the form of images of turkeys and wolves (depending on which room you enter), each one pulled from a collector’s magazine. There are turkey decoys, wolf-emblazoned beer mirrors, and themed dishes, too. “I found a guy selling his grandma’s entire collection of wolf plates,” Hereford says, “and I bought all of them.”

But parts of Icehouse are uniquely rooted in its city. “We didn’t want to bring too much art to Nashville,” Hereford says. “We wanted it to be a product of the neighborhood.” Icehouse commissioned Nashville artist Matt Edmondson, co-owner of the American-made denim and clothing brand Imogene + Willie, to create a mural featuring graphic wolves against streaks of bubblegum pink, red, and light blue. Local maker Matt Eberts salvaged bowling lanes from a nearby alley that was closing to fashion tables. And Devin Drake, a local miniature maker and sculptor, cut and painted the turkey and wolf thermometer sign.

Hereford says he can’t stop picking up decor here and there. His most recent find? A giant dinosaur for the yard, of course.