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By Root 855 0

’s premier hot-lunch restaurants, and every day at lunch and supper, you can choose from a menu of such entrees as pork barbecue, country-fried steak, fried chicken, and meat loaf. On the side you pick two vegetables from a list of southern classics: blackeyed peas, turnip greens, fried okra, baked squash casserole, crowder peas, white beans. Or, it is possible to get a plate of nothing but vegetables—an excellent strategy even if you aren’t a vegetarian. With the vegetables come good rolls or warm corn bread, and if you don’t want beer to drink, the menu lists chocolate milk, sweet milk, and buttermilk.

Silver Sands

937 Locklayer St.

615–742–1652

Nashville, TN

BL | $

Silver Sands is a soul-food cafeteria known for its great breakfast and its meat-and-three lunch. Meals are portioned out from a short cafeteria line that gives customers a view of what’s to eat as well as the opportunity to discuss options with one of the team of servers behind the counter: What’s good with smothered pork steak? (Answer: stewed apples and fried potatoes with onions.) Don’t be surprised if the helpful gals dipping plates refer to you as Honey, Darlin’, Sweetheart, and Baby.

We recommend the country ham, but when the kitchen runs out of it, a good fallback meat is fried bologna, which is served under a mantle of sweet, soft fried onions. Grits are thick, full-flavored, and especially wonderful when ladled with plenty of butter. Huge chicken wings are dished out with brown gravy, and among the worthy vegetables at lunch are porky greens, green beans, and luxurious macaroni and cheese.

Silver Sands is a low-slung cinder-block building tucked into a corner in an otherwise residential neighborhood just west of the Farmers Market in North Nashville. There are about a dozen tables—much business is carry-out—and despite circulating overhead fans, air in the cream-colored dining room is thick with the homey aromas of good cooking.

Sunny’s Cafeteria

1000 S. Roan St.

423–926–7441

Johnson City, TN

LD Mon–Sat, L only Sun | $

Pick up a tray, select your silverware, and work your way along the line. First comes dessert. Pies galore adorn the shelves: peach, coconut meringue, lemon meringue, chocolate chip pecan, plain pecan, custard. Also on the dessert shelf is banana pudding—great banana pudding!—and near that are the Jell-Os and salads, a kaleidoscopic array of sweet things that makes us week-kneed with desire.

After salads, you are at the main-course and entree station, where a nice lady asks what you want. This is the moment of truth, for sometimes we look down at our tray and realize that we have taken so many desserts and salads that there isn’t room left for a main course. Somehow, though, we manage, and choose a beautiful hunk of fried chicken or a plate of ultimate comfort-food chicken and dumplings, or steak and gravy topped with sautéed onions, and accompany that with a few choices from the cornucopic vegetable selection. Pungent collard greens, real mashed potatoes, crunchy fried okra, silky boiled cabbage: all are recommended, but if squash casserole is available when you push through the line, we implore you to have a bowl. It is laced with buttery bread crumbs and rich as top cream.

To drink? Presweetened iced tea, of course. Now find a place in the good-size dining room, partitioned into cozy sections where fans spin overhead and music is provided by the local radio station.

“Y’all doin’ all right?” asks the man at the end of the line when he tallies up the bill for trays of food. Seldom do we feel as all right as when we sit down to enjoy Sunny’s fine food.

Swett’s

2725 Clifton Ave.

615–329–4418

Nashville, TN

LD | $

Swett’s is a visible success story: opened in 1954 as a small soul-food meat-and-three café, it became a large, modern cafeteria, burned down, and was built again. Portraits of the founding Swetts adorn the walls, and their legacy is well reflected by a kitchen that continues to serve hearty soul-food meals at reasonable prices.

Like so many cafeteria lines, this one starts with dessert: