The biscuit is a Southern staple everywhere, but Nashville has developed a specific identity around it that goes beyond regional tradition. USA Today called Loveless Cafe’s biscuits “Nashville’s second-most-important contribution to American culture” after music, which is the kind of hyperbole that suggests something real is happening underneath it. The obsession has two distinct roots: a 70-year-old institution that established the standard, and a food truck that turned biscuits into modern Nashville’s defining breakfast moment.
Why the Obsession Is Real
Nashville’s biscuit culture is rooted in a longer Southern breakfast tradition, but it intensified around 2012 when Biscuit Love launched as a food truck and made biscuits feel current rather than nostalgic. The timing coincided with Nashville’s population explosion and the arrival of enough newcomers who didn’t grow up with scratch biscuits to find them entirely new. What had been a taken-for-granted Southern staple became a category that could be reimagined, priced as a premium product, and turned into a dining experience with a 45-minute wait. Biscuit Love made biscuits fashionable. Those two operations together explain why Nashville has more serious biscuit options per capita than almost any American city.
Loveless Cafe
Loveless Cafe on Highway 100 in southwest Nashville opened in 1951 when Lon and Annie Loveless converted their home into a restaurant serving fried chicken and biscuits from the front porch. The biscuit recipe has not changed since 1951. The cafe serves over 500,000 guests per year. Biscuits are made fresh and come out of the kitchen every 20 minutes throughout service. Willard Scott of the NBC Today show called them the world’s greatest scratch biscuits in a characteristically unqualified endorsement that turned out not to be wrong.
The Loveless biscuit is a traditional Southern drop biscuit: tall, buttermilk-based, with a crust that shatters and an interior that pulls apart in layers. The house-made preserves that accompany it are part of the experience. Country ham paired with a Loveless biscuit is what serious biscuit people reference when explaining what they’re chasing.
The location requires driving. There is no convenient way to get to Highway 100 from downtown Nashville without a car, and the wait on weekend mornings runs 45 to 90 minutes. Neither of these facts has reduced the demand.
Biscuit Love
Karl and Sarah Worley (Johnson & Wales culinary school) launched Biscuit Love as a food truck in 2012 and opened the first brick-and-mortar in The Gulch in 2015. There are now six locations across Tennessee, Alabama, and Ohio. The Worley approach treats biscuits as a platform for creative combinations rather than a traditional format to be preserved.
The Bonuts are the flagship: fried biscuit dough topped with lemon curd mascarpone and blueberry compote, which sounds like dessert because it essentially is dessert at breakfast. The East Nasty (fried chicken thigh with cheddar and sausage gravy on a biscuit) is the savory answer. The Princess substitutes hot chicken for the standard fried chicken. The B-Roll is a biscuit rolled like a cinnamon roll.
The Gulch location has lines every weekend morning. The format is order-at-the-counter with table service following, and the waits are a genuine 30 to 45 minutes on Saturdays and Sundays.
The Best Biscuit
Loveless for the traditional experience. Biscuit Love for the modern interpretation. These are not competitors for the same thing. If you only go to one, your choice should reflect whether you want the original or the reimagined. If you go to Nashville regularly, you eventually eat both and understand why the city has room for both.
Sources
- Loveless Cafe, lovelesscafe.com; Southern Living “South’s Best Breakfast Spots” designation
- USA Today “Top Down-Home Dining Spot” for Loveless Cafe
- Biscuit Love, biscuitlovebrand.com; Nashville Scene coverage of food truck origins and expansion
- James Beard House dinner 2013 (Loveless Cafe)
- Nashville Lifestyles on Nashville biscuit culture