The answer starts in 1930s Nashville, inside the employee cafeteria of the May Hosiery Mill. Workers lined up and paid 25 cents for a choice of meat, three vegetables, and bread. Nobody branded it, nobody franchised it, and nobody thought to call it anything besides lunch. What they were doing was inventing a culinary format that would come to define the city.
Every major industrial American city had factory workers who needed fast, cheap, hot midday meals. Birmingham had steel mills and coal fields, Pittsburgh had its foundries, Detroit had its auto plants. None of them developed a meat-and-three culture. John Egerton, the late Nashville writer and co-founder of the Southern Foodways Alliance, wrestled with this question and gave the honest answer: some things you just thank your lucky stars for, what he called “unearned grace.” Nashville didn’t earn the meat-and-three tradition through logic. It just happened here, took root, and never left.
What Makes a True Meat-and-Three
The format is built into the name. You choose one meat, three vegetable sides, cornbread or a roll, and sweet tea. The catch is that “vegetables” in this context covers ground that would confuse a nutritionist. Macaroni and cheese counts. So does hush puppies. So does banana pudding, in some places. This is Southern cooking’s most honest admission: carbs and cheese are vegetables when they’re eaten alongside fried chicken.
The meats rotate. Monday might be country-fried steak. Tuesday is frequently fried chicken. Friday often brings catfish. Roast beef shows up mid-week at better places. The cafeteria-style service is traditional, but some meat-and-threes switched to waitress service over decades. Either way, the economics stay the same: a full plate of scratch-cooked food for what a fast food combo costs, sometimes less.
Why Nashville Held On When Other Cities Let It Go
Nashville’s meat-and-three tradition survived because the city’s working class kept eating at these places through every economic cycle. Music Row producers ate at the same lunch counters as construction workers and hospital nurses. Vanderbilt professors sat at the same tables as plumbers. Egerton called the cafeteria line at places like Arnold’s Country Kitchen “the great equalizer.” Long before farm-to-table became a marketing phrase, meat-and-threes were sourcing fresh produce from farms just outside the city. They just didn’t write it on a chalkboard.
The tradition also survived through family succession. Swett’s has been operating since 1954. Wendell Smith’s has been feeding the same Charlotte Avenue neighborhood since 1952, now in its fourth generation. Arnold’s Country Kitchen has run continuously since 1982 under the same family, earning a James Beard American Classics Award in 2009 and surviving a near-closure in 2023 only to reopen and announce a second North Nashville location in 2024. These aren’t restaurant chains. They’re family commitments.
What Sets Nashville’s Meat-and-Three Apart From Soul Food and Diners
Meat-and-three borrows from multiple traditions without being reducible to any single one. West African food traditions, brought to the South through slavery, shaped the long-simmered greens, the black-eyed peas, and the fried chicken. Appalachian farm cooking contributed the pinto beans, the corn, and the biscuits. Country ham is pure Tennessee. The combination, served cafeteria-style to a mixed crowd, is something Nashville assembled from its own specific history.
The closest comparisons are the Hawaiian plate lunch or the Louisiana daily plate lunch, but neither operates in exactly the same format or grew from the same roots. Boston Market copied the general concept for national chains. Cracker Barrel approximates it. Neither gets the food right, and neither captures the social function. At a real meat-and-three, you are not a customer. You are expected to share a long communal table with people you don’t know, eat quickly, and make room for the next person.
The Venues That Carry the Tradition
Arnold’s Country Kitchen at 605 8th Ave S sets the standard. The roast beef is slow-cooked and sliced to order. The turnip greens have been simmered with enough pork to constitute a side dish in themselves. The chess pie is one of the few desserts in Nashville that gets written about by food critics with genuine reverence.
Swett’s, which opened in 1954 after Walter and Susie Swett bought a tavern and started cooking for their ten children, now operates as both a Germantown restaurant and an airport location. The Elliston Place Soda Shop has been serving in its same location since 1939, making it Nashville’s oldest continuously operating restaurant in its original spot, and it still serves milkshakes alongside its meat-and-three plates. Monell’s serves everything family-style, which breaks the cafeteria format but keeps the spirit. Wendell Smith’s on Charlotte Avenue is where neighborhood regulars still sit at the counter.
None of these places are destinations in the Instagram sense. They’re destinations in the sense that Nashville locals return to them the way people return to certain streets or parks: not because they’re novel, but because they’re necessary.
Sources
- Wikipedia, “Meat and three,” en.wikipedia.org
- Notes on Nashville, “Meat-and-Three Restaurants,” notesonnashville.com
- Southern Foodways Alliance, “Nashville Eats” oral history project, southernfoodways.org
- Explore Parts Unknown, “When all you need is a meat-and-three,” explorepartsunknown.com
- Eat Your World, “Meat-and-three in Nashville,” eatyourworld.com
- Arnold’s Country Kitchen, arnoldscountrykitchen.com
- Arnold’s Country Kitchen, Wikipedia, en.wikipedia.org
- Garden & Gun, “Nashville Bids Farewell to Arnold’s Country Kitchen,” gardenandgun.com
- Yelp, Arnold’s Country Kitchen listing, yelp.com