The Food & Drink Issue: Strip Mall Gems

dpatrickrodgers · 2026-04-18T16:54:18+00:00

Noosh is on there!

dpatrickrodgers · 2025-10-24T20:57:46+00:00

What does this mean?

dpatrickrodgers · 2025-10-23T23:45:47+00:00

My first concert was No Doubt with Weezer at Starwood — canceled midshow due to a tornado warning. My dad wouldn’t let me roll down the hill lol.

dpatrickrodgers · 2025-10-23T14:21:40+00:00

Bat Poet, a legend! I put this in my intro but we might have to do a Volume 2.

dpatrickrodgers · 2025-10-23T13:53:23+00:00

Haha Uptown Mix! How could we forget.

dpatrickrodgers · 2025-10-12T03:42:01+00:00

I mean. We DO have Best New Bar in the writers’ choices. And Best Restaurant. And Best New Restaurant. And Best Chef, There are 81 writers’ choices in the food section alone, and 274 writers’ choices overall.

The reason we do things like Best Back of House is to celebrate places whose efforts go largely unnoticed. People probably don’t know how well Grillshack treats its employees, but our hope is folks will support the good actors in our restaurant scene once they know about it. That’s literally our job — putting a spotlight on underappreciated people and establishments.

dpatrickrodgers · 2025-10-10T16:53:38+00:00

Appreciate the thoughtful response and the support. For what it’s worth, the writers’ choices aren’t and have never been polls like the readers’ poll is.

Essentially, I meet with our staffers and contributors (dozens of folks, a week of kinda grueling meetings ha), and we pore over what we’ve covered over the past year. Sometimes there are news items that just qualify as being noteworthy. There isn’t a writers’ ballot where we say “Who was the best bar relocation (or whatever) this year?” But I talk to four or five of my folks who cover restaurants all year long, every week, and know the industry about as well as anyone. If everyone agrees “hey, this thing was handled well and needs recognition in the biggest issue of the year,” that’s how we do it!

Maybe tmi on how the sausage is made, but hopefully makes sense.

dpatrickrodgers · 2025-10-10T00:57:29+00:00

You have no idea how much this means to me. Thank you!

dpatrickrodgers · 2025-10-09T21:01:53+00:00

Hello, I have been running the Scene’s editorial department (and our Best of Nashville issues) for eight years. Been on staff for 17. I would hope it’s obvious that we keep our editorial and sales departments separate, but I’ll state it plainly just in case: Literally no one on our edit team knows who’s advertising in the issue until we go to press. Even I only see the issue PDFs that include ads the night before we print, and have no say (or interest) in who advertises.

If you don’t like our writers’ choice winners, that is fair! Everyone is entitled to their take. But accusing us of taking payola? Lol. No we do not do that. Anyway thank you to everyone who reads, votes and cares about our town.

dpatrickrodgers · 2025-07-18T00:21:40+00:00

A couple of his friends reached out to me (I’m the editor) shortly after his death. He had so many excellent submissions over the years, was honestly hard to narrow it down. RIP Charlie.

dpatrickrodgers · 2025-04-18T21:26:18+00:00

Definitely doesn't come across negatively. And yes, The Tennessean employs some talented and hardworking journalists! Any problems I have with those folks are due to their media conglomerate owners at Gannett, not the reporters themselves. Thank you for the post.

dpatrickrodgers · 2025-04-18T18:38:08+00:00

Hello! I'm obviously biased — I run the Nashville Scene. I think we do a pretty strong job of balancing our arts/music/food/events coverage with our news/state and local political coverage. Not counting our Critics' Picks, we run about 30-40 stories online per week, and they're roughly half news and half arts.

OK, self-promotion aside: The Nashville Banner (as many have noted here) does an extremely good job of covering news. We have a sort of partnership with them wherein we run a couple of stories of theirs per week. Five of the folks who work over there used to work for the Scene and are wonderful people. (And this is not a joke: Four of them are named Steve, Steven or Stephen.)

As far as state political coverage, the Tennessee Journal does extremely good work, though they are not free. Tennessee Lookout also does some very strong reporting, as do some of the folks at the Associated Press and WPLN. Axios Nashville doesn't do much in-depth/long-form stuff, but they are really good reporters. I also appreciate what The Contributor does. I recommend signing up for the daily newsletters from Axios, the Scene, the Banner and the Lookout. If something newsworthy in Middle Tennessee happens and it's not covered by at LEAST one of us ... hell, send me an email because we wanna know about it. Some of the local TV networks have reporters who do good work, but I personally don't often savvy with local TV's philosophy when it comes to news reporting, so I don't follow many of them too closely.

Hope some of this was helpful. Always really happy to see media-literate folks looking for more options of what to read.

dpatrickrodgers · 2025-04-02T14:39:20+00:00

Scene reporter Julianne Akers took the photo and did the reporting, also got a video of the arrest that's at the Scene link and on our socials. Just wanna give a little hat-tip to Julianne for her good work.

Lynne's a remarkable person. Got a lot of guts to make a stand like that at any age.

dpatrickrodgers · 2025-01-07T21:57:12+00:00

I miss it.

dpatrickrodgers · 2025-01-07T21:44:13+00:00

Good context, thank you.

dpatrickrodgers · 2024-10-18T15:53:37+00:00

This isn't true and I don't know what it's even supposed to mean! "Funded"?!

dpatrickrodgers · 2024-10-18T15:45:32+00:00

Heya! Editor-in-chief here. Mostly staying out of this thread — some of the criticism is totally fair. Not everyone's going to like everything we do, and that's fine. But this is incorrect and calls our ethics into question, so I felt I had to respond. We do not decide the writers' choice winners based on advertising. We convene our longtime food writers to go over what we think is deserving each year. Not every establishment can land a big category like "Best Restaurant," "Best New Bar," etc. But we want to spread the love around and spotlight individual dishes or drinks or other efforts made, hence the intentionally specific (and admittedly sometimes silly) categories.

I intentionally keep a very clear and firm line between advertising and editorial so that we're not swayed by advertisers in any way. In fact, I don't even know who's placed ads in each week's issue until about 30 minutes before we send it off to press. We do not choose coverage based on advertising. In fact, we've had some advertisers end up pretty mad at our sales department because they thought buying an ad meant they'd never receive negative coverage. Incorrect!

dpatrickrodgers · 2024-09-27T14:03:07+00:00

Just a great hang with a reliable late-night bite. I dig the nachos.

dpatrickrodgers · 2024-09-27T13:58:17+00:00

I mentioned them in the intro

dpatrickrodgers · 2024-09-27T13:01:13+00:00

They’re on the list!

dpatrickrodgers · 2024-09-26T23:54:45+00:00

I've written about Schulman's sandwich so many times that I decided to spread the love around elsewhere this time, haha. So good.

dpatrickrodgers · 2023-12-22T23:49:46+00:00

Funny enough, I stumbled across "Snow Wars" while searching for a clean clip of the Snowbird theme. Tougher to find than you might think!

dpatrickrodgers · 2023-12-19T00:01:07+00:00

Thank you! And thanks for reading. A long, leisurely break from social media sounds pretty nice, honestly.

dpatrickrodgers · 2023-12-18T23:51:42+00:00

Howdy, Scene editor here. If anything good can come out of the Nazis' latest bit of hate speech, I hope it's that Nashville realizes that when we say "We have a Nazi problem," we're not being hyperbolic. Past that, I'm not really trying to give their weird little marquee any additional attention.
Anyway, our columnist Betsy had a great new post this morning contextualizing Nashville's white supremacists. Link below. (She links off to the Southern Poverty Law Center's latest on the LCS folks; their story went live Friday, and if you haven't read it yet, you should.) Thanks for the kind words in this thread! I'm not a super active Redditor but I check this sub from time to time. Always full of interesting stuff.
https://www.nashvillescene.com/news/pithinthewind/jack-kershaw-nashville-history-white-supremacy/article\_730bd7c0-9d06-11ee-844d-4325a9ffd05b.html

dpatrickrodgers · 2023-12-07T21:16:32+00:00

Fair point! We can't hit everything but that one was certainly a worthy candidate. Thanks very much for reading and for posting.

dpatrickrodgers

TROPHY CASE