Nashville

Nashville's defining plate is the meat-and-three: a steam-table format of one meat with three vegetable sides, sold as a workingman's lunch and codified in rooms like Arnold's Country Kitchen, recognized by the James Beard Foundation's America's Classics program in 2009. The city's other signature, hot chicken, is traced to the Prince family and to Prince's Hot Chicken Shack, where cayenne-heavy fried chicken is served on white bread with pickles; the shack received an America's Classics award in 2013, after which the style spread nationally and became the template for later local imitators.

Sweet and packaged goods form a parallel record: the Goo Goo Cluster, produced in Nashville by the Standard Candy Company from 1912, and Maxwell House coffee, named for the downtown hotel where it was first served.

Drinks history runs through Tennessee whiskey, including Nelson's Green Brier Distillery, a nineteenth-century Robertson County operation shuttered by Prohibition and revived by descendants in Nashville in the 2010s. Contemporary cooking has been shaped by Sean Brock, who opened Husk Nashville in 2013 and later Audrey, and by Tandy Wilson of City House, named Best Chef: Southeast by the James Beard Foundation in 2016.