Our history
From Blanche Seay in the mid-1950s to a tornado, a pandemic and a construction dispute. Seventy years in one building.
Read the history →
Family owned and operated for over 70 years
A restaurant that has never left the family
Silver Sands Cafe is a family owned restaurant serving some of the best home made southern style food in the Downtown Nashville area. Popular family recipes have been passed down 3 generations now, including smothered pork chops, potatoes & onions, salmon croquettes, fried chicken, mac & cheese, greens, hot water corn bread and so much more.
Besides the daily items that are prepared fresh everyday, there are special menu items that change daily. Stop in or view our menu to see what’s on the line today.
What that description leaves out is how unusual this is. Restaurants of this age rarely survive at all, and almost never in the same family, in the same building, cooking from the same recipes. Silver Sands has done all three. The kitchen has passed from aunt to niece to daughter, and the recipes were taught at the stove rather than written down.
What we are
A meat-and-three, in the Nashville sense
Nashville has a particular restaurant tradition called the meat-and-three: a cafeteria-style counter where you pick one meat and three vegetables, and cornbread comes with the plate. It grew out of working-class kitchens feeding people quickly and cheaply, and it remains one of the few genuinely local restaurant forms in American cities.
Silver Sands is a meat-and-three that is also a soul food restaurant, and the owner does not draw a hard line between the two. As Sophia Vaughn once described it to a local news crew, the cooking is a combination of all of it — meat and three, soul, and comfort — with love at the top of the list.
Made from scratch
Greens cleaned by hand, cobbler baked in the pan, cornbread dropped into hot fat to order. The kitchen starts before four in the morning.
Changes by the day
The meats and vegetables rotate through the week, so Tuesday and Friday are genuinely different meals. The everyday items stay put.
Counter service
No reservations, no table service. You queue, you choose as you go, you pay at the end. It moves faster than it looks.
The owner
Sophia Vaughn
Sophia Vaughn is the third generation of her family to run Silver Sands, and a native Nashvillian who lives a couple of streets from the restaurant in the Hope Gardens neighbourhood.
She is up at two or three in the morning and cooking by the time most of the city is asleep, so that everything is ready when the doors open. She knows her regulars by name and by order, and she has described her customers as family more than once — including to reporters, during the weeks she was forced to close and could not feed them.
Before her, the kitchen belonged to her mother, Nellie McAdoo. Before that, to her aunt, Blanche Seay, who opened the place in the mid-1950s. Vaughn has said she intends to pass it to her own children, and that one of her daughters may already cook better than she does.
The neighbourhood
Hope Gardens, North Nashville
Silver Sands sits in Hope Gardens, a historically Black neighbourhood on the northern edge of downtown, around the corner from the Nashville Farmers’ Market and a short walk from Germantown. The restaurant predates the market in its current location, and it predates almost everything else now standing nearby.
The area has changed enormously. Vacant lots that sat empty for decades now hold new housing, and construction has come right up against the restaurant’s walls. Silver Sands has stayed put through all of it, and the owner has been clear in public that she intends to keep it that way.
That context matters to a lot of the people who eat here. Silver Sands is one of the oldest Black-owned businesses in the city, and for many regulars it is a fixed point in a part of Nashville where very little has stayed fixed.
Visiting from out of town?
We are ten minutes from Broadway and five from the Farmers’ Market, but this is not a tourist restaurant — it is a working neighbourhood cafe that happens to have been written about in a lot of places. Come as you are, bring cash or a card, and do not be shy about asking what things are.
Keep reading
More about Silver Sands
Press & recognition
The Southern Foodways Alliance, Atlas Obscura, TrueSouth and the Nashville press have all come through the door.
See the coverage →Guide to the dishes
What hog maws are, why cornbread is scalded with boiling water, and what to order if you have never eaten soul food.
Read the guide →