Silver Sands sits in Hope Gardens, a historically Black neighbourhood on the northern edge of downtown Nashville, just off 10th Avenue North and a short walk from the Nashville Farmers’ Market. To understand the restaurant, it helps to understand the neighbourhood it has occupied since the mid-1950s — because very little of that neighbourhood looks the way it did when Blanche Seay opened these doors.
What the area looked like then
When Silver Sands opened, Hope Gardens was a working, largely African American community, and the restaurant was built to feed the people who lived and worked in it. The Farmers’ Market did not yet exist in its current location around the corner. There were no condominiums, no short-term rentals, none of the newer construction that now presses close against our walls.
What has changed
Over the following decades, and especially in the last ten to fifteen years, North Nashville has seen enormous redevelopment. Lots that sat vacant for decades — including the one immediately next door to us — have been built up with new housing. Property values and rents have shifted the makeup of the neighbourhood considerably. It is, in short, one of the more visibly gentrifying corners of the city.
That change has not been abstract for us. In January 2025, new construction on the long-vacant lot next door forced the temporary closure of our kitchen over a code violation involving our decades-old exhaust vent, which suddenly sat too close to the new building to meet fire code. It took a nine-thousand-dollar repair and roughly two weeks closed to resolve.
Why we are still here
Silver Sands is one of the oldest Black-owned businesses in Nashville, and the family that runs it has been clear, publicly and repeatedly, that it intends to stay exactly where it is. When the closure happened, customers and neighbours organised in support, and the queue on reopening day ran out of the restaurant and onto the pavement.
For a lot of regulars, that matters beyond the food. In a neighbourhood where nearly everything else has been rebuilt, Silver Sands is one of the few fixed points left — the same building, the same family, the same recipes, in a part of the city where very little else has stayed the same.
Read the full account in our history page, including the 2020 tornado and the 2025 closure in more detail.
Come see it yourself. 937 Locklayer Street, around the corner from the Nashville Farmers’ Market. See directions and parking.