Why people write about us

A restaurant that is also a record

Silver Sands gets written about for two reasons. The first is the food. The second is that a family-run soul food restaurant that has operated continuously in one Nashville building since the mid-1950s is now a genuinely rare thing, and people who study Southern food have noticed.

We have never courted the attention. It arrived because the restaurant kept doing what it does, for long enough that it became part of the city’s history.

Recognition

Where Silver Sands has appeared

Southern Foodways Alliance

A documented piece of Southern food history

The Southern Foodways Alliance, the University of Mississippi-based institute that documents the food cultures of the American South, has been a long-standing supporter. Sophia Vaughn was invited to prepare lunch at the 17th Southern Foodways Symposium alongside Kahlil Arnold of Arnold’s Country Kitchen, and the SFA commissioned a short film about Silver Sands made by Jordan Berger.

Vaughn’s cooking has also featured at an SFA summer symposium in Nashville and at the John Egerton Prize ceremony.

TrueSouth · SEC Network

The Nashville episode

John T. Edge filmed the Nashville episode of the documentary series TrueSouth at Silver Sands. Edge, then director of the Southern Foodways Alliance, has publicly described the cafe as a “backbone restaurant” — one that supports the working women and men of the city.

Atlas Obscura

A living piece of history

Gastro Obscura profiled Silver Sands as a place where regulars have lined up five days a week for more than seventy years for the classic meat-and-three, noting that the third woman in her family to run it makes everything from scratch daily — waking at two in the morning and starting to cook an hour later.

Nashville news

Local coverage, repeatedly

WKRN, WSMV, NewsChannel 5, the Nashville Scene and The Tennessean have all covered the restaurant — its longevity, the 2020 tornado damage and community-funded recovery, and the 2025 closure over a code violation caused by construction next door.

The chef community

Nashville’s kitchens turned out

When the tornado and pandemic closed Silver Sands in 2020, local chefs organised to help it reopen. The LEE Initiative matched funds raised of at least $10,000, and chef Sean Brock auctioned a private virtual cooking class hosted with his mother to raise more.

Online

The audience that built itself

Silver Sands has more than twelve thousand followers on Instagram and a similar community on Facebook, where reviews run overwhelmingly positive. Much of it comes from customers filming their own plates rather than from anything we have posted.

In her own words

What Sophia has said about it

Speaking to News 2 during the 2025 closure, Vaughn described what being shut actually felt like: not the lost income, but the absence of the room itself — the regulars, the music, watching people eat her food. She said it felt like losing family.

Asked years earlier by the same station to describe her cooking, she refused to narrow it to one label. She called herself a combination of all of it — meat and three, soul, and comfort — and put love at the top of the list.

And on staying in a neighbourhood being rebuilt around her, her position has been consistent: whatever gets built here, this Black-owned restaurant is staying.

Read the full history

Writing about Silver Sands?

For press enquiries, interviews or photography, call 615-780-9900 or email silversandscafe37208@gmail.com. The kitchen is busiest between 6:30am and 2:30pm, so late morning is usually the worst time to reach anyone by phone.

Press & recognition