On any given day, someone is waking up in Nashville committed to making something unique that you didn’t know you needed, something that you would come to crave.

Thai fried chicken. Tacos made with corn from a small farm in Oaxaca, Mexico. Korean egg sandwiches. Authentic French baguettes. Macha tea cake. Small-batch mead.

Sometimes, there’s only one thing on the menu, whether it be an absolutely perfect smashed cheeseburger or an unlikely combination of homemade soft serve with a side of perfectly seasoned french fries.

Meet the makers, entrepreneurs creating out-of-the-box food and drink who are changing the culinary landscape in Nashville. Some of them operate out of brick and mortars. Others use borrowed spaces or food trucks. A fairly large number have nothing but a pop-up canopy tent. Many don’t keep set hours or days. To find them, they depend on fans to stalk Twitter and Instagram. They are their own cooks, dishwashers and social media marketers.

“Talk about throwing a rock,” says Sam Corley, a Realtor who is the administrator of the 50,000-member Foodies of Nashville Facebook page. “Just pull in the nearest parking lot and you’ll find a good meal.”

Not surprisingly, the largest demographic in the group is ages 25-34, younger people who aren’t fazed by planning a meal around a place that will only be open three hours a day and might well run out of food before closing.

No one keeps track of how many makers open their doors or lift their tent flaps annually, but the consensus among educated observers is that Nashville provides an unusually welcoming atmosphere.

“It’s different from a lot of cities,” says Delia Jo Ramsey, a freelance food writer and creator of Dining With Delia Jo.com. “Nashville is so attached to the new and they think the pop ups are exciting. For these makers, when they’re creating the food the energy is palpable.”

Let’s meet a few of the makers.

Sweeter Than Honey

Do Ross Welbon and Dru Sousan tend bees or make mead? Turns out, the answer is both. The former bartenders turned beekeepers turned mead makers has created Honeytree Meadery, a boutique business in East Nashville (918 Woodland Street) that creates a variety of signature meads.

Most meads – made by fermenting honey mixed with water and other ingredients – are super sweet, but Honeytree has perfected meads that are on the much dryer side that are actually refreshing. While mead can be a hard sell due to its unfamiliarity, Sousan says if he can get you to try it, you’ll like it.

“When people say ‘we don’t like mead,’ we say yes. Challenge accepted,” he says. “We’re up against two things. Either they’ve never had it or they had it and didn’t like it because it was too sweet.”

Developing mead started as a love for bees and a desire to not only save their fragile environment, but also help beekeepers make a sustainable living. Welbon and Sousan started with a couple of hives they kept in an alley. A disaster involving some of the bees ingesting pesticides in the urban environment and infecting the hive sent the pair to more remote locations, one in Ashland City and the other in Leiper’s Fork where they keep 30 hives.

“You want to be as remote as you possibly can,” Sousan says. “On average, the bee’s flight path for harvesting honey is 3 miles. So wherever you place your hives you want to have a three-mile radius of knowing there’s no farming, no pesticides used.”

Their own honey goes into the standard Honeytree meads, which take from three to 12 months to make. They also buy honey from small-batch producers to make specialty meads.

“Because we were beekeepers first, we saw all these beekeepers not being able to make a living,” Sousan says. “We saw all these beekeepers just give up. So for us to make a product that is made almost entirely from their honey that more people are into, we can directly fund more beekeepers and that’s the name of the game.”

The only thing lacking when Honeytree opened was food to go with the mead. There was a small area in front of the building. And that’s where the collaborative nature of the makers came in. The meadery offered it to any pop up restaurant that wanted it. Alebrije, an artisan Mexican pop up, took up residence and now completes a perfect marriage. Customers get their tacos and quesadillas outside and then head inside to pair them with the perfect mead.

Bottoms Up

Rhonda Cammon is on a roll as she dives into her third career.

Perfectly Cordial non-alcoholic cocktails was created by Rhonda Cammon, a nurse who had seen too many drinking-related probles in young adults.

-- Photos By Michelle Morrow |The Ledger

Cammon’s first career was nursing. And she noticed with alarm how many patients she saw with liver failure.

“I always had at least one patient who had a liver diagnosis because of alcohol,” she says. “These were 20- and 30-year-olds coming to the ER with liver failure.”

So in Career Two, Cammon is trying to remedy that by creating a signature line of mocktails, alcohol-free beverages that mimic cocktails.

“It just got my goat because if you didn’t drink alcohol there were limited choices,” she says. “This was before the mocktail movement. I wanted something that a customer could order that you’d never know it was a mocktail.”

Her company, Perfectly Cordial, features mocktails with such unique combinations as cardamom pear, cassis and apple, hibiscus and honeycomb, and jalapeño mint. The products are shelf stable and can be combined with alcohol for those who want it.

In the beginning and while still maintaining her nursing career, Cammon started self-distributing and marketing the product herself. “Get a website and you start knocking on doors, shaking hands and kissing babies,” she says. “And then COVID hit. COVID was the best of times and the worst of times. I luckily had a website I had thrown together. And then the world shut down. Before the website I was doing a lot of pop-up markets. It took me away from the stress of being a nurse.”

Cammon got through the pandemic and learned a lot about business during the shutdown. One lesson was that distribution really favored large producers over the small-batch ones. And that led to her third career founding oneSHOP, a collection of small businesses that have banded together under one roof to sell their products.

“oneSHOP happened because I was looking for a way for distribution,” she says. “Distribution right now is very archaic and a lot of pay to play and it doesn’t benefit the small makers. It was a proof of concept to see if a nonalcoholic retail spot and bar would make it in Nashville. If I’m having the same problems with distribution, others are.”

oneSHOP sells everything from sandwiches and baked goods to take-home meals and handmade condiments, all created by small entrepreneurs. The “staff” is Cammon, other makers and students from TSU and Harpeth Hall. Makers pay a small shelf-space fee and sometimes Cammon buys an entire order wholesale.

“I see us as an anomaly,” she says. “It’s the right place, the right time and the right people.”

King of the Table

“Bread is the king of the table and all else is merely the court that surrounds the king.” – American novelist Lois Bromfield.

Elodie Habert, founder of Cocorico bakery

-- Photos By Michelle Morrow |The Ledger

If bread is the king, then Elodie Habert is the queen. The French-born founder of Cocorico, Habert makes artisan French baguettes as the center of her business and fills in around the edges with sandwiches, quiches, desserts and accompaniments.

Habert moved here from Nantes, France, in 2016 for her husband’s work. Two years later, she created Cocorico with a friend with the goal of bringing authentic French food to Nashville.

“It started around a coffee table,” says Habert. “I was with a French friend and we were just discussing how hard it was to find good French food in Nashville, especially baguettes. We started playing with recipes and invited our friends to a tasting and that’s how Cocorico started.”

Like so many other makers, Cocorico is based at Citizen Kitchen. It’s a commercial kitchen designed for small food entrepreneurs to test their recipes and perfect their craft in a budget-friendly environment.

“We have farmers market partnerships to get our tomatoes, honey and other ingredients,” Habert says.

-- Photos By Michelle Morrow |The Ledger

“It’s one of the best food incubators in Nashville,” Habert says. “We’ve grown from one farmers market a month to four a week. We work with grocery stores, the airport and do catering, as well. It’s tremendous how Nashville has embraced our products.” Last year, Cocorico baked more than 17,000 baguettes.

Cocorico works closely with farmers at the markets to supply seasonal ingredients for the menu. “We have farmers market partnerships to get our tomatoes, honey and other ingredients,” she says. “Because we are already selling at farmers’ markets, we’re already building those connections so we just go to a booth across the market. It’s exciting to partner with very local farms and support the local community. And it brings better products. You have flavor and quality.”

Low and Slow

Bill LaViolette says he wasn’t cut out for an office job. What he really wanted to do was tend a hot wood-fired pit for hours, gently nudging along giant cuts of beef and pork until they achieved the perfect taste, texture and smokiness. What he wanted was a place called Shotgun Willie’s BBQ.

Nashville gave the native Texan just that after moving here to open a bakery with his then wife.

“When Yeast Nashville opened, my ex-wife and I were on a career crossroads,” he remembers. “Neither of us wanted to work in an office. We decided to open a bakery. I don’t know if I would ever have had the bravery to make that leap if I lived in Houston.

“But there was something about living in East Nashville. The mindset was we are not going to become millionaires doing this, but the neighborhood won’t let us fail. It was true with that bakery and it’s true with the BBQ. Nashville gave me the comfort level to step out on that ledge. I knew we were at least going to survive.”

Survival, though, came into question in 2020 when the world shut down.

“I originally thought the restaurant was going to open in October of 2019,” he says. “And then I hit a ton of delays. And when I was thinking we were finally getting through the construction, I stood in that space in January of 2020 and cried because I never thought it would get clean enough to serve food. And then the universe said ‘have you heard of a global pandemic?’

“What it came down to was I didn’t have a choice. We were so far along in the process it was impossible for us not to open. We are out of money; we have to unlock the door. Let’s see what happens. Here we go.”

Compounding the risk, LaViolette refused to use a delivery service that might compromise the product and didn’t offer phone-in orders. “I say this tongue-in-cheek, but we made you stand in line for food during a pandemic.”

And fans of this Texas BBQ are still standing in line today. Shotgun Willie’s (4000 Gallatin Pike Suite B) is only open Wednesday-Sunday, 11 a.m.-3 p.m., or until the ‘que sells out. It routinely sells out. And that has created an expectation of scarcity in that you’ll be out of luck if you show up close to 3 p.m.

The 500-gallon offset smoker can only produce so much brisket, ribs, pulled pork and sausage a day.

LaViolette makes Texas-style BBQ. It’s more savory than the Southern version, relying at times only on salt and pepper to season the meat. His brisket in particular is a real standout – meltingly tender with a fragrant punchy outer bark.

It and his other meats and sides are so popular, LaViolette is moving to a space double the size in the next few months, near Eastside Bowl in Madison. He’s also doubling the size of his smoker.

“I’m not growing because I want to grow,” he says. “I’m growing because we have to grow. We had to get a bigger dining room and a bigger smoker because people want to come to eat what we have to eat. I’m a guy just living the dream. I never wanted to work in a corporate office. To be in a position to live the life I want, doing the things I want to do…I’m so lucky and I never lose sight of that.”

Life Lessons

One thing these culinary pioneers have in common is that they’re all eager to help other entrepreneurs grow and benefit from the lessons they’ve learned along the way.

“Everyone is in it together,” Sousan says. “You never feel any competition. Everybody’s so sharing with information and equipment and assistance.”

LaViolette says he strongly believes it’s his duty to help other small-business owners, whether they’re in his industry or not.

“We’re all trying to navigate this industry that’s built to work against us,” he says. “There are so many obstacles put in the way of small-business owners that could be streamlined. There’s a three-part path to opening your own business. The first is the dream. I love BBQ. I want to cook BBQ. Part B is all the other garbage you have to go through whether it’s funding your own business, all the regulations. Part C is opening the doors.

“If you can get through B you can get through anything. It’s the hardest part,” LaViolette continues. “Having the dream and unlocking the door are the two easiest things. Part B calluses your skin enough that if you’re faced with a global pandemic you just wake up and say what do we have to do to open the door.”

Habert relishes the camaraderie she’s found in the makers community. “Everyone is eager to help each other, which I haven’t seen in other cities,” she says. “We have something special here.”