Chappy's on Church (Nashville)

Located about forty miles outside New Orleans, Chappy's Seafood Restaurant had been a fixture of the Gulf Coast culinary scene for over twenty years. But when Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005, John "Chappy" Chapman lost both his restaurant and his home. Less than a year later, Chappy was resettled in the West End area of Nashville, TN and reopened his restaurant as Chappy's on Church - a high end restaurant specializing in traditional Creole and Cajun seafood dishes.

Maggie and I both went to Vanderbilt University, so we have a bond with Nashville and decided to spend New Year's Eve there, visiting a few old friends and enjoying the live music that pours out the door of nearly every restaurant and bar in the city. We picked Chappy's for our New Year's Eve dinner.

Ducking into Chappy's from an unseasonably cold Nashville night, the first thing we noticed was the size and scale of Chappy's main dining room. I have no trouble believing the web site's claim that they can seat 220 for dinner. It's a giant rectangle of a place with French Quarter-inspired lights dangling from the ceiling and red and green taffeta curtains draping the windows in front, and the booths in the back.

Open and boxy with a huge aisle flanked by tables running down the center, if it were empty there couldn't be a more depressing layout. The word "intimate" would just bounce around the place laughing like a poltergeist. But on this night, Chappy's was packed. I don't know what a normal dinner service looks like, but at capacity Chappy's ambiance is cheerful enough, even if it feels a bit impersonal and, as one of our dinner companions pointed out, looks a little bit like a Chinese food restaurant.

Our waitress came over sniffling and fanning herself with her notepad, obviously sick. A friend asked what types of gin were available, and after hemming and hawing confessed she had no idea. She had a similar amount of knowledge about the specialty martinis. How long had this woman been working at Chappy's? Twenty minutes? When your waitress is too incompetent to take a drink order, there is a problem. We requested a new server.

From then on, service was fine - a slightly too-friendly (slightly drunk?) waitress with decent knowledge of the menu flitted ably about.

Chappy's serves a nice crusty loaf of bread to the table with four house-made butters. There is a garlic butter, a sweet cream butter, a strawberry butter, and an alligator butter. Admittedly, this is sort of a gimmick - the alligator butter just tastes a little extra salty and leathery - but it's a gimmick I got really excited about.

I this point I started forgetting about the bizarre service experience for all the right reasons.

An appetizer of seared tuna in Cajun spices was beautifully cooked and presented, with a generous portion for the table to share. A dark spice rub was complex and savory, with the tongue-satisfying tingle of salt, without tasting the least bit salty. Fried green tomatoes were as light as can be, while still staying Southern and fried and homey. Finding small crawfish tails hidden in the accompanying Creole hollandaise was a pleasant surprise, like a hazelnut in chocolate cake.

Our entrées arrived: seared scallops with spices similar to those found on the tuna, cooked until just past translucent. For me, two braised quails on a bed of Cajun rice that reminded me of Paella. As small game birds tend to be, the quails were difficult to eat, but just as well. I eat quickly and eating tricky food is a good way to slow down. That said, the total service time at Chappy's was 90 minutes - I think that's right on that mark for a 3-course meal at a nice restaurant, especially when the place is packed.

All of us agreed that the food was top notch. It exceeded our expectations in almost every way, but I can't help feeling that the whole evening was teetering on the edge of disaster. Only because we were able to overlook and move past the terrible initial service did we come out unscathed. It would have only taken one more mistake to ruin the dinner, but instead the kitchen did its job and sent us off for our New Year's Eve parties full, warm, and happy.

Chappy's on Church

1721 Church Street

Nashville, TN 37203-2921

(615) 322-9932