The brisket was gone by 1:30 p.m., but smoke still rose from the smokehouse at Loveless Cafe on a blistering Saturday afternoon.
Inside, the dining room was full. Signed photographs near the host stand documented decades of famous visitors, from Chris Stapleton and Al Gore to Princess Anne, Martha Stewart and Bobby Flay. For a moment on Sept. 19, though, the room belonged to Robin Warren.
Service manager Jonathan Crutchfield led customers in singing "Happy Birthday" to the server, who has worked at Loveless for a decade.
She wasn't the only one celebrating. The restaurant was 75.
Over in the air-conditioned Barn, Natasha Neely, a 14-year professional Dolly Parton impersonator, paid tribute to the late icon and posed for pictures with children during
Jam Fest, the restaurant's anniversary celebration.
"Loveless Cafe is a staple here in Nashville, and has been for 75 years, just like Dolly is a Nashville icon. And I think the combination of Loveless Cafe and Dancing with Dolly is a great fit," said Neely.
Danielle Bradbery, Brooke Lee, and Jesse Lee Jones and Brazilbilly performed on the Robert's Western World stage. All net proceeds benefited Second Harvest Food Bank of Middle Tennessee.
What is Loveless Cafe's story?
It began with hungry travelers stopping along Highway 100, once the primary connector between Nashville and Memphis, for Lon and Annie Loveless's fried chicken and biscuits in 1951.
The couple turned their home into a restaurant and 14-room motel, where Lon tended to the rooms and cured and smoked country hams while Annie made the biscuits and preserves.
The appetite for smoked meat has outgrown the smokehouse built in 2004. Executive chef Scott Peck, who marked 14 years at Loveless in May, said adding a second rack doubled its capacity, but the Saturday brisket still regularly sells out.
The biscuits require an operation of their own.
On the busiest days, the restaurant makes 10,000. From 5 a.m. until about 9 p.m., someone is mixing dough or rolling, cutting and baking biscuits. Only a select group gets those shifts, and cooks must prove themselves before their biscuits reach a customer's table.
Every batch is mixed by hand to avoid overworking the dough, which rests for 24 hours before rolling. Cut too thin, the biscuits are too small. Too thick, and they won't cook through.
It's serious business.
Every batch is mixed by hand. Machinery would make it too easy to overwork the dough, which rests for 24 hours before rolling, Peck said. Too thin, and the biscuits are too small. Too thick, and they won't cook through.
For all that work, most land on the table, but not on the bill.
“We don't even sell most of our biscuits," Peck said. "Just for coming into the front doors of the cafe, we give them away. It's a loss-leader for sure."
The preserves get similar attention.
"It's fruit, sugar and time, and literally nothing else — no pectin, no thickeners," he said. "Because of that, it's definitely an expensive item to produce. We could save a lot of money if we would ever be willing to take a look at something like Smucker's."
Peck knows customers come for Loveless's fried chicken, not Scott Peck's fried chicken. Hiring chefs means finding people who understand that distinction and can resist the urge to leave their own mark on recipes that have worked for decades.
Even the strawberry preserves count as a recent development.
"Try our new flavor, strawberry," he joked. "We've only been making it for 15 years."
The building demands its own accommodations. The kitchen is still tucked into the original home, with prep areas squeezed into available pockets. One table folds up against the wall when it isn't needed, like a Murphy bed.
Peck estimates the cafe has served as many as 3,000 people in a single day, with only about 130 seats.
Those tight quarters, and the volume of food coming out of them, surprised the team from Locust when they visited ahead of a collaborative dinner.
Nashville's grand dame of Southern cooking had invited the newcomers into a kitchen with very little room to spare.
"It's a kitchen built inside of an old family home," Peck said. "Spoiler, there's not a lot of real estate."
'They know what they're going to get'
For Wendy Felts, Loveless's community relations manager, inviting newer restaurants into the kitchen is a chance to share what 75 years in business can teach.
"We have to share our experience as a company or business that has been around a long time with the newbies," she said.
Felts has spent 18 years learning the place herself. A 1978 graduate of the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, New York, she arrived to expand catering and open the Loveless Barn before it had even been built. She worked with the construction crew, managed events and eventually worked in every department.
Community relations is her favorite.
"I'm a talker," she said.
Even after nearly two decades, she isn't the longest-serving employee. And some customers make her tenure look brief.
Willis "Stoby" Reynolds, a 101-year-old World War II veteran, has been eating at Loveless for half a century.
In a video shared by the restaurant, he named his favorites: "the breakfast, lunch and dinner."
He called the food "excellent" and the service "out of this world."
Another family returns every Easter. Felts has watched their gathering grow smaller over the years, then grow again.
"We are consistent in what we do," she said, "and they know what they're going to get."
With retirement on her mind, Felts is beginning to look back on her own part in that history.
"It's been a good run," she said. "It's been a really good run."
Peck found himself thinking further back, to Lon and Annie. The anniversary party was a way to acknowledge what they started and imagine what they might make of it now.
"I know they're not around to see it," he said. "But if there is an afterlife and they're able to look down, I hope they were pleased with it."
Mackensy Lunsford is the senior dining reporter for The Tennessean. Reach her at mlunsford@tennessean.com.
This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: At 75, Loveless Cafe still makes 10,000 biscuits a day. By hand.
