Two Nashville restaurants built on distinctly different ideas about dining have landed on The New York Times’ 2026 list of its 50 favorite restaurants in America.
Junior, chef Philip Krajeck’s restaurant inside an old Piggly Wiggly on Dickerson Pike, and Cauponor, a 14-seat restaurant hidden in the belly of Nashville’s Neuhoff District, were selected for the unranked national list.
Krajeck said this honor meant a lot to him and his team.
"We opened Junior wanting to build something that felt like us, and to have The New York Times recognize that means the world to the whole team," he said.
At Junior, Times writer Brett Anderson recognized the sense of calm he said underlies nearly every decision, including the concise menu he said unburdens customers
from excessive decision-making.
Anderson praised the precision of executive chef Brian Mejia’s cooking, the thick-sliced porridge bread and a wine list built by Billy Smith, formerly of the Four Horsemen in Brooklyn.
Even the relative quiet is intentional, Krajeck told The Tennessean earlier this year.
One year after opening, Junior still has exactly three cocktails: a martini, Negroni and Manhattan, batched before service and poured to order. Why premake them? Krajeck said that bartenders shaking cocktails in the 1,800-square-foot restaurant would disrupt the restaurant's environment.
“We think too much about everything,” Krajeck said.
That consideration extends from the pâté en croûte and delicate seasonal soufflés to the feather-light red goblets built to hold fantastic, hard-to-find wines.
"This is really a reflection of everyone in that kitchen and on that floor every night," Krajeck said of the recognition. "We're just grateful people are connecting with what we're doing."
Why Cauponor made the list
At Cauponor, the Neuhoff restaurant from the team behind Peninsula, Anderson had a different take. Nearly every dish had a distinct element of surprise, he said.
"Nearly every dish here leads you toward belief in what at first you weren’t so sure about: the horseradish oil that draws out the hammy flavor of aged tuna belly wrapped around local melon, the spruce gelée cutting through a richly brown-buttered kohlrabi that eats like potato pavé’s cerebral cousin," he wrote.
The seven-table restaurant leans on a sense of discovery, from finding it behind a wooden door near the bottom of the staircase leading to the amber-lit hallway that opens into a room where the light has the quality of golden hour filtered through curtains.
But in many ways, Cauponor defies explanation. That's a big part of the restaurant's identity, which the trio of owners has not otherwise clearly defined.
Executive Chef Jake Howell told The Tennessean early this year that the team has tried to create a space that reflects their shared philosophy, which mainly seems to be about serving delicious food in a gorgeous, intimate, and beautifully tuned environment that somehow also feels unpretentious.
"I just want to be able to have a restaurant and just call it a restaurant," he said.
More about Cauponor at cauponornashville.com. More about Junior at www.juniornashville.com.
Reach senior dining reporter Mackensy Lunsford at mlunsford@tennessean.com.
This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: 2 Nashville restaurants land on New York Times' 50 best in America
