It sounds like the setup to a restaurant joke: A chef who staged at Copenhagen’s Noma (the world’s No. 1 restaurant, according to the pacesetting S. Pellegrino list) and a chef from Chicago’s Alinea (America’s No. 1) get together to start a new place…in Nashville. On October 12, The Catbird Seat—Erik Anderson and Josh Habiger’s 30-chair eatery above The Patterson House cocktail lounge—begins serving a very modern menu (Habiger’s influence) featuring locally foraged ingredients (Anderson’s philosophy). “Our goal is to get Nashville to try new things,” explains Habiger. But the two chefs are refreshingly anti-doctrinal. “You can’t use an ingredient just because it’s local,” says Anderson. “I mean, it has to taste good.”Photo: ANTHONYMATULA
