Success for celebrity chefs won't come easily in Nashville

Dear Celebrity Chef,

You've been seen around town, tasting the scene and making sideways glances at promising locations. I'm not surprised. You represent the latest wave of outsiders looking in.

Nashville is indeed an awesome place and enjoys being on so many "it city" lists and culinary roundups. While our economic trajectory might be fairly typical of other boom towns, I want to share some completely unsolicited bits of advice with you.

The word 'celebrity'

Country music has long made Nashville a destination. It's an industry built on performers' and songwriters' ability to connect with common folk. Our stars will sit behind a folding table and sign autographs until the last fan is gone.

What that means is celebrity is special to us in its ordinariness. We don't treat stars as something apart from ourselves, and we respect them with privacy, grace and distance. Paparazzi are anathema to Nashville.

I say this because I don't want you to get your feelings hurt. Celebrity doesn't move us like it might in other cities, and your television-earned status might not carry the same cachet.

Fill a niche



As you know, we already have some great restaurants, and many of our chefs are on a par with anyone out there on the coasts. They might not be the best brand builders, but they have opened businesses that have evolved locally with the city's expanding appetite.

We have already elevated Southern food to the point of altitude sickness. We have shown we can take rustic Italian and inject new hybrid identity, and farm-to-fork is no longer a novelty but an expectation. We have steak and charcuterie, tacos and pho, and barbecue that's proper, true and righteous.

Yet we hunger for more. We want to experience more cuisines, more flavors that are new to our palates. We hunger for more and deeper authenticity.

Knock our socks off



If you are going to do it, do it well, and I mean really well, consistently. Do it with passion, not ego. We can smell apathy, and it starts at the host stand.

Going back to that celebrity thing, coming in with an established name only serves to lift the bar of great expectations. Your publicity machine will work hard to raise it even higher. Let your accolades lead the way, but show us why you earned those stars, those James Beard medals, those appearances on "Iron Chef." When the sparkling sheen of newness begins to fade, your ultimate success will depend more on the sustaining support of locals than the occasional minivan of tourists.

Be present



I know. This is a tough one. You're looking to expand your empire, not build a life in Nashville.

You want to bring your expertise, vision and access to investors and ride our surging wave of popularity. You want to get in on the second floor before that other time-slot star gets here.

Here's the thing. Our current restaurant landscape was built by folks who live here. Many are from here. They have come to know the community and we have come to recognize their faces, working in open kitchens. That's not a requirement, but it helps.

There are very few chef/restaurateurs who can build such ironclad systems that the discipline of both kitchen and front of the house can operate without their sustained presence. Some do this by grooming chefs and managers and then stepping back and handing them the keys to the house, but even then, they often have geography working on their side.

This is made even harder in a city where the talent pool is already shallow and evaporating with each new opening. I know this is a constant lament, but we don't have the developed base of other cities. Without your regular presence, or outstanding people in your place, it simply won't work.

Seek community and collaboration



Maneet Chauhan, one of your small-screen colleagues, was recruited by local investors. She marveled at the warmth of the chef community here, and wound up joining the ownership group and opening her eponymous Masala House.

She's right. We truly do welcome you if you come with a degree of humility and a healthy spirit of collaboration and cooperation. On the other hand, if your attitude is that you're going to finally show this town what "real" cooking is all about, you'll go the way of Andrew Chadwick, a talented chef who somehow managed to burn just about every bridge in town. At least he left us the antebellum shell that is home to Husk.

This community will help you source ingredients, share line cooks and drink whiskey with you into the wee hours, but it won't abide one-upmanship. Hospitality is not an industry here, it's a way of life.

Cautionary tales



I say this because I care and I want to see the quality of Nashville dining continue its climb. What we have is good, and what we want is better.

I already have concerns.

Two chefs, two celebrity chefs whom I like and respect greatly, are working through some of these very issues, and their cautionary tales are worth hearing.

On one hand is wunderkind Sean Brock, who returned to Nashville to find gleaming smiles and open arms. "He chose us," we whispered, excited to be the home of his Husk outpost. We felt that we knew Sean and took pride in his growth and evolution.

When Brock is in the house, I would hold up Husk Nashville as one of our best. But when he is not, it has lagged, and talk among the dining cognoscenti has begun to sour, much of it is warranted. Food quality and preparation have been inconsistent, and at times service flutters between the pretentious and the absurd. Chalk it up to growing pains, but most of it comes down to personnel and the absence of their leader.

The other example is a chef who I believe truly fell in love with our community. Jonathan Waxman began this affair with Nashville first through music, namely the Kings of Leon. That developed into a business partnership with music manager Ken Levitan and a significant investment in developing the Music City Food and Wine Festival, a gathering that will no doubt seed future waves of high-profile chefs.

The festival, going into its third year, is a beautiful example of filling a niche and has shown tremendous growth and improvement in just two years. Along the way, Waxman decided to open Adele's.

Both the front of the house and the kitchen at Adele's have shown serious miscues. At a cocktail party for Bon Appétit Magazine's Grub Crawl, I looked on in embarrassment at the haphazard and crumb-laden display of food and the poor attention to detail. It looked more like a frat party afterthought than a "best foot forward" for a national food media event.

While his menu is keenly uncomplicated, it should at least wrap us in the comfort of our expectations by being beautifully and well-executed. Waxman's signature roast chicken is glorious when done right, but has been served undercooked more than once. Other dishes, such as his sprouts and potatoes, have shown similar inattention. Waxman is a great chef, and a pioneer of a defining American cuisine from his days in California, so disappointment is all the harder to swallow.

Perhaps my greatest concern is the inevitable attrition of growth. While the closings of stalwarts such as F. Scott's and Sunset Grill are in part because of concepts that have played out, their demise was hastened by the rise of the next, next thing. When we act like cats chasing lasers, we forget the old reliable bundles of catnip that have entertained us for so long.

My fear is that the bubble for high-end, chef-driven restaurants is already stretched thin, and is testing the tensile strength of the one key indicator: the critical mass of diners needed to support this culinary growth. I don't want it to burst any time soon.

So, bring it, celebrity chefs. We welcome you. Really, we do. Just please do it right. Amaze us. Amuse our bouches, and be the beacons of great service we expect from players coming to us from a bigger stage.

We already have some great places to go.

Reach Jim Myers at 615-259-8367 and on Twitter @ReadJimMyers.

Already here

• Jonathan Waxman

Adele's, 1210 McGavock St.

• Sean Brock

Husk Nashville, 37 Rutledge St.

• Maneet Chauhan

Chauhan Ale & Masala House, 123 12th Ave. N.

• Dale Levitski

Sinema, 2600 Franklin Pike

Opening in 2015

• Richard Blais

FLIP burger, 4111 Charlotte Ave. (opens Jan. 21)

• Donald Link

Cochon Butcher, 1120 Fourth Ave. N.

Seen around town: Andrew Zimmern, Bobby Flay, Aaron Sanchez