Nashville

With a boutique hotel boom, a surge of restaurants and cocktail bars crowning the city’s rooftops, you don’t have to be a country music fan to get stuck in to Tennessee’s capital.

- Jonathan Thompson

A place nicknamed ‘Music City’ has a reputation to uphold, and Nashville certainly hits the right notes. Up and down Broadway, country music ebbs and flows from open-fronted venues like a rhinestone tide. But there’s considerably more to this city than just neon-powered honky-tonks and heartbroken harmonies. Nashville’s evolving into a thriving hub for young creatives, squeezed out of cities like New York by astronomical rents. They’re contributing to a restaurant scene that saw over 100 new openings last year, a lively farmers’ market, a flourishing rooftop cocktail culture and a boutique hotel boom. It sounds like Nashville is changing its tune — or at least adding a few new riffs.

East Nashville

The best way to discover left-leaning East Nashville is with an appetite. Here, in the traditional artisans’ district across the river from downtown, you’ll find a veritable feast of eating options, from quirky family-run cafes to hipster-friendly fusion restaurants. A favourite with aspiring musicians and young families alike, East Nashville is the kind of place where you find crumbling thrift stores and shady tattoo parlours next door to slick modern art galleries and stylish restaurants.

The smartest approach to the neighbourhood’s head-spinning menu of venues is to join a Walk Eat Nashville food tour. They’re led by local journalists, full of stories about the area’s history (like the time outlaw Jesse James hid out under an alias in one of the neighbourhood’s grand Victorian homes), as well as the colourful characters who reside here today. One of these personalities, Margot McCormack, runs a neighbourhood institution, Margot Cafe & Bar, renowned for its daily handwritten menus and stellar Sunday dinners.