Pancakes in Paradise

This blog post was sponsored by my friend Jeffrey of the Jeffrey van Leeuwen Podcast.

Check out his his podcast here:

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I’ve been informed that there’s nothing more American than sitting in a little wayside country diner with a plate full of pancakes and mug of bad coffee while tumbleweeds roll past outside.

I have been nowhere near tumbleweeds recently, but decided it was time to go find a little slice of that American Dream that my friend from the Netherlands had been talking about.

I was in Nashville at the time, and it did not disappoint.

Here is the Loveless Cafe, a tourist hotspot of the flavor of Americana I was after that’s been in business for over 70 years:

Loveless Cafe Sign, Probably the Original from the 1950s.
How is the 1950s 70 years ago already?!

It wasn’t much to look at out front, but this was an illusion of the TARDIS variety:

The Unassuming Outside of the Loveless Cafe
If there hadn’t been a multitude of cars outside I’d’ve had no idea it was a tourist hotspot.

Apparently most days you need to have a reservation if you’re not there at 8 AM when they open.

One of the locals told me this after the fact, but I was fortunate enough to be seated right away when I got there a bit later on a Wednesday morning.

Below is the view of the lobby area when you walk in. While I didn’t look super closely at most of the photos on the wall, I recognized none of them.

So, it’s a good bet they’re all country singers.

Lobby of the Loveless Cafe

Had I been used to this blogging thing, I would have gotten more photos of the inside of the place, ’cause it was much more spacious than this next photo shows.

I really even just took the picture to show that I was joined by the Man in Black for breakfast.

There was country music playing quietly in the background the whole time. Pretty sure the song playing when I sat down was Johnny Cash, too…sounded like his voice, but I couldn’t quite make out which one it was.

The Man in Black Himself

As soon as I was seated, I was greeted with a plate of steaming buttermilk biscuits.

Talk about hospitality!

They were served with the Loveless Cafe’s very own peach and strawberry preserves.

Both were excellent.

I thought the peach ones were slightly better.

Biscuits (9 / 10) with Homemade Peach (8 / 10) and Strawberry (7 / 10) Preserves

I sat and enjoyed the atmosphere and biscuits.

But not for very long.

It’s not that I stopped enjoying either, it’s that the pancakes arrived super quickly.

Now I was living the American Dream.

Minus the tumbleweeds.

And the coffee wasn’t bad, either.

The Pancakes (7 / 10) with Bacon (5 / 10) and Coffee (8 / 10)

This place had a BBQ pit out back, too, so I got a biscuit with their pulled pork (6 / 10).