Date Night: Nashville City Cemetery, Dicey’s Pizza & Tavern and Never Never

Date Night is a multipart road map for everyone who wants a nice evening out, but has no time to plan it. It’s for people who want to do more than just go to one restaurant and call it a night. It’s for overwhelmed parents who don’t get out often; for friends who visit the same three restaurants because they’re too afraid to try someplace new; and for busy folks who keep forgetting all the places they’ve driven past, heard about, seen on social and said, “Let’s remember that place next time we go out.”

All I know about Ladie Savage Butts is that she was born in 1882 and died in 1957. I don’t know how she lived and died or whether she took her biscuits with butter or jam — only that she gets my vote for Most Interesting Headstone in the Nashville City Cemetery, where my husband Dom and I started our recent date night. 

It is absolutely gorgeous there, friends. And it’s hiding in plain sight, just a couple blocks south of where the Second and Fourth avenues exit dumps you off of I-40 East. In this random, industrial-ish area, Nashville’s oldest continuously operated public cemetery is a well-preserved pocket of tree-lined walkways, weathered statues and iron gates that creeaak open to the final resting place of Civil War veterans, former Nashville mayors, enslaved people and Nashville’s founding families. 

It’s blessedly empty, even at sundown when the heat finally relents and the light’s just right. I spied a total of three people in the distance as we strolled from one end to the other, and crossed paths with exactly no one.

It’s also impossibly quiet. Only two sounds broke the silence during our visit: the Nashville City Cemetery tour app, which offered historical facts as we passed various markers, and the occasional woo bus. As I approached sweet Ladie Savage Butts’ headstone to get a closer look, one rolled by thumping out “Drop It Like It’s Hot” with a gaggle of bachelorettes doing just that. Gotta say, I’m still trying to wrap my head around that bizarro collision of O.G. Nashville and modern times.

Dicey’s Pizza & Tavern

From either of the cemetery exits, both of which face Fourth Avenue South, Dicey’s Pizza & Tavern is an easy eight-minute walk around the corner and over the train tracks in the Wedgewood-Houston neighborhood. 

Dicey’s is a super casual spot with solid service. It’s a lot bigger than it looks from the outside, with space in the bar, main room, outdoor covered deck and back patio for all the double dates, tables of dudes, bachelorette parties, people who take their dogs to dinner and families young and old to be together, but not on top of each other.  

When we arrived at 6 p.m. on a Friday night, the main area was full, and we shared the crispy cheese over a picnic table. Besides the shape, what makes these two fried pockets of mozzarella different from every other mozzarella stick in America? A layer of basil lemon pesto that gives each bite a nice, herby hit.

I want to throw my full support behind any kitchen creative enough to use salt-and-pepper potato chips instead of croutons on a salad, so I ordered the Little Gem with roasted cauliflower and creamy lemon-anchovy dressing. With all of those ingredients, it should have been a 10/10 in terms of textures and flavors, but it was strangely one-note. I kept eating it, thinking there might be something wrong with me rather than the salad. Then a toddler threw a ping pong ball into it, and his mother, after many apologies, remarked offhandedly, “Make sure to squeeze the lemon all over that salad. I love it, but last time I had it they were off on their dressing.” We had much better luck with the Chopped Greek. 

Dicey’s hangs their hat on thin-crust, pub-cut pizzas dusted with semolina flour on the bottom, which gives it a nice grit. They do some fun combos, like hot-pickle-bacon-cheddar, sausage-and-giardiniera, and cacio e pepe, in addition to the classics (cheese, pepperoni, sausage, veggie) and create-your-own. I like the slight funk that taleggio cheese gives the Hippy Flip (roasted mushrooms, lemon, green onion) and the restrained heat of the Earth Crisis, but it could’ve used some cheese to keep all the cubes of roasted eggplant and onion from diving to their death on my plate.

I have a huge soft spot for Dicey’s: Their branding, from the menu to the plates, red plastic tumblers and pizza boxes, reminds me of the old-school pizza parlors and red-sauce joints I visited with my Grandma Antrilli in Pittsburgh as a kid. So I say this with love: Most of the food we had on two visits was oversalted, from the fried pickles to the $1 side of ranch. What I initially thought was a chunk of shaved Parmesan in the cracks and crevices of my Earth Crisis was a big clump of flaky salt. 

This is an easy fix, and should stop exactly no one from trying it out or going back.

Never Never

A couple options when you leave Dicey’s: If you’re over the eating and drinking, as I often am, walk just across the train tracks on your right to the grassy area in front of Live Nation, hop on a swing and sit in the glow of the guitar-shaped scoreboard developers bought from Greer Stadium when the Nashville Sounds left for greener fields. Or make three lefts: one out the door of Dicey’s onto Chestnut, another at the crosswalk at Martin and one more on Houston, the second half of the neighborhood’s namesake.

You could stop for a drink at Earnest Bar & Hideaway — instead of listing out ingredients on the cocktail menu they make up a fun story about each. You could duck into Jackalope or Bastion. Or keep going until you can’t go anymore, where Houston dead-ends into the train tracks and you’ve arrived at Never Never.

Never Never has no theme. It barely has decor. That’s what makes it great. Half the space is a traditional indoor bar setup; the other half is an outdoor bar and patio. They have a short list of cocktails, a slightly longer list of beers, and chunky chili or chili nachos, beef or veg style. This is not a place to see and be seen; it’s a place to sit and be with your people. The best bars don’t beat you over the head with who they are; they’re a shell for whatever you need them to be.