Feel the Burn: Pelican & Pig Fires Up East Nashville

Prior to Feb. 25, I had never heard of sweet corn ribs. The day after, I couldn’t stop thinking of them — even now, I still whip out my phone and share the photos I took at East Nashville’s Pelican & Pig. One of my dining companions, who admitted with not one twitch of guilt to snagging more than her share from the table’s bowl, has added sweet corn ribs to her official last-meal menu.

As it turns out, I was woefully out of touch on a thing that had been trending forever on TikTok. I am not a TikTok user. Nor is Pelican & Pig chef/fire master Nick Guidry, who owns P&P with wife and pastry chef Audra Guidry. “People in my kitchen knew about it, and I really just added them as a kind of lark,” he says. “Now, if I took them off the menu, we’d have people with pitchforks coming for us. Our kid loves them too.”

What’s not to love? Besides being fun-to-eat finger food, they’re addictive — buttery, salty, spicy and smoky.

The big stack of cut wood just outside the front door at Pelican & Pig is a reliable clue of the type of cooking that Guidry adheres to — confirmed by the campfire scent wafting through the parking lot, and inside, the flames that draw the eye to the open kitchen where he and his crew work on fire, in ember, ash and brick oven. “Live fire has always been my favorite type of cooking,” he says. “To me, it’s more of a seasoning than a cooking element. Cooking 95 percent of our menu with fire and live embers is a big challenge. It’s uncontrollably controllable.”

In considering how to bring what he loved doing outdoors safely indoors, Guidry studied restaurants around the world that were similarly devoted to it. Then he built the giant hearth himself, laying every brick and pouring every bit of concrete, designing everything with the exception of the brick oven to be modular so he could reconfigure as needed.

The live-fire protein station has a Santa Maria-style grill — a large wheel lifts and lowers the metal grill to regulate the heat and interludes with flame. Some vegetables are parcooked then finished over fire; some start on the grill and are then roasted over and under embers. The famous corn ribs get dunked 15 seconds into the fryer for a quick crisp before getting a char over fire and being tossed in herbed butter and two different house-created spice blends. The smallish whole Yukon potatoes are parboiled, roughly smashed with herb butter, fried for texture, showered with roasted garlic bits and laid atop a puddle of crème fraiche, evocative of a baked potato and sour cream.

Like the corn ribs, the fried cheese is a sly wink and a crowd-pleaser, a play on fried cheese sticks with a Nashville twist. The house-made hot chicken spice has fired up different items in the snack section since the restaurant opened in 2019; the night we dined it was in the dredge for a solid block of mozzarella cheese, deep-fried and sprinkled with chopped green onion, centered on an unadorned plate. It had such authentic hot chicken flavor, with a heat level equivalent to a Prince’s medium, that I was wishing for a pile of pickles and a piece of white bread to wrap around a slice of melty cheese. It’s key to find that fleeting moment between tongue-scorching heat and when it cools to an odd state resembling rubber. I wouldn’t advise ordering this for any fewer than four people to share.

We almost breezed by the Brussels because my eyes tend to glaze over at the sight of the word, but I’m glad we didn’t — and you shouldn’t either. Of the roughly 87 versions of Brussels sprouts I’ve tried since they became ubiquitous on so many menus, Pelican & Pig’s smoke-kissed orbs, glazed with honey and miso and nestled under a snowdrift of shaved Parmesan, are among the best.

A full meal could easily be made of the snacks and small plates, but why deny Guidry, his staff and the dozen diners who have staked claim on the stools at the kitchen bar the visceral thrill of seeing flames shoot into the air around a thick pork chop or ribeye on that Santa Maria grill? Or deny yourself the elemental pleasure of biting into a fire-kissed chop or steak?

Regularly, two steaks, a pork chop and a seafood selection are the entrée options. The 2-inch-thick Bear Creek heritage pork chop had just the right amount of fat, which I was professionally obligated to sample — I sliced it like a stick of room-temp butter to reveal a glistening pink interior. It lay atop a mound of whipped cotija cheese, blended with cream and cream cheese and beside a fan of embered cabbage so tender it seemed braised.

A fillet of corvina — a meaty white fish — was crisped on the edges, swaddled in brown butter, and perched on celery-root puree. The accompanying cluster of confit hen-of-the-woods mushrooms was a tease; I urge adding them as a small plate.

It pains me to say this, and surely it was an aberration, but we were quite disappointed in what is lauded as Pelican & Pig’s most popular dessert, the chocolate chip cookies, aka Separation Anxiety. For $2 per cookie, I expect something with more volume than a flattened silver-dollar pancake; as much as I love a warm, classic chocolate chip cookie, I left half on the plate, and was wishing we had ordered the cinnamon apple cheesecake with salted caramel, pecans and granola instead. I was envious of the couple next to us, clearly enjoying their better choice.

The decor of the dining rooms, beverage bar, kitchen bar and furnishings is minimal and rustic, but comfortable and cozy; refreshingly unpretentious and organically complementing the restaurant’s down-to-earth culinary character and honest hospitality.

Pelican & Pig is a valuable asset in East Nashville’s enviable and diverse portfolio of independent, authentic neighborhood restaurants — a genuine, home-grown, hearth- and heartfelt concept all of Nashville should invest in.