Avo

Avo is a fully plant-based restaurant at 4 City Blvd, Suite 104, tucked beneath the Element hotel in the OneC1ty development on the West End edge of Nashville. It has been trading for about a decade — the restaurant now markets ten years of plant-based cooking — and is run by owner Annie Choo. The kitchen is entirely vegan and leans seasonal and largely gluten-free, working through a menu of kale Caesar, fried cauliflower, nachos, a lentil-walnut burger, penne pesto primavera and a cauliflower steak, with a fried hash brown sandwich and cornbread pancakes on the daytime side. It serves Tuesday through Saturday 11am to 9pm and Sunday 11am to 8pm, closed Mondays. Parking is the one piece of local knowledge worth having in advance: the restaurant recommends the outdoor lot behind the shipping containers, which is free for two hours but requires registering the car by QR code on arrival.

What distinguishes Avo from most restaurants with a mocktail or two is that the bar itself is fully vegan alongside the kitchen — the same standard applied to drinks as to food, which rules out the animal-derived fining agents, honey syrups and egg-white foams that quietly appear in a lot of cocktail and mocktail programmes. That makes it a genuinely straightforward room for anyone who is both avoiding alcohol and eating plant-based, a combination that usually means interrogating a server. The non-alcoholic side runs a rotating list of named mocktails built on the same seasonal produce as the kitchen, alongside Walker Brothers kombucha, sparkling tonics and cold brew, with non-alcoholic beer from Athletic Brewing reported on the list. Be aware that Avo does not publish its drinks menu in a readable form online — the ordering page is not retrievable and the mocktail names rotate — so the specific drinks are best asked about on the day rather than planned around. What is dependable is the format: a vegan bar in a vegan restaurant, where a non-alcoholic order is ordinary rather than a special request.