Butcher & Bee

Butcher & Bee occupies 902 Main Street in Historic Edgefield, East Nashville, the second outpost of a restaurant that began in Charleston. The cooking is vegetable-forward with a Middle Eastern lean, built around mezze and shared plates rather than individual mains — whipped feta with fermented honey, avocado and crispy rice with winter greens, serrano dressing and spicy peanuts, seared wild mushroom, and a turnip cacio e pepe that turns a pasta idea into a vegetable one. Weekend brunch is a substantial part of what the kitchen does, running from 10am on Saturdays and Sundays with a stewed-tomato shakshuka served with two soft-baked eggs, labneh and olive tapenade, and Bubbie's short stack of pancakes under chocolate tahini maple syrup. Dinner service starts at 5pm Monday through Thursday. The kitchen asks guests with coeliac disease or allergies to speak to a server directly, since cross-contamination is possible.

What earns the restaurant a place here is a small design decision repeated on every menu: a section headed "Buzz Free", printed in the same place and the same type as everything else, so a non-drinker reads the menu the same way everyone else does rather than asking what there is. The list is short and specific. The Tin Lizzies ($12) is the one that shows real thought — Lucano non-alcoholic amaro with espresso from local roaster Crema, Giffard aperitif syrup and orange oil, effectively a zero-proof espresso-and-amaro drink rather than a sweet substitute. The Seasonal Gazoz ($10) is a macerated fruit shrub lengthened with sparkling water, rotating through combinations like pineapple-coconut-lime and strawberry-sumac-rose, which makes it the drink to ask about since it changes. Below those sit an Untitled Art non-alcoholic Italian pils at $6 and Boylan's sodas at $5 in ginger ale, cola and diet cola. It is not a long list, and it does not pretend to be; what it is instead is a properly composed one, priced in line with the bar rather than at soft-drink markup, on a menu where nobody has to ask a special question to find it.