Potluck Teahouse

Potluck opened on the Inglewood stretch of Gallatin Pike with a question rather than a business plan: how to strengthen the connection between Nashville artists and the people who live around them. The answer was to put a working pottery studio and a teahouse in the same room. One half is a quiet space for tea, with shelves of art, pottery and goods from local makers for sale; the other is a studio where members work and where the public can watch the making happen through the glass. The studio runs workshops for anyone - intro to wheel throwing, morning mugs, ceramic wind chimes, and a handbuilding class where you make a matcha set and then taste matcha with it. For a city with very few evening options that are not bars, a teahouse you can also make something in is a genuinely different proposition.

The tea itself is bought in rather than blended in house, and the sourcing is the point. The largest section is High Garden, the East Nashville teahouse whose blends a generation of the neighbourhood grew up on; Potluck says plainly that it wanted to honour the original East Nashville teahouse and carries its signature blends for that reason. Tea for Tea, blended locally in Nashville, supplies black, green and herbal blends. Spirit Tea, out of Chicago, supplies the single-origin leaf for anyone who wants to drink something more particular. Everything on the leaf list is $4.50.

Worth ordering: Rose Garden Grey, an earl grey lifted with orange peel, rose and lavender buds; Sun Drenched, a Dooars estate assam with lemon verbena, spearmint and dried oranges, which the menu says is best iced; Bee's Knees, a green earl grey with jasmine, lemon verbena, rose petals, dried oranges and lavender, also best iced; and Lapsang Souchong for anyone who wants smoke and pine. On the single-origin side there is Kodama Sencha from Japan, with toasted nori and honeydew notes, and Morning Mist from China. No alcohol is served. The shop is closed on Mondays and shuts at 6pm the rest of the week, 4pm on Sunday, so plan it as an afternoon.