The Horn Midtown

This is the Midtown branch of The Horn, the Somali cafe a Nashville family opened in 2015 after their father arrived from Somalia and sold sambusas out of his car. The address puts it on Scarritt Place, inside the Scarritt Bennett Center campus between Vanderbilt and Belmont - a quiet pocket of Gothic stone buildings a short walk from both universities and from the Music Row end of Midtown. That location shapes the room: students, faculty and conference guests during the week, and a neighbourhood counter at weekends. No alcohol is served.

The menu is the same as the Murfreesboro Pike original and it is chai-led, which is worth stating plainly because most Nashville coffee bars are not. Somali chai is the house pour; there is a brown sugar version, and a dirty chai that adds a shot of espresso to it. All are made iced as well as hot, and priced around $4. The coffee menu behind it is deliberately short - americano, latte, white mocha, cinnamon white mocha - and the food is the sambusas the family has been folding by hand since the beginning, plus sweets.

WPLN, Nashville's public radio station, reported in March 2025 on The Horn alongside Deir Cafe and Haraz Coffee House, in a story about Muslim-owned coffeehouses in the city that shut for the daylight fast during Ramadan and reopen at night to long lines - and about the owners' ambition to make that alcohol-free evening culture a year-round fixture rather than a seasonal one. Outside Ramadan, though, this branch keeps daytime hours: 7am to 5:30pm on weekdays, with a split on Friday around midday prayer, 9am to 5:30pm on Saturday and 9am to 3pm on Sunday. Come for chai and a sambusa in the afternoon rather than for a night out, and note that the campus setting means parking is on the street rather than in a lot.