Offbeat Eats

While our trip to Chrysalis was quite enjoyable, for our last night in Franklin, Tennessee we decided to see what downtown Franklin was like. Unlike a lot of towns that have sort of sprawled out, Franklin actually has a nice, central Town Square, and an approximate 16 block downtown central business district that has been maintained with historic architecture. It’s actually a pretty nice area to walk around, and there are a nice selection of restaurants. We ended up decided to try Red Pony, which is across Main Street from the neon-adorned historic Franklin Theatre.

While I lived in Tennessee for almost two years of my life, it’s been quite a long time since Offbeat Eats has done a review in Tennessee, primarily since I myself haven’t done more than pass through the Nashville Airport in years. However, a recent work trip had me spending most of a week in Lewisburg, TN. Lewisburg is well off of most folk’s culinary radar, and rather lacking in hotels, so we stayed in the substantially more developed town of Franklin, TN, halfway between Lewisburg and Nashville, which had a good variety of dining establishments. Indeed, with a late night arrival, our first dinner was spent at a local location of Culinary Dropout (see my review of the Scottsdale location here), which was a near-perfect culinary copy of the Scottsdale location, and enjoyable. On our second night, we decided to do Italian, dining at Chrysalis Modern Italian, in a small shopping center a few blocks from our hotel.

Big Ed’s is one of the historical institutions of Oak Ridge, TN. I’m not sure when exactly Big Ed’s opened it’s doors, but it’s definitely the pizza place that’s been around longest in Oak Ridge, since when I lived there I knew several people that had been swearing by Big Ed’s pizza for at least 3 generations. There are a lot of reasons to go to Big Ed’s. The pizza is one of them, being a contender for the best pizza in Oak Ridge (however, as one coworker of mine would say, that’s “damning with faint praise”, the rest of the pizza in town is pretty marginal). The other draws are the gritty ambiance (shown here, just the right amount of “dank”, and a bunch of TV, sports, and military banners that have been hanging probably at least as long as I’ve been alive). The friendly service. The catering to the little kids watching them make pizzas while hoping for a spare piece of pepperoni to get hurled to them. The very cheap beer. The decades of multilingual intercontinental graffiti in the men’s room. In other words, Big Ed’s is the epitome of a “Pizza Joint”…