Introduction

Although best known for its music, Nashville is a city filled with many dining destinations. Some of the more popular types of local cuisine include the Hot Chicken, Hot Fish, Barbecue, and the “Meat and Three”. Thanks, in part, to Nashville’s foodie culture, the city was ranked as the 13th “snobbiest” city in America according to Travel + Leisure magazine.

Below is a quick-and-dirty analysis of restaurants’ Yelp ratings in the Nashville, TN area. It is intended to inform AGA conference attendees of the best dining options this city has to offer.

Yelp Ratings

Yelp users assign a rating based on a scale of 1 (worst) to 5 (best) Stars. The histogram below shows that the ratings distribution is skewed towards positive with a long negative tail and a median rating around 3.5 to 4 Stars.

Min. 1st Qu. Median Mean 3rd Qu. Max.
1 3 3.5 3.492 4 5

Uber Pricing Data

To help you get around Nashville’s hot spots, we used Uber’s API to download and its pricing data. Our analysis includes cost estimates for traveling from the conference center to each point of interest. The estimates include the route distance (in miles) and approximate ride duration (in minutes).

Yelp Ratings by Neighborhood

The map below allows to zoom-in on individual Neighborhoods to find out where the best-rated restaurants are concentrated.

Nashville’s Top-Rated Neighborhoods

Restaurant Categories

This wordcloud represents the frequency counts of restaurant categories in the city of Nashville. The cloud is split into four quartiles by level of Yelp Rating. It shows which types of restaurants tend to be highly rated by Yelp users and vice-versa.

Nashville Hot Chicken

Nashville hot chicken is a type of fried chicken that is a local specialty of Nashville, Tennessee, in the United States. In its typical preparation, it is a portion of breast, thigh, or wing that has been marinated in a water-based blend of seasoning, floured, fried, and finally sauced using a paste that has been spiced with cayenne pepper. It is served atop slices of white bread with pickle chips.

There are many restaurants in Nashville that serve a variant of the dish, and there is a city-wide festival and competition commemorating it. The popularity of hot chicken has spread beyond the Southern United States due to the influence of Nashville’s music industry.

Don’t leave Nashville without sampling this unique dish from one of the restaurants highlighted below.

Top 20 Restarants Serving Nashville Hot Chicken

We calculated restaurants rankings based on a combination of Yelp ratings, number of reviews and frequency of ‘hot chicken’ mentions in user reviews.

Best of Hot Chicken on the Map - Red Hot!

  • The color of the circles represents the rank of the restaurants from 1 (Dark Red) to 20 (Pink).
  • The size of the circles indicates the frequency of ‘hot chicken’ mentions in Yelp reviews.

Explore Nashville’s Music Scene

Nashville has a vibrant music and entertainment scene spanning a variety of genres. As the city’s name itself is a metonym for the country music industry, many popular tourist sites involve country music. Numerous music clubs and honky-tonk bars can be found in downtown Nashville, especially the area encompassing Lower Broadway, Second Avenue, and Printer’s Alley, which is often referred to as “the District”.

Top Neighborhoods

Top 20 Music Venues

Best Nashville Music Venues on the Map

  • The color of the circles represents the venue’s rank from 1 (Dark) to 20 (Light).
  • The size of the circles indicates the number of Yelp reviews.

Where to Eat Southern Food

Top Neighborhoods

Top 20 Southern Restaurants

Where to Find the Best Barbeque

Top Neighborhoods

Top 20 Barbeque Restaurants

Where to Eat Steak

Top Neighborhoods

Top 20 Steakhouses

Where to Drink Beer

Top Neighborhoods

Top Breweries

The Data

We performed the following steps in our analysis:

The resulting data set contains information on