So we decided to go to Jack’s Bar-B-Q last night.  Me and four of my colleagues, packed into my rental car which, as it turns out, does not have a middle seatbelt in the back seat.  Whoops.  Nashville in general is a horrifying tangle of highways, right?  It’s confusing as hell.  And downtown Nashville at first did not appear to have much going for it.  Until we hit the neighborhood where the restaurant was:

Oh.  So this is where Nashville’s nightlife is.  And there was some sort of major concert going on tonight, so there were millions of people out– look at the upper left of the picture to see the size of the crowds on the street.

Eventually we found a spot in a parking garage and left.  Then my boss pointed out the door we’d walked through:

This door has no external handle.  Once it’s closed, you can’t get back through it.  Because it’s secret, you see.  So we were gonna have to figure out another way to get back to the car on the way home.

Finding Jack’s wasn’t hard, and the live music blaring from literally every door on the block made waiting in the holy-shit-people-are-you-kidding line worthwhile.  The reason finding Jack’s wasn’t that hard is that the line extended out the door and halfway down the block.  

(Not pictured:  a hundred people behind us.)

Once we got inside I saw this sign, which I post here, and also on Facebook, without comment:

Right before we got our food, I turned around and took a picture of the line behind us, which hadn’t exactly gotten smaller.  Remember, this gets outside, turns right, and goes on for another couple hundred feet:

Now, a genuinely weird, if oddly convenient, thing about this place:  their service was slow as hell, which partially accounts for the length of the line– but also meant that finding a table wasn’t terribly difficult, because people were tending to eat and go.

I got a combo platter again.  Brisket, sausage, and pork shoulder, plus a piece of something called “chess pie” at the recommendation of my assistant principal, who grew up in Tennessee:(*)

Apparently something happened to my eyes when I had my first bite of chess pie. I want to marry chess pie.  The barbecue was goddamned delicious as well.  Even the cornbread in the corner, which doesn’t look like much, was pretty good.  The food made the endless wait well worth it.

And then we went to the Parthenon.  Which doesn’t seem like a sentence that I should be ending an article about barbecue with.  Did you know that Nashville has a full-size replica of the Goddamn Parthenon?  Because it does:

The food made the trip worth it.

The end.

(*) True thing: spellcheck just tried to tell me that “Tennessee” was incorrect, the little wiggly line not going away until I removed an S.  I double-checked, feeling that perhaps I’d lost my mind, and fixed the spelling back to how I’d had it to begin with.  Weird.