HENRIETTA RED, GERMANTOWN'S NEWEST RESTAURANT

words: alex hendrickson || photos: alex hendrickson

At Henrietta Red, Germantown’s newest restaurant, the focus is bright, clean flavors of the ocean and the earth. Oysters are shucked and wood roasted; field peas, sunflower tahini, sprouts and sunchoke chips top toast; carrots are roasted and laid atop yogurt; cauliflower is treated as a steak and topped with pistachio aillade; and mushrooms make for a mouthwatering risotto. The combinations are far from banal, and the options anything but boring.

We’ll come back to the menu later, but first let us tell you the tale of the gals behind the concept. Julia Sullivan isn’t the first Nashvillian to find her way back home after years away, but she may be the first to bring with her a degree from New York’s Culinary Institute of America, experience at acclaimed restaurants like Blue Hill at Stone Barns and Per Se, and the desire to bring a vegetable-driven and oyster-focused restaurant to Music City. “We wanted to do something not high-end, something more approachable, a place where we would want to eat,” Julia tells us.

Allie Poindexter, the restaurant’s general manager, sommelier and Julia’s business partner, helped formulate plans for the restaurant while the pair lived and worked side-by-side in New York City’s food and hospitality industry.

Julia and Allie paired up with Strategic Hospitality to turn their four-years-in-the-making dream into a reality of opening a restaurant in Nashville. “We created a restaurant we wanted to create, but felt intuitively there was room for it,” Julia says. “We have an outstanding sense of community in Nashville; people want to support each other. It is a challenging city to open a restaurant, and Max and Ben [Goldberg] have been good partners in that.” Henrietta Red opened in February of 2017.

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