Grab a Sandwich

A family-run hot chicken shop in a strip mall a few minutes from the airport; the family opened its first restaurant in 2017. It's named for the chicken, but the catfish sandwich is the one to get: spiced, fried fillets with lettuce, tomato, pickles, onion, tartar and the house BJ sauce.

A squat blue-and-white fish house near Fisk and Meharry that has been frying fish since 1972, in this building since 1993. The whiting sandwich is the order: forearm-length cornmeal-crusted fillets with hot sauce, mustard, pickles and onion between two slices of white bread that can't hope to cover them.

A cinderblock hot chicken and fish shack on Main Street, opened in the 1990s by Bolton Matthews and his wife Dollye on his late uncle Bolton Polk's recipe. Order the fish: whiting or catfish, fried and dusted in the same spice as the chicken, on two slices of white bread with pickles.

A hot chicken shop that opened in 2010 and moved from East Nashville to the Nations. Its sandwich is two tenders on a toasted brioche bun with poppyseed slaw and Dale's Comeback Sauce. The house oddity is the Tender Royale: three tenders stacked on a deep-fried pepper jack grilled cheese.

A walk-up window near the Parthenon, run by chef Eric "Red" White, who started out with a food truck. No bone-in birds here: tenders and boneless thighs soak in buttermilk for a day and a half before frying. For a sandwich, get the crunchwrap, with hot chicken, pimento mac and cheese and comeback sauce seared inside a tortilla.

The family that gave Nashville hot chicken. As the story goes, Thornton Prince's fed-up girlfriend loaded his fried chicken with pepper to punish him, he loved it, and the family has been frying it ever since. The Nolensville Pike shop is the one to visit, and the sandwich comes messy, doused in a sweet-hot sauce.