Every Dish Tells a Story ...
Tailor in Nashville, Tennessee, isn¡¯t just Indian food ¡ª it¡¯s a tapestry of memories and traditions.
Story by Cara Clark, Photos by Brit Huckabay
Guests do not so much arrive at Tailor as they are gathered into it. The moment feels domestic and deliberate, like stepping into a space already warmed by conversation in the Germantown neighborhood of Nashville, Tennessee. Someone once described the entry, with its comfortable seating, eye-catching bar space, and chandeliers, as “the experience of a family’s living room.”
That line lingers because it frames everything that follows, carefully tailored by Chef Vivek Surti, a James Beard Foundation Semifinalist for Best Chef: Southeast and first-generation American of Indian descent. This is not a restaurant built around spectacle or performance. It is built around hospitality, memory, and the quiet confidence of someone who knows precisely why he cooks.
At the center of the room is Vivek. He is present in a way that feels increasingly rare. He moves easily between tables, speaks directly to patrons, and explains dishes not as lessons but as stories. His path here was never linear, and it never started with the idea of opening a restaurant. It began instead with a need to remember and to share his South Asian American heritage.
“I started doing a blog, really, just because my family kept asking me for the recipes that I was cooking,” Vivek explains. “This was pre-Twitter and Instagram, but I wanted to start sharing those family recipes.”
That early instinct — to document, to preserve, to give people access — never left him. What evolved was the format. The blog grew into a community, the community into supper clubs, and the supper clubs into a restaurant that still resists being called one. What Vivek really wanted was to recreate the way food shaped his childhood, the way it organized people into rooms and relationships.
“A dinner party was something that we grew up going to pretty much all the time as kids.”
Vivek says. “All the uncles would hang out in one room, all the aunties would hang out in one room, all the kids hung out in one room. That’s how we socialized outside of school, and that's how we learned a lot about Indian culture.”
That energy still defines the experience here. The menu is preset, not as a restriction, but as a release. There is comfort in surrendering choice, in trusting someone else to guide the evening. Vivek understands how exhausting constant decision-making can be, and he designs the meal to remove that burden entirely.
“That way people don't have to make decisions,” Vivek says, “When you decide to come here, we want you to feel like, ‘Well, let us take it from here.’”
That trust — between guest and host — is the foundation of everything. It creates a connection. Even the restaurant's name carries that intention. It is not branding; it is inheritance.
“The name comes from all of my grandparents who were tailors by profession,” Vivek explains. “Choosing the name Tailor was like reclaiming a little of my family heritage.”
What is being tailored here is not the Indian food most diners think they know. This is Gujarati home cooking — food that rarely appears on restaurant menus anywhere in the world.
“It's really the only place in the country that focuses on Gujarati food, and arguably the world.”
Vivek says, “Even in India, you don't see places selling good Gujarati food in a restaurant setting. That just doesn't exist.”
He is careful to explain why that matters. Indian restaurant food, as most people know it, bears little resemblance to what is actually cooked at home.
