FISH OUT OF WATER Meet the women behind Nashville’s Henrietta Red. by KEA WILSON / Photography by ATTILIO D’AGOSTINO
The best oyster you’ll eat this year is served 400 miles from the nearest coast, in an understated white building in the heart of Nashville’s Germantown neighborhood. There are no seashells on the menu, no mermaids on the walls. Instead, there’s a clean, tiled dining room flooded with natural light, the subtle smell of a wood-burning oven in the next room and a menu that challenges you to think more expansively about everything the flavors of the heartland can be.
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The restaurant is Henrietta Red, and the coowners behind it—general manager Allison Poindexter and chef Julia Sullivan—are challenging preconceptions in all kinds of ways. As women restaurateurs in a still male-dominated industry delivering seafood-focused food in urban Tennessee, there’s no doubting their boldness. But what’s more remarkable about Poindexter and Sullivan—as well as about Henrietta Red itself—is how they marry that sense of daring-
