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Bajo Sexto Taco
Bajo Sexto Taco opened in March 2015 inside the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum in downtown Nashville, founded by chefs Jonathan Waxman and Kaelin Ulrich-Trilling as a quick-service taqueria built into one of the city's most-visited tourist landmarks. The name is a nod to the museum's musical setting — a bajo sexto is the largest guitar typically used in a mariachi band, a small, deliberate wink connecting the restaurant to the honky-tonks and instruments surrounding it. Under Chef Ulrich-Trilling's direction, the counter serves traditional Mexican staples — tacos, flautas, soups, salsas, and guacamole — built for museum visitors who want a real meal rather than typical gift-shop food-court fare, alongside a bar program that includes an unusually deep rum selection for a museum café. Bajo Sexto briefly expanded beyond the museum in spring 2016 with a full-service Bajo Sexto Taco Lounge in Sylvan Park, but that satellite location closed in January 2018 after roughly a year, not long after the chef who'd led it departed. The original museum location weathered that contraction and has stayed open as part of Red Pebbles Hospitality's restaurant portfolio, the one true constant of the concept since 2015. Being embedded inside a major tourist attraction gives Bajo Sexto a genuinely different context than any other entry on this list — most of its customers are visiting the Country Music Hall of Fame first and eating tacos second, which makes it a rarer thing: a quick-service taco counter serious enough about its food to earn repeat visits from locals who come specifically for the tacos, museum ticket or not. For a Nashville taco list, Bajo Sexto Taco is the essential "chef-driven tacos inside a landmark" entry — a quick-service counter built into the Country Music Hall of Fame, serving genuinely considered street-style tacos to a mostly tourist crowd since 2015.
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Mas Tacos Por Favor
Mas Tacos Por Favor started in 2008 as a food truck built out of a 1974 Winnebago, the creation of self-taught chef Teresa Mason. Two years later, in 2010, Mason opened a permanent brick-and-mortar location in East Nashville's Five Points neighborhood, and the counter has stayed there ever since, growing into what locals now describe as the taco spot East Nashville built its lunch culture around. The menu leans scratch-made and specific rather than trying to cover every regional Mexican style at once — fried avocado tacos, a well-regarded elote (Mexican street corn), and a tortilla soup that regulars order as often as the tacos themselves. It's counter-service, cash-only, no-reservations food, built for a fast, casual lunch rather than a sit-down dinner, which fits the food-truck roots the restaurant never really left behind even after going brick-and-mortar. Mas Tacos has picked up national attention beyond its East Nashville regulars, including a feature on Guy Fieri's "Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives" — genuine mainstream recognition for a restaurant that's stayed resolutely counter-service and unpretentious even as it's become one of the most talked-about taco spots in the city. Thousands of online reviews have kept it rated among Nashville's most consistently loved restaurants, taco-focused or otherwise. That consistency, sustained since a single Winnebago in 2008, is the real story here — Mas Tacos didn't chase a bigger space or a fancier build-out as its reputation grew, it just kept doing the fried avocado tacos and elote that built the following in the first place, at the same McFerrin Avenue address it's occupied since 2010. For a Nashville taco list, Mas Tacos Por Favor is the essential "food truck that became a neighborhood institution" entry — scratch-made, counter-service tacos that East Nashville has organized its lunch routine around for well over a decade.
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