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City House
City House opened in 2007 in a historic brick building in Nashville's Germantown neighborhood, founded by chef Tandy Wilson around a menu that blends Italian comfort food with Southern classics rather than committing fully to either tradition. That hybrid identity is unusual enough on its own, but it's the restaurant's pizza — a genuinely secondary item on paper, in a restaurant that isn't primarily a pizzeria — that's become City House's most famous dish. The belly ham pizza is the specific draw: pork belly that Wilson brines for five days before roasting it into a rich, house-cured ham, then layers onto pizza dough alongside house-made mozzarella and oregano. It's a labor-intensive process for a topping most restaurants would buy pre-made, and that five-day commitment is a big part of why the dish has become a genuine signature rather than just another pizza option on a broader Italian-Southern menu. Wilson's own reputation carries real weight here — in 2016 he became the first Nashville chef to win a James Beard Award, taking Best Chef: Southeast, national recognition for a kitchen built around Germantown's brick walls rather than a big-city flagship. City House's pizza specifically drew further national attention in 2024, when the New York Times included it among its list of the 22 best pizzerias in the United States — a notable distinction for a restaurant that isn't primarily known as a pizza place at all. That combination — a James Beard-winning chef's most acclaimed dish happening to be a pizza, at a restaurant that also serves handmade pasta and Southern-inflected small plates — makes City House a genuinely different kind of pizza destination than anywhere else on this list, closer to a chef's tasting menu than a neighborhood pizzeria. For a Nashville pizza list, City House is the essential "a James Beard chef's pizza" entry — a five-day-brined belly ham pizza from an Italian-Southern kitchen that the New York Times named among the best pizzerias in the country in 2024.
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Five Points Pizza
Five Points Pizza opened in 2011 at the East Nashville end of the Five Points intersection, founded by David and Tara Tieman with a straightforward goal: build a genuine New York-style pizzeria in a city that didn't really have one at the time. That original location has stayed a neighborhood anchor ever since, busy enough on a given night that it functions as much as a Five Points hangout as a restaurant. The pizza itself sticks close to New York tradition — thin crust, a proper fold, pies sized and priced for a table that comes back weekly rather than a once-a-year splurge. The Margherita functions as the restaurant's own baseline test, the pie the Tiemans use to judge whether the dough, sauce, and cheese are all working together the way they should, a useful detail for anyone deciding what to order first. Five Points Pizza has been voted the best pizza in Nashville in local polling, recognition for a restaurant that built its reputation the unglamorous way — consistent, well-executed slices and pies rather than a single viral menu item. That kind of steady local acclaim, sustained over more than a decade, tends to mean more than a single splashy write-up. The concept proved durable enough to expand beyond East Nashville, with a second location opening on Charlotte Avenue in West Nashville in 2018 — growth that's kept the New York-style approach available on both sides of the river without diluting what made the original Woodland Street spot a neighborhood favorite in the first place. For a Nashville pizza list, Five Points Pizza is the essential "real New York-style, done right" entry — a thin-crust, proper-fold pizzeria that's anchored East Nashville's Five Points intersection since 2011 and earned its reputation one weekly regular at a time.
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