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Nicky's Coal Fired
Nicky's Coal Fired opened in 2016 in The Nations, a West Nashville neighborhood built out of former industrial land, founded by Tony and Caroline Galzin as a family-owned Italian restaurant centered on a single, genuinely rare piece of equipment: a four-ton, custom-built coal-burning pizza oven the Galzins named "Enrico," described as the only coal-fired pizza oven in Tennessee. The restaurant occupies a converted space in the former Belle Meade Hosiery Mill on Centennial Boulevard, giving it real industrial character that fits the neighborhood's own transformation from mill town to one of Nashville's fastest-growing residential pockets. The pizza menu runs seven red and six white options, all built on daily sourdough crusts made from scratch and finished in Enrico's coal-fired heat, which produces a different char and texture than a standard wood-fired or gas oven. Beyond pizza, Nicky's runs a full Italian menu of house-made pastas, charcuterie and cheese boards, and gelato and other desserts, plus a private event space called The Maxwell Room — a broader ambition than a single-format pizzeria, closer to a full neighborhood Italian restaurant that happens to have built its identity around one very specific oven. That coal-fired distinction is a genuine rarity worth understanding: most American pizzerias chasing a wood-fired or Neapolitan reputation use wood or gas, and coal ovens require a specific, harder-to-maintain setup that few restaurants bother investing in — Nicky's built its entire brand around being the one Tennessee kitchen willing to do it. For a Nashville pizza list, Nicky's Coal Fired is the essential "the only coal oven in the state" entry — a family-owned Italian restaurant in a converted West Nashville hosiery mill, built entirely around a four-ton custom coal-burning oven no other Tennessee pizzeria has replicated.
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Slim & Husky's Pizza Beeria
Slim & Husky's started as an experiment in a North Nashville garage its three founders nicknamed the "Mad Pizza Science Lab" — Tennessee State University graduates and childhood friends Clint Gray, Emanuel "EJ" Reed, and Derrick Moore, testing pizza recipes together before turning the project into an actual restaurant. That garage-to-storefront origin has stayed central to the brand's identity even as it's grown well beyond a single North Nashville location. The concept is built explicitly around hip-hop and R&B culture — a fast-casual, artisan pizza shop that treats music, art, and community building as core parts of the business rather than background branding. Locally sourced ingredients and craft beverages round out a menu built for a younger, culturally plugged-in crowd that wants good pizza served in a space that feels like it belongs to them specifically. Slim & Husky's made real local history when it opened a location at Fifth + Broadway in downtown Nashville, becoming the first Black-owned business to operate on Broadway — Nashville's most tourist-heavy, most symbolically loaded commercial strip, and a genuinely significant milestone for a business that started with three friends testing recipes in a garage. That downtown expansion sits alongside the original North Nashville flagship on Buchanan Street, and the company has continued to frame its mission around creating community in underserved areas through pizza, art, and music — an explicit social goal that's stayed part of the business model rather than fading once the brand found commercial success. For a Nashville pizza list, Slim & Husky's is the essential "hip-hop culture meets artisan pizza" entry — a North Nashville garage experiment that grew into the first Black-owned business on Broadway, built around community as much as the pizza itself.
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