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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.
VS
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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