Loveless Cafe

Nashville’s biscuit and country ham institution, cooking on Highway 100 since Lon and Annie Loveless started selling fried chicken to travelers in 1951. The kitchen now turns out up to 10,000 biscuits a day.

The dining rooms are the couple’s own converted house. They built a 14-room motel alongside for overnight guests, with Lon curing country hams while Annie made the biscuits and preserves.

Nobody checks into the motel anymore. The old rooms now hold shops, offices, and event space, including the Hams & Jams Country Market with its bacon, biscuit mix, and home goods.

Lon and Annie sold in 1959 to Cordell and Stella Maynard, who passed it to Charles and Donna McCabe in the early 1970s. The biscuit recipe is still Annie’s, unchanged.

In 2003, Nashville restaurateur Tom Morales and a group of partners bought the cafe to save it from being torn down. Morales, the TomKats Hospitality founder, led the revamp and rebranding.

Dolly Parton and Taylor Swift have both taken a table here. The Infatuation calls the 30-minute drive out a pilgrimage tourists make to eat biscuits in the same room they did.

The cafe sits a little east of the Natchez Trace Parkway’s northern end on Highway 100. From there the parkway runs 444 miles to Natchez, Mississippi.