Date Night is a multipart road map for everyone who wants a nice evening out, but has no time to plan. It’s for people who want to do more than just go to one restaurant and call it a night. It’s for overwhelmed parents who don’t get out often; for friends who visit the same three restaurants because they’re too afraid to try someplace new; and for busy folks who keep forgetting all the places they’ve driven past, heard about, seen on social and said, “Let’s remember that place next time we go out.”
Downtown Franklin brings out the old lady in me. In my day, I tell anyone who’ll listen, “Cool Springs was farmland!” A big Friday night out meant a trip to Baskin-Robbins in my parents’ baby blue, wood-paneled station wagon for a peanut-butter-and-chocolate cone, which I’d savor slowly while listening to the country boys in big trucks rev their engines as they cruised from the Sonic on Hillsboro Road around the square and back again.
I point out places that no longer exist, like the bridal shop where I bought my senior prom gown (yes, there was a massive bow) and Hunan Chinese restaurant, the site of a legendary family story that I often threaten to include in my mother’s eulogy. There was a time when I couldn’t imagine anything more romantic than marrying my high school boyfriend at the foot of the Confederate soldier statue in the middle of the square, our wedding party dressed in Civil War-era attire.
Both Franklin and I have grown and changed quite a bit over the years. This town isn’t a secret anymore, but here’s one to use when the sidewalks get too crowded: Detour your Date Night down East Main.
Stop 1: JJ’s Wine Bar
Main Street and its offshoots have become silly with tasting rooms over the past few years: There’s even a secret-ish cocktail club accessible from the back-alley door to the Mellow Mushroom. JJ’s Wine Bar, which opened in late 2010, predates them all.
Though alcohol and impossible snobbery often go hand in hand, JJ’s is a low-key and lovely combination of antique and modern. At the corner of 2nd Avenue and East Main, the Queen Anne Victorian has a deep front porch, creaky floors, a funky layout of small rooms and homey, slightly hokey wine-focused décor. Guests can sit and order a glass or bottle from the extensive menu or walk down the short hallway in the middle of the house, which is lined with do-it-yourself wine-dispensing machines.
It took my husband, Dom, and I a few minutes to wrap our heads around the process: Instead of drinking first and paying later, we had to estimate how much we planned to spend on wine so our server could pre-load that amount onto a card. That’s difficult to do without knowing prices, and we arrived at the tail end of happy hour (4-6 p.m., Tuesday-Friday), during which all wines in machines were 25 percent off. So we started with $25, with the understanding that we could add more later if needed.
We took our card into the hallway, slid a stemmed glass off the rack above the wine machines and started reading: Each of the 28 bottles has a screen that details the name, kind of wine, region of origin, tasting notes and prices for one-ounce, five-ounce and eight-ounce pours. Once you slide your card into the reader, it also lists your balance. I got a little overwhelmed reading all the tasting notes — do I want honey/cream/banana or vanilla/tobacco/pepper? — gave up and picked a bottle with a pretty label. While snacking on roasted red pepper hummus, we both had three one-ounce pours of reds and whites and a lot of fun creating our own wine-tasting experience.
Stop 2: Landmark Booksellers
If you time it right, you can wrap up happy hour at JJ’s at 6 p.m., walk east on East Main for two minutes and spend an hour in the stacks at Landmark Booksellers before they close at 7 p.m. I could lose half a day staring at the shop’s Great Wall of Books, a beautifully displayed collection of what they consider the “most essential fiction and non-fiction books across all genres.” Give me a warm cup of tea and a lot less responsibility and I’d read my way through every one of them. (Well, maybe not The Odyssey.)
Southern authors old and recent get lots of love at Landmark and rightly so, including sections for Southern history, Tennessee history and many shelves of novelist, poet and environmental activist Wendell Berry’s works. Landmark packs more than 35,000 new, rare and signed first editions into a small Greek Revival structure built in the early 1800s that has housed everything from a bank to a hospital after the bloody Battle of Franklin.
The most noticeable reminder of Landmark’s roots on the night of our visit, however, was the woman in the hoop skirt carrying a lantern by the door. Landmark is the meeting place for Franklin Walking Tours and she was waiting for guests to arrive for the Grim & Ghostly that started at 7 p.m.
“Franklin looks like a postcard town now,” she told me, “But it used to be like the Wild West with brothels and shootouts in the street.”
I relished the reminder. Today the most harrowing thing you can do in downtown Franklin is try to find a parking space during PumpkinFest.
Culamar
Stop 3: Culamar
There is nothing remotely historical about the building that houses Culamar at the corner of East Main at First Avenue South. Andrew Jackson and his troops certainly didn’t spot Union soldiers approaching from the rooftop bar while passing around plates of ceviche and shrimp cocktail. Instead, this Italian coastal seafood-focused spot is a welcome and much-needed addition to a food scene largely dominated by barbecue, pizza and pimento cheese sandwiches.
The scallop crudo appetizer was a supermodel of a dish, showing real range and creativity. Thinly cut cucumber, bright red strawberry and watermelon radish topped slices of raw scallop, not too thin and not too thick, dressed and dotted with mint, cilantro and nubs of pistachio. We were still talking about how good it was long after the plates had been cleared and we’d moved on to the honey gem salad, which advertised an anchovy vinaigrette that came out with the consistency of a Caesar.
Formerly named Bestia Mare, Culamar is the sister restaurant and across-the-street neighbor of Culaccino Italian Restaurant + Bar, the influence of which is clear in a short list of fresh pastas and risottos available in half or full portions. The broth in my linguini and clams was similar to the broth around my artichoke cianfotta, a side dish of thickly cut vegetables atop potato puree, and the artichoke cianfotta was also the base of Dom’s incredibly plentiful Bucksnort trout. We accidentally had a lot of repetitive flavors for the main course — a mistake we won’t repeat on the next visit, which we planned while finishing our entrees. Dom’s curious about the pork parmigiano and I have my eye on the Faroe Island salmon, though I think we’d both be just as happy to sit at the bar that faces the open kitchen, ask the chef to send out a combination of raw east and west coast oysters and spend our night trying to guess where they came from.
