National “best restaurant” lists tend to treat the South as a rounding error, and they tend to treat Mexican food in the South as something that happens in Texas. So it is worth sitting with this one for a second.
The New York Times published a list of the 41 best Mexican restaurants in America. Exactly one Tennessee restaurant is on it, and it is not in Memphis and not in a strip mall off a Texas interstate. It is Alebrije, on Gallatin Avenue in East Nashville — one of only a handful of Southern restaurants to make the cut at all.
A restaurant that has not been open very long
What makes it more remarkable is the timeline. Alebrije opened in 2025. A brick-and-mortar barely a year into its life does not usually turn up on a national list of the country’s best anything, and yet chef Edgar Victoria‘s kitchen has been steadily collecting state and national attention since it opened.
The cooking is Mexico City street food — the fast, precise, deeply traditional register of Mexican cuisine rather than the Tex-Mex vocabulary most Americans grew up with. The stated emphasis is on preserving traditional Mexican techniques, ingredients and culture, which is a quiet way of saying the restaurant is not interested in sanding down its food to meet anyone halfway.
Why this is a Nashville story, not just a restaurant story
For years, the honest answer to “where do you get great Mexican food in Nashville” pointed south, to the taquerias and panaderías along Nolensville Pike — the corridor that has quietly been the city’s most interesting eating for two decades, largely without national notice…