Bill Baxter took one last drag of his cigarette as he approached his favorite affordable downtown Nashville breakfast restaurant Feb. 25, the painted brick building with the red-shingled roof. He stopped when he saw a piece of paper taped on the door.
Scrawled on it was a simple message: “Closed. Sorry.”
Varallo’s, the oldest continuously operating restaurant in Tennessee, has closed permanently after more than a century in business. According to Bob Peabody, who has owned the chili parlor since 2019, a prohibitively expensive lease renewal offer necessitated the closure…