1 week Ago By Margaret Littman
Ana Aguilar and Josh Cook have been cooking together in town for years. First at Husk Nashville, where they first met, and since the pandemic, serving their Latin American pastries and breakfast foods at farmers markets and at the now-shuttered Henry James bar. On April 29, the pair will soft-launch Tantísimo’s brick-and-mortar restaurant, which they say is the city’s first farm-to-table Latin American restaurant.
The name means “so much,” as Aguilar notes that in Spanish the “-isimo” suffix is an enthusiastic superlative, like adding extra exclamation marks in English. Aguilar’s business was originally called Tantito Pastelito, which translates to “little cake,” and the change is apt — Tantísimo will be so much more than that. Aguilar’s family is from Guadalajara, Mexico.
She grew up in California and has lived in Nashville for 13 years. Cook is a Nashville native. Together they draw on cuisine from across Latin America to create a “Spanglish” approach to dining.
Ana Aguilar and Josh Cook The restaurant, in the old Vegan Vee location in Sylvan Park, will be open 7 a.m. to 2 p.
m. for breakfast and lunch, and 5 to 10 p.m.
for dinner, Tuesday through Sunday. The restaurant has 82 seats, including a bar and a private room, plus a patio is in the works. While the vibe in the mornings might be coffee-shop-like, it's a table-service spot, with a menu of dishes that may be recognizable to current customers as well as dishes that weren’t possible to serve before they had a kitchen of their own.
Dinner will be table service, and reservations are recommended (through Resy), with a selection of dishes both new and familiar to Tantísimo fans. Those new items include besos — jam-filled coconut pastry that Aguilar has never sold to the public but has been working on — and empanadas, which have been available on and off because of limited access to a fryer. They’ll be making bread for dinner.
Chuleta Kan Kan will be on the dinner menu too. That’s a bone-in pork chop with belly and skin still attached. (The skin puffs up on the grill, so it’s a real show-stopper.
) It’s a Puerto Rican specialty that Aguilar hasn’t seen locally in years. All of that is in addition to their popular breakfast tacos and quesadillas, which include chorizo that they make. The couple is working to make their restaurant as sustainable as they can, encouraging the kitchen and bar to collaborate to use every part of produce and herbs to reduce waste.
In the kitchen, every part of the animal is used. They’re sourcing from local farms as much as possible. The bar features a full wine program entirely made up of Latin American wines.
On May 5, Tantísimo is hosting a $50 ticketed kickoff party, with various stations to sample the dishes, and then a grand opening on May 6. You can book dinner reservations now at this link . The couple are fans of Sylvan Park and know some of the neighbors because they are customers from the nearby Richland Park Farmers Market.
They’ve gotten to know others as they have been building out the restaurant. (It was hard labor, grinding down concrete floors themselves.) They’ve participated in river clean-ups with their new neighbors and appreciated how involved everyone is in the community.
“I have felt more part of a community here than anywhere else since I lived in Nashville,” Aguilar says. “We’re not technically in Sylvan Park as residents, but we’re not far, and we’re just making that our home base. I mean, we’re pretty much going to live at the restaurant for a while.
”.
