Arnold's, on Eighth Avenue South, has been Nashville's flagship meat-and-three since 1982. The "meat-and-three" is a Southern institution: you queue down a steam line, pick one meat (roast beef, fried chicken, country-fried steak, catfish, cornmeal-fried green tomato), three sides (turnip greens, mac and cheese, fried okra, candied yams), and a slab of corn bread; the whole tray costs well under twenty dollars.
Open weekday lunches only, 10:30 to 14:30. The queue at noon stretches out the door but moves quickly; this is a cafeteria, not a restaurant, and turnover is the entire model. The roast beef, dripping with au jus, is the order locals will tell you to make. James Beard award winners; the antithesis of the polished new Nashville and worth it for exactly that reason.