The 4 Best Seafood Restaurants in Nashville 2026

The crab omelette at Locust is custard-soft egg folded around sweet Dungeness, cooked to the exact point where it holds without firming, and when the inaugural Michelin Guide for the American South reached Nashville it was rooms like this one that took the stars. A landlocked city five hundred miles from salt water now runs a seafood scene with a starred kakigori-and-crab counter, an oyster program assembled by a Per Se alumna, a Gulf Coast warehouse room from Atlanta’s best-known fish cook, and a New Orleans-rooted hotel dining room in the Gulch. Four rooms, ranked, each verified open for 2026, each with a different answer to the question of what seafood in Tennessee should even mean.

How a river town learned fish

Overnight logistics did the heavy lifting: Gulf snapper and both-coast oysters land in Nashville within a day of the boat now, and the kitchens that committed to that supply chain stopped apologizing for geography years ago. The local grammar is Southern, oysters dressed like the South Carolina lowcountry, snapper run through New Orleans technique, and the best rooms cluster in Germantown and the Gulch within ten minutes of each other. The Nashville dining guide carries the full grid, and our seafood restaurants worldwide guide holds the global standard.

The four, ranked

1. Locust — 12 South

Trevor Moran took a Michelin star in the guide’s inaugural American South edition for a room at 2305 12th Avenue South that refuses every category: a raw bar of pristine sourcing, dumplings, the celebrated crab omelette, and kakigori to finish, all served at a pace Moran controls like a set list. Dinner runs about $150 a head once the table orders properly. Locust is the most original seafood-adjacent restaurant in the South and the hardest booking on this list. It is also a kitchen with firm opinions about how its food should be eaten. Diners who want a conventional appetizer-entrée evening should book two spots down and be happier for it.

2. Henrietta Red — Germantown

Julia Sullivan cooked at Per Se before coming home to open Henrietta Red at 1200 4th Avenue North in 2017, and her oyster program remains the most serious in Tennessee: both coasts, rotating beds, a selection chosen for contrast rather than volume, backed by a repeat James Beard-recognized kitchen. The wood-roasted oysters and the vegetable-forward plates around them make this Germantown room the city’s best argument that a seafood dinner can be light on purpose. It is the date-night pick of the four, candle-bright and conversation-easy. Big-appetite steakhouse-style eaters should order accordingly or pair the visit with a second stop.

3. The Optimist — Germantown

Ford Fry’s Nashville room occupies a former ax-handle factory warehouse off 11th Avenue North, the second Optimist after the Atlanta original that made his name in fish, and the regulars order without menus: oysters, the lobster roll, whole Gulf snapper. The Optimist is the volume player of this list, a big handsome room that handles a twelve-top birthday and a two-top date with the same ease, with a raw bar deep enough to anchor either. The cooking aims for pleasure rather than surprise and hits the target nightly. Diners hunting the experimental edge of Nashville seafood already know which room on this list they want instead.

4. Marsh House — The Gulch

Marsh House opened with the Thompson hotel at 401 11th Avenue South in 2016 and cooks the most New Orleans-rooted menu in the city under executive chef Brack May: shrimp toast, seafood towers, an Alabama blue crab omelette at brunch that has its own following. The room runs hotel-handsome, leather and brass and a raw bar up front, and stays the most reliable seafood table in the Gulch for a client dinner that needs to be walkable from the hotel itself. Marsh House does not chase the top of this list and serves a different job: it is the dependable fourth wall of a scene whose other three rooms ask more of you.

Where not to spend the evening

Skip the Broadway-adjacent rooms stacking $90 seafood towers over loud cover bands; the fish is a prop there, and you can hear it. Be careful with menus listing “daily catch” with no source and no species, which in a landlocked market is a confession. And do not order seafood at the honky-tonks at all: they are for the music, the beer and the night you will not fully remember, which is its own kind of fine dining.

Booking notes

Locust is the tight book: small room, fixed pace, and weekend seats vanish a week or more out, so take the Wednesday table and thank yourself. Henrietta Red books normally on Resy and holds bar seats that suit a first date better than almost any seat in Germantown. The Optimist and Marsh House both hold large-format space, which makes them the planning-friendly rooms of the four; the Optimist’s private side handles the group dinner Locust structurally cannot. Sunday is the quiet-confidence night across all four.

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