The Restaurant
Josephine opened in 2013 at 2316 12th Ave S in the heart of Nashville's 12South neighborhood, and for a full decade it was the most quietly exceptional dining room the area had to offer. Chef Andy Little and his wife Karen Van Guilder Little built something that Nashville's dining scene rarely produces: a restaurant without ego, where the cooking existed entirely on its own terms and the neighborhood grew more grateful for it each passing year.
Little's cooking drew on a singular combination of Pennsylvania Dutch farmhouse traditions and classical French technique. The result was a cuisine that felt simultaneously rooted and precise — humble ingredients treated with discipline and imagination. Dried sweet corn was elevated into a revelation. Nashville hot scrapple arrived on a plate that made you question every association the word carried. Sourdough spaetzle landed with the confidence of a kitchen that had refined the dish over years rather than months.
The dining room itself matched the cooking in register: warm, unhurried, slightly intimate. 12South in the mid-2010s was still finding its identity as a neighbourhood, and Josephine anchored it with a particular kind of calm authority. The restaurant received two James Beard nominations for Best Chef: Southeast during its tenure — recognition that confirmed what regular guests already understood, that this was not a neighbourhood restaurant in the ordinary sense but a nationally significant table operating without fanfare on a residential block in South Nashville.
Josephine closed permanently on December 23rd, 2023, when the lease expired. The neighbourhood turned out to say goodbye. NYC-based Mexican restaurant Fonda now occupies the space at 2316 12th Ave S. Little's decade in 12South remains one of Nashville's most significant contributions to American regional cuisine.
Why It Was Perfect for a First Date
Josephine operated at exactly the right register for a first date: intimate without being suffocating, ambitious without being intimidating, warm without being casual. The dining room on a Friday evening had a low murmur and a quality of light that made everyone look better than they arrived. This is not an accident of design but a deliberate choice about what kind of restaurant Josephine wanted to be.
Chef Little's menu was designed to generate conversation rather than demand interpretation. The dishes arrived with enough character to spark genuine interest — what is sourdough spaetzle doing in a Nashville restaurant? why does this cornbread taste unlike any other cornbread? — but none of the performative complexity that requires a server to deliver a lecture before each course. You could eat and talk and be present in the way a first date requires.
The wine program, curated with the same intelligence applied to the food, offered enough variety at enough price points to avoid the anxiety of choice while providing ample material for the kind of low-stakes preference-revealing that a first dinner is ultimately about. You left Josephine knowing something about your companion. The restaurant was designed to produce exactly this outcome.
The Signature Dishes
In a decade of cooking, Josephine produced several dishes that achieved the status of institutional memory in Nashville dining. The duck fat hash browns became something of a calling card — potatoes cooked with a richness and crispness that made the dish simultaneously familiar and entirely distinct. Regulars ordered them regardless of season, regardless of what else arrived.
The stone bass with gremolata topping demonstrated Little's range with seafood: clean technique, bold finishing, a dish that proved the kitchen's ambition extended well beyond its farmhouse identity. Beef cheeks arrived with corn nuts and crispy kale in a combination that should not have worked as well as it did. The ricotta gnocchi was light to the point of seeming implausible; the duck breast with truffle vinaigrette showed what happened when French training was applied to specifically American ingredients without apology or qualification.
Desserts maintained the same philosophy: apple cobbler with salted caramel ice cream, peach cobbler when the Tennessee season warranted it. Nothing invented, everything considered. The result was a body of cooking that Nashville has not found a replacement for since the doors closed.