The Restaurant
St. Vito Focacceria at 605 Mansion Street in Nashville's Gulch began with a single, specific ambition: to bring Chef Michael Hanna's version of sfincione — the Sicilian street food that occupies the same cultural position in Palermo that pizza occupies in Naples — to Nashville. The restaurant opened in a Gulch neighbourhood already dense with serious food options and occupied its singular niche without competition, because no other Nashville restaurant was doing what St. Vito does. Michelin's Bib Gourmand designation confirmed that what it is doing is worth significant attention.
The sfincione at St. Vito is built on a focaccia base that is thick, airy, and structured enough to carry substantial toppings without becoming wet or collapsing under weight. The base is studded with fontina — a cheese that melts into the bread's interior rather than sitting on top, integrating into the texture rather than forming a separate layer. Breadcrumbs and pecorino finish the surface, providing a crust of specific texture that distinguishes sfincione from every other bread preparation in Nashville's dining landscape.
The toppings are offered in four varieties that reflect the range of what sfincione can carry: spicy tomato with burrata, which combines the focaccia's richness with the freshness of good fresh cheese and the heat of a properly made tomato preparation; roasted potato cream, which uses the bread's structural capacity to carry a topping that would overwhelm a thinner base; and two further variations that rotate with season and availability. The toppings are generous — this is street food in its original spirit, where portion is part of the generosity of the form.
Why It's Perfect for a Team Dinner
The logic of team dining is sharing: a table of people who spend their days in professional contexts arrive at a restaurant with the permission to be less structured, and the food format that best serves this permission is one that encourages physical participation — passing dishes, making choices together, discovering shared preferences. St. Vito's sfincione format is built for exactly this dynamic.
The focaccia arrives in portions designed for sharing across a table of four to eight. The decision-making process — which topping? spicy tomato or roasted potato? burrata or straight? — gives the table something concrete to collaborate on before the food arrives, breaking whatever residual professional ice remains from the day's work. The format is casual enough that nobody needs to perform fine dining competence, and the food is good enough that nobody feels they have compromised by choosing something unpretentious.
The Gulch location is accessible from the major Nashville hotels and within walking distance of several of the city's most commonly used corporate event venues. A team dinner at St. Vito has the advantage of specificity — "we're going to a Michelin Bib Gourmand Sicilian focacceria in the Gulch" — which gives the evening the character of a deliberate choice rather than a default. The value proposition, at a price point that makes the corporate card comfortable, completes the case for a team of ten spending an evening eating excellent bread together.
The Sfincione
Sfincione is Palermo's answer to the question of what bread can become when treated as a canvas rather than an accompaniment. The word's etymology connects to the Latin for sponge — a description of the focaccia base's character when done correctly: light enough to absorb, structured enough to support, thick enough to carry toppings that need genuine depth to rest on. Chef Hanna's version maintains the Sicilian tradition while adapting to what the Gulch neighbourhood requires from its kitchens.
The fontina inside the bread is the decision that distinguishes St. Vito's sfincione from the broader category of topped focaccia that Nashville's pizza and bread-adjacent restaurants produce. Fontina melts at a temperature that integrates it into the focaccia's crumb without creating the rubbery cheese layer that other bread preparations produce. The result is a base that tastes of cheese throughout rather than at a discrete moment, which changes the experience of eating the toppings above it — they land on a foundation that is already flavoured rather than neutral.
The breadcrumb-and-pecorino finish is the preparation's structural conclusion: a crust that provides textural contrast to the soft interior, seasoning that reinforces the saltiness of the fontina below, and a visual presentation that signals authenticity to anyone who has eaten sfincione in Sicily. The spicy tomato preparation applied to the base of the most popular variety provides the acidity that cuts through the bread's richness, while the burrata added after baking provides a temperature contrast — cold dairy against hot bread — that is one of the meal's primary pleasures.