Butcher & Bee

Butcher & Bee is a restaurant in East Nashville operated by Honest to Goodness Hospitality Group, which also runs other food and beverage concepts. The first Butcher & Bee opened in Charleston in 2011 with the mission of serving sandwiches made with flavor combinations and food quality usually reserved for fine dining. A Nashville location, an expanded version of the original, followed in late 2015, and in 2016 the Charleston restaurant moved to a larger space, where it offered a broader, vegetable-forward, Middle Eastern-leaning menu. The East Nashville location is now the only Butcher & Bee.

The restaurant, a 2022 James Beard Award finalist, serves brunch on weekends and dinner every night. Diners are encouraged to eat family style, with shared dishes arriving as they are ready, whether ordered a la carte or as the chef's choice. Butcher & Bee builds relationships with its suppliers, especially farmers, and prizes heirloom vegetables and pasture-raised meats, an approach typical of farm-to-table kitchens that cook with the seasons.

Butcher & Bee branched out in 2014 with The Daily, a modern bodega, and in 2017 opened Workshop, a Charleston food hall with a rotating lineup of chefs and concepts. The Daily, which sells coffee, cold-pressed juice, pastries, sandwiches and provisions, now has locations in Charleston and Atlanta. In East Nashville the group also runs Redheaded Stranger, a casual Texan-inspired taco shop, and Fancypants, billed as an irreverent take on fine dining. The Butcher & Bee team helped found Pay It Forward Charleston, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit offering emergency grants to members of the city's food and beverage community. Grants like these help hospitality workers, many of whom rely on hourly wages and tips, weather sudden hardship.