Best Pizza in Nashville (2026)

Five Points Pizza opened in 2011 on the East Nashville end of the Five Points intersection, and it has operated as a neighborhood anchor ever since. David and Tara Tieman built the room around New York-style pies, and the format has held: thin crust, proper fold, sized and priced for a table that comes back weekly rather than once a tour-bus season. The Margherita is the baseline test, and it passes it cleanly. Tomato, cheese, crust in proportion, nothing dressed up to cover structural flaws.

The Pepperoni runs the same logic: the slice should speak for itself, and here it does. The Caesar Salad rounds out the table without competing for attention. The kitchen's strength is consistency in the classics, which is exactly what a neighborhood room needs to hold regulars over the long run. The record shows some variation across visits, which is not unusual for a high-volume counter-service operation at this price point.

When it is running well, which is most of the time, the execution is straightforward and the value is real. The room is walk-in-friendly and absorbs late arrivals without friction; the staff handles the tail end of service the same way it handles the rush. For East Nashville, that reliability matters. The room draws families, tables of friends, the after-work crowd from Five Points.

It is moderately priced in a neighborhood where rents have climbed steadily since the It-City boom, which means the Tiemans have held a formula that works without pricing out the people who showed up first. Nashville Scene readers have returned it to the top of the Best Pizza poll for years, which reflects local esteem, not tourist volume. It is the kind of room that earns regulars at the free-slice stage and keeps them for the family-dinner stage.

Pelato operates in the upscale Italian lane that Nashville's It-City boom made room for, and it earns that positioning through execution rather than atmosphere alone. The house-made pappardelle Bolognese is the anchor dish: hand-rolled pasta with a long-cooked meat sauce is a measure of whether a kitchen is doing the work, and this one is. The wood-fired Margherita pizza runs alongside it, offering the same philosophy through a different medium. Wood heat demands timing and attention, and the char on a properly fired pie is not something a kitchen fakes.

The Osso Buco Milanese rounds out a menu that leans on Milanese and Roman classicism rather than the Italian-American hybrid that populates most of Nashville's mid-tier options. These are not easy dishes to execute at volume; they require mise and patience, and the fact that all three anchor the menu says something about the kitchen's priorities. The price point is upscale. This is a room built for anniversaries, birthdays, and New Year's Eve, and it draws that crowd.

Bar seating is available and moves on busy nights, which gives walk-in guests a real option even when the dining room is fully reserved. The front-of-house runs organized on high-volume evenings, and the reservation system holds. Nashville's Italian scene has grown considerably since 2013, but most of it clusters toward casual pasta bars and Neapolitan-style pie shops. Pelato occupies a different position: a full-service room that takes the occasion seriously and builds the menu around labor-intensive preparations.

TennFold Brewing sits close to the Nashville airport, which puts it in useful range for travelers with layovers and locals on the east side of Davidson County who want a neighborhood room without driving toward Lower Broad. The expectation walking in is standard brewery fare. What the kitchen delivers runs past that baseline.

The wood-fired Margherita pizza is the foundation of the menu, and it reads as the right starting point: the format disciplines the kitchen, and execution here is consistent. The Nashville Hot Chicken Pizza plants the brewery squarely in Music City's defining food tradition, the one Thornton Prince originated and André Prince Jeffries carried forward from 1980. A brewery doing a credible hot-chicken pizza is not a given; the fact that the kitchen commits to the format rather than softening it says something about the room's intentions. The Loaded Brewery Nachos round out the program as a shareable that works for groups gathered around a sports broadcast.

The beer program follows the same seasonal logic as the food menu, meaning the tap list turns with what the brewhouse is producing, not a fixed rotation held year-round. That is a real brewery operating as a real brewery, not a pizza restaurant with a liquor license stapled on.

Outdoor picnic tables handle the overflow and suit the casual register of the room. Families, groups meeting after work, someone with a long airport connection: the room absorbs all of them without friction. Pricing runs moderate, consistent with a neighborhood brewery that is not trading on a Gulch address. For a room this close to BNA, the food clears a bar that most spots in that corridor do not bother trying to clear.

TailGate Brewery runs as Nashville's answer to the neighborhood gathering place that doesn't require a honky-tonk wristband to enjoy. The operation is built around a working brewery and a wood-fired kitchen, and the combination produces a room that earns its standing with the people who actually live here rather than those passing through Lower Broad.

The wood-fired pepperoni pizza is the anchor. The oven does the work that a standard pizza operation cannot replicate, producing a crust with the char and structure that separates the format from fast-casual competition. A ricotta pizza rounds out the wood-fired program and signals a kitchen thinking past the obvious. Nashville hot wings appear on the menu as a nod to the city's defining dish, and the fact that a brewery is running that item seriously rather than as an afterthought says something about how the kitchen is operating. The Brewery Burger completes a menu that keeps the ambition focused: pizza, wings, a burger, and house beer.

The physical space is the other story. The barn area handles large groups and private events at a scale most neighborhood spots cannot match, which means TailGate functions as both an everyday bar and a destination for gatherings that need square footage. The sports bar character is real and owned without apology. This is a room where a game on the screen is not a distraction from the food; it is part of the operating premise.

Moderate prices across the board make the math work for a table of friends ordering a round of pints alongside a full meal. The brewery output means the beverage side is not an afterthought poured from a regional distributor. TailGate is doing what Nashville's neighborhood rooms have always done: build a place for the people around it.

Culaccino sits in downtown Franklin, the preserved Civil War-era square that Williamson County built its dining identity around, and it operates as the kind of Italian room the neighborhood warrants: upscale, occasion-forward, and built around a wood-fired oven that anchors the menu. The wood-fired Margherita pizza comes out of that oven with visible char and heat, though the dough itself draws some division from the people who order it. That split is worth noting for a room at this price point, where execution consistency matters more than it does at a neighborhood slice counter. The house-made gnocchi is the stronger argument for the kitchen's technical range, the sort of pasta work that separates a serious Italian program from one that sources its pasta elsewhere.

Osso buco rounds out the signature column, a Milanese braise that asks a kitchen to plan ahead and apply patience, and its presence here signals that the kitchen is running more than a pizza-and-antipasto program. The room operates with an in-between menu in the mid-afternoon, so the full dinner menu is not available across all hours, a practical detail that matters for anyone arriving after the lunch window closes. Service responsiveness has drawn some friction in the record, which at upscale prices in Franklin is the kind of thing that shapes whether a first visit becomes a regular habit. The room is positioned as special-occasion and romantic-evening territory, which is a reasonable read for a full-service Italian room on the Franklin square.

The price reflects that positioning. Diners who come expecting the full dinner program, booked at a dinner hour, are likely to find the kitchen doing the work it was designed to do.