Varallo`s, Nashville’s oldest restaurant, has closed.
As @justinbarney reports, on the door of Varallo’s a white piece of paper hangs. In black sharpie. “Closed. Sorry” is handwritten. The sign has been there all week. A Google search lists the beloved restaurant as permanently closed. In a phone call, current owner Bob Peabody confirmed it.
Varallo’s opened in 1907 and had been at 4th Street for over 100 years. They specialized in chili. Three way chili, with beans and spaghetti served on a tamale. It’s distinctive red triangular pediment and red and white checker tablecloths made the restaurant stand out as part of The Arcade downtown.
Peabody said that Varallo’s could not keep up with rising prices in downtown Nashville:
"The rents have gone up a lot. And then property taxes have gone up a lot. I tried to see if we could get a lease, if we could sell it to new owners and just didn’t see any path forward." Peabody said that rent would go up almost three times if they sold to a new owner.
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Foster care children in Tennessee could be placed in the most secure facilities — with barbed wire and cells that lock — under a newly proposed bill that is alarming advocates.
It is best practice to keep foster kids with families or in communities, research shows. But WPLN’s criminal justice reporter @paigepfleger says a bill at the Tennessee legislature would allow the Department of Children’s Services to place foster kids in facilities that are usually reserved for children who have committed crimes.
DCS has been under fire for years for keeping some hard-to-place youth in state office buildings. A recent state audit found one child slept in an office building for more than 100 days.
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Now DCS and the Governor’s office are pushing to be able to place foster children that are violent, or who threaten violent behavior, in the state’s most secure facilities.
“It’s concerning when any youth-serving system is looking to incarceration as a solution for problems,” said Jasmine Miller, an attorney with the national nonprofit Youth Law Center.
This week we had an amazing breadth of stories, from the legislature seeking to delegitmize same-sex marriage, to deep converations about DEI on This is Nashville, to investigative coverage of foster kids in prison-like conditions and more.
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"This is not a Republican or Democrat issue. This is about people, and this is about being able to provide food for approximately 700,000 kids in the state of Tennessee,” said Rep. Michael Hale (R-Smithville).
After more than half of Tennessee’s county mayors signed a letter demanding the state accept federal dollars meant to help kids buy food during the summer, a new bill was filed in the state General Assembly seeking to force the governor to take the funds.
As Pierce Gentry reports, with the support of around 10 Republican lawmakers, it would require the state government to opt into the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Summer EBT program, which provides $120 to each school-aged kid in the summer to help pay for food each year.
Tennessee participated in that program in 2024, but Governor Bill Lee pulled the state out for 2025 and 2026, citing a $5 million state cost to administer the roughly $77 million in federal funds.
Instead, Lee put state dollars behind a much more limited initiative serving 15 of Tennessee’s 95 counties, notably excluding some of its most impoverished communities.
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The weather is great today, but there could be a tornado tomorrow. If that happened, would you be ready?
Do you have an air-horn, flashlight and shelf-stable food? If not, our newsroom intern Seth Thorpe reports this is your week to get prepared.
TEMA and the National Weather Service have teamed up to showcase a Severe Weather Awareness Week. This is meant to be a collection of "bite-sized" tips about severe weather preparation, so residents who are still getting back to normal after the winter ice storm can take small, manageable actions that can improve safety when the next round of storms arrives.
Seth is an intern in the Public Media Journalists Association "Opening Doors" program.
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Missing elephant alert. We are looking for Pinky the Elephant (the OG version).
Pinky the Elephant showed up on Charlotte Pike in Nashville in the 1980s. Initially Pinky had a gang of friends — a bull, fish and gorilla.
Pinky`s original location was McPherson Motors. When they closed, Pinky was subsequently sold to a rental company and poof — a 12 foot pink elephant disappeared from public view.
The new owner, University Motors, commissioned a new Pinky. That Pinky has been on Charlotte for 26 years, currently residing in all its pink glory at Clean Getaway Auto Wash.
But where is the OG Pinky?
Help us solve the mystery of how a 12 foot pink elephant vanishes. If you have any leads as to the whereabouts of the original Pinky, the tip line is open — please drop a comment below with any information as to the whereabouts of Pinky and the gang.
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Happy Valentines Day! It`s hard not to love a baby animal, right? Say hello to Happy, a baby aardvark at the Nashville Zoo. He’s #1 — the first baby aardvark born in the zoo.
While Happy might look all cuddly and pink in these photos, aardvarks are private creatures, who mind their business and eat ants/termites. They are nocturnal and underground creatures, making them hard to spot during the day and notoriously hard to research, reports WPLN reporter Catherine Sweeney.
So note to self: you can only see them at the Nashville Zoo during presentations, or when they’re on walks. (You can love Happy the aardvark from afar.)
Photos: Catherine Sweeney and Allyson Mao
Tennessee lawmakers have advanced a host of anti-LGBTQ bills that would run counter to U.S. Supreme Court precedent. That is only one of the bills that reporter Marianna Bacallao is tracking during this legislative session.
Two measures, both proposed by Rep. Gino Bulso, R-Franklin, would challenge landmark cases that legalized same-sex marriage and established protections for discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity.
Rep. Gloria Johnson, D-Knoxville, questioned the legality to going against Bostock v. Clayton County, which established that LGBTQ people are protected from discrimination under the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
“We’re talking about federal law that supersedes state law,” Johnson said. “You can’t just ignore the federal law. So, therein is the problem for those of us who believe in our U.S. Constitution.”
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Curious Nashville Returns!
Back by popular demand, the WPLN fan favorite series Curious Nashville is here to investigate oddities, share local history, tell stories of interesting people, and explain how local institutions operate.
You ask the questions, and we answer.
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