Gluten Free Restaurants in Nashville: 2026 Celiac Guide

Let’s be honest about what Nashville is up against. The city’s signature foods are, almost without exception, built on wheat. Hot chicken starts with a flour dredge before it ever sees hot oil. Biscuits are the backbone of half the brunch menus in town. Cornbread here is traditionally cut with a flour blend, not straight cornmeal. Meat-and-threes lean on rolls, dumplings, and gravy thickened with flour. If you’re celiac and you came to Nashville expecting to eat like a local at Prince’s or a classic safe-and-sound biscuit joint, the reality is that a meaningful slice of what makes this city’s food famous just isn’t built for you — and pretending otherwise would be doing readers a disservice.

That said, Nashville isn’t a wasteland. It’s a city where the good gluten-free options tend to come from personal stakes rather than a citywide gluten-free culture the way Denver or Boulder has one: a pastry chef with celiac disease built out The Butter Milk Ranch’s bakery case, a restaurant owner with celiac disease runs Sixty Vines with a dedicated fryer, and a genuinely strong Mexican and Vietnamese food scene means naturally corn-based, naturally lower-risk options if you know where to look. The fully dedicated, walk-in-and-order-anything gluten-free kitchens are thinner here than in a city like Denver — there are really only a couple of true dedicated ones — but the shared-kitchen scene that does take celiac disease seriously is deeper than it first appears.

Below is what’s actually documented, restaurant by restaurant, rather than a blanket “gluten-free friendly” label copied from an old best-of list.

Table of contents

Fully Gluten-Free Kitchens

This category is genuinely short in Nashville compared with cities that have a bigger dedicated-GF restaurant scene — a fair reflection of how wheat-centric the local food culture is. What’s here is solid, though.

• Gluten-Free Goose, A Bakery — A dedicated gluten-free bakery in South Nashville (Sugar Valley Drive), certified through the National Celiac Association’s Gluten-Free Food Program. Cinnamon rolls, rustic loaves, and cupcakes, all baked in a facility with zero gluten in the building. It does use dairy, eggs, tree nuts, corn, and soy across various recipes, and keeps a binder of full ingredient lists on hand for anyone checking for other allergies. Open Wednesday through Saturday, 7am to 1pm — items sell out, so go early.
• Sunflower Bakehouse — A vegan restaurant and bakery in Donelson. The bakery production itself is kept strictly gluten free — everything baked in-house, from sandwich bread to cupcakes to pizza rolls, is GF. Worth knowing: the broader kitchen does bring in regular wheat bread for non-GF sandwich orders, kept in dedicated, separate containers with staff trained on cross-contact handling — so it’s the baked-goods side of the operation that’s the truly airtight part, not necessarily every corner of the kitchen.

Not 100% Gluten Free, But Trusted by Celiacs Who Eat There Regularly

This is where most of Nashville’s real gluten-free dining actually happens. None of these are dedicated facilities, but each has a specific, documented reason celiac diners keep coming back.

• Sixty Vines (Assembly Food Hall, near The Gulch) — A wine bar and restaurant whose owner has celiac disease, which shows in how seriously the kitchen treats it: a dedicated gluten-free fryer, plus GF pizza, pasta, fried chicken, and even cheesecake on the menu.
• The Butter Milk Ranch (12 South) — Executive pastry chef Alyssa Gangeri was diagnosed with celiac disease in 2017 and built the bakery program around that experience. Numerous dishes are marked celiac-safe, with a house-made focaccia standing in for biscuits. It’s a shared kitchen, not a dedicated one, but the level of GF-specific menu detail is unusual for a Southern brunch spot.
• bartaco (12 South) — Corn tortillas and chips are cooked in a dedicated fryer, separate from anything with flour. Staff reportedly bring celiac guests their own separate basket of chips so shared-table cross-contact isn’t a factor.
• Blanco Cocina + Cantina (Broadway, downtown) — Another dedicated fryer for chips, with corn tortillas fried separately from the flour ones. Most of the menu can be made gluten free.
• Two Hands (The Gulch) — An Australian-style all-day cafe with a dedicated fryer and multiple GF items across breakfast, lunch, and dessert menus, including banana bread and hash browns.
• Kitchen Notes (Omni Nashville Hotel, downtown) — A dedicated gluten-free fryer and a separate prep space for GF orders, in a hotel restaurant setting that sees a lot of traveling celiac diners.
• Sunda (The Gulch) — A pan-Asian menu (Japanese, Chinese, Thai, Vietnamese, Filipino) with a distinct gluten-free dinner menu covering 15-plus dishes, including sushi and crispy rice. Not a dedicated facility, so it’s still worth flagging celiac disease specifically rather than a general preference.
• Vui’s Kitchen (Berry Hill, East Nashville, Franklin) — Vietnamese food built around a clearly marked GF menu: pho, rice bowls, noodles, and tacos. The kitchen uses tamari instead of soy sauce. The gluten items to skip are the bao buns, dumplings, and banh mi rolls — everything else is largely safe to order from the marked list.
• AVO (West End / oneC1TY) — A fully plant-based restaurant with a dedicated gluten-free fryer for items like battered cauliflower and fries. Worth knowing: AVO’s own menu is upfront that it is not a strictly gluten-free facility and that food is prepared in an environment that contains gluten elsewhere in the kitchen — so the fryer is the specific thing that’s dedicated, not the whole operation.
• Maíz De La Vida — Fresh, hand-pressed nixtamal corn tortillas made from just corn, water, calcium hydroxide, and salt, ground in-house from corn imported from Mexico. Naturally gluten free by ingredient, though it’s not a dedicated facility.
• Mas Tacos Por Favor (East Nashville) — A longtime neighborhood favorite where everything is gluten free except the flour tortillas and fried items. Staff will change gloves and clean surfaces on request, but there’s no dedicated fryer, so fried items carry more risk than the rest of the menu.

The Hot Chicken (and Fried Chicken) Situation

This is the part of Nashville dining that deserves a direct answer rather than a vague “ask your server.” Classic Nashville hot chicken is dredged in seasoned flour, fried, then finished with a cayenne-oil paste — the flour step isn’t optional to the technique, which is exactly why it’s a genuine problem for celiac visitors.

Prince’s Hot Chicken, the restaurant credited with inventing the dish, does not appear to offer a gluten-free version — searches turn up no confirmed GF option, and past customer questions about it have gone unanswered on the restaurant’s own review pages. If you’re highly reactive, this is one to skip rather than gamble on.

Hattie B’s Hot Chicken, Nashville’s best-known hot chicken chain, is not a dedicated facility and does not run a separate fryer. Fries and breaded fried pickles come out of the same oil, and there are multiple reports of celiac diners reacting even after confirming GF status with staff. The one meat that’s reliably gluten free there is the grilled chicken tender — not the fried hot chicken itself.

Gus’s World Famous Fried Chicken (East Nashville) is the more workable option: the batter is rice flour rather than wheat, so the chicken itself is naturally gluten free. Some locations fry the chicken in a separate fryer from fries and onion rings, which matters for cross-contact — worth confirming with staff on your visit, and worth telling them you have celiac disease specifically.

Deacon’s New South (downtown) built a genuinely gluten-free fried chicken dish into its menu on purpose: cornmeal-breaded fried chicken served with potato purée and braised collards, all GF by design rather than as a workaround.

Outside of those specific dishes, treat “fried chicken” and “biscuits” as a category to ask hard questions about anywhere in this city, not a safe default the way they might be elsewhere.

Bakeries Worth a Detour

• Gluten-Free Goose, A Bakery and Sunflower Bakehouse — both covered above, and both worth planning a stop around specifically since dedicated GF bakeries are the rarer find here.
• Caviar & Bananas (multiple locations) — A large gluten-free selection, including croissants and pastries, but the GF items are displayed in the same case as regular baked goods rather than a separate one, which is worth knowing if you’re highly reactive to cross-contact from shared surfaces and air.

How to Find More

The list above reflects what’s currently open and reasonably well documented, but restaurants in Nashville’s fast-casual and bakery scene turn over quickly — AMOT Eatery (formerly A Matter of Taste), once one of the city’s only fully dedicated gluten-free sit-down restaurants, and The Wild Cow, a longtime East Nashville vegetarian spot with heavily GF-adapted menu, have both closed. If you find either on an older “best of Nashville” list, skip it.

GF Scanner App — the built-in restaurant map groups verified gluten-free spots by neighborhood, so you can see what’s actually within walking distance of Broadway, The Gulch, or 12 South without needing signal once you’re out exploring.

Local subreddits — r/glutenfree and r/nashville both have searchable threads where locals share the kind of shared-fryer and cross-contact detail that doesn’t make it onto a restaurant’s own menu.

Ask about the fryer, specifically. It’s the single detail that separates a genuinely safer order from a risky one across almost every entry on this list — bartaco, Blanco Cocina, Sixty Vines, Two Hands, and Kitchen Notes are all upfront about having a dedicated one, while Hattie B’s and most classic hot chicken counters are upfront about not having one.

Summary: Where to Eat Gluten Free in Nashville

Nashville isn’t a city where the gluten-free options fall into your lap the way they might in Denver or Portland — the hot chicken and biscuit culture here is real, and it’s genuinely worth being cautious about rather than assuming a “GF” label covers it. But between a couple of solid dedicated bakeries, a cluster of restaurants run by people with a personal stake in getting it right, and a naturally corn-based Mexican food scene, there’s a real path to eating well and safely here — it just takes more specific questions than it would somewhere with a bigger dedicated-GF restaurant culture.

Checking a grocery run between meals? GF Scanner scans a barcode and tells you in seconds if a packaged product is celiac-safe — handy for stocking up before a day exploring Broadway and the honky-tonks.