36 hours in Nashville, Tennessee

Barista Parlor opened in May 2012 in a converted auto-repair garage. [Photo/Agencies]

Saturday

10:00 AM

Local Flavor: Barista Parlor opened in May 2012 in a converted auto repair garage behind a dusty old store called Rainbow Fashions in increasingly hip East Nashville. It is a highly stylized coffee house where they spin vinyl, decorate with Edison bulbs and old motorcycles, use blue bandannas as napkins and do not serve decaf. It's a communal place - a kid with a "Franny and Zooey" paperback in the pocket of his low-slung jeans might take a stool by a willowy woman in a big sweater editing footage on her Mac-Book Air - that is serious about local ingredients. The sausage in a crumbly buttermilk biscuit is from Porter Road Butcher next door; the baristas' canvas aprons with leather straps are from the workshop of the leather goods company Emil Erwin, across the river in Marathon Village; and the Olive and Sinclair chocolate in this morning's scone? Stone ground in Nashville. (Breakfast for two, about $25.) With the Black Keys front man Dan Auerbach, who lives and operates a recording studio in Music City, Barista Parlor has just opened a second place on Magazine Street in the Gulch neighborhood.

12:00 PM

Food Trucks and Stuff: Poke around the rapidly changing east side, and you'll find a district reinventing itself. The Craftsman-style bungalows, circa 1920s, that make up sleepy little residential pockets vary from student flophouse to renovated dream house. Creative types mill around I Dream of Weenie, a hot-dog stand fashioned out of an old Volkswagen bus. All the imaginative dogs cost less than $4.75. In the Shoppes on Fatherland, there's Moxie, a furniture store opened by a former set designer where you might find the perfect Lucite ice bucket, and Jones Fly Co, where a fly-fisherman hand ties his feathery designs on a raw wood workbench. Before dropping from shopping, repair for a nouveau comfort-food lunch at the Silly Goose (red chile couscous with grilled chicken is $9.50), or if the wait's too long, head to Mas Tacos Por Favor, the groovy former food truck that's serving fried avocado from a fixed address now. Tacos are $3; cash only.

3:00 PM

A New Frontier: In hilly Sevier Park, picnickers in fashion-sweats settle in for the afternoon, while strollerpushing mothers amble shoulder to shoulder, and plaid-and-denimclad men throw balls for their rescue dogs. Here's a chance to walk among the locals who staked a claim to the 12 South neighborhood well before the current boom. A pioneer on 12th Avenue South, Imogene + Willie, opened in 2009 in an old gas station selling meticulously made jeans and has grown into a cool emporium with a branch in Portland, Oregon. The avenue is now lined with independent businesses like Savant Vintage (packed to the gills with frocks, clutches, tumblers, and the like), Las Paletas unusually flavored ice pops ($2.50), Holly Williams's nouveau general store White's Mercantile, and Judith Bright, a jeweler that recently moved from Green Hills, where Ann Patchett opened Parnassus Books, drawing a crowd that's equal parts Berkeley and Bridgehampton.