Andrew Rodriguez Brought New York, Sicily, and Restraint to Nashville

By Eric Barton | March 21, 2026

AUTHOR BIO: Eric Barton is editor of The Adventurist and a freelance journalist who has reviewed restaurants for more than two decades. Email him here.

Andrew Rodriguez learned about food from two places that do not much resemble each other. One was New York, where a kid can grow up eating his way through the entire world without leaving town. The other was Sicily, where he spent summers with family, watching people cook all day and pass plates around until somebody finally said basta.

“Growing up in New York was truly a blessing, and the access to so many different cuisines is what makes the city so special,” Rodriguez told me. “Meanwhile, Summers in Sicily gave me a deep love and understanding of family-style cooking and the beauty of food as a shared connection.”

That seems to explain a lot about the way Rodriguez cooks now. As executive chef at Conrad Nashville, he oversees Blue Aster and Thistle & Rye, two restaurants with very different assignments, and he does it with the perspective of someone shaped by fine dining, family cooking, and enough years in serious kitchens to understand that the smartest move on the plate is not always adding one more thing. Rodriguez is a chefs who helped build Nashville into the kind of city where ambitious people want to cook, and because he has now landed in one of its higher-profile hotel jobs with a point of view that feels earned.

Chef Andrew Rodriguez

His education started early. Rodriguez grew up with a grandfather who was a chef and restaurateur, and while he never got to see those restaurants in their day, he remembers what was cooked at home. “I remember the distinct smells of Puerto Rican cuisine,” he said. “There was always something on the stove, and it was always made with love.”

Then there was Sicily. Rodriguez describes whole days spent cooking as a family, with the matriarch making the rounds and refilling plates until somebody finally gave in and said enough. He started working in restaurants in his later teens and found, pretty quickly, that this was not just a job. “It wasn’t until culinary school, when I was told I had a natural talent, that I knew I was on the right path,” he said. That path led him into serious kitchens, including work under Missy Robbins at A Voce and as part of the opening team at A Voce Columbus. Those restaurants taught him the lessons that define a good chef: organization, cleanliness, attention to detail, and the discipline to execute day after day.

35-layer lasagna

Rodriguez also took from those kitchens an appreciation for simplicity, which sounds obvious until you realize how many chefs spend years trying to learn it. “One of the most formative challenges in my early career was refining the art of restraint,” he told me. “When you’re young and ambitious, it’s tempting to add every garnish, technique, or trend you’ve learned.” He had to learn to stop doing that. “Using high-quality ingredients is enough, and they speak for themselves.” That idea shows up again when he talks about cooking over open fire, which he says will always be his preferred method. It is a useful detail because it tells you he likes clarity. Fire, good ingredients, less fuss. There is a whole philosophy tucked in there.

Mezze

Lamb kofta

The turning point came in 2015, when he moved to Nashville. “I arrived at a time when the city was really starting to gain culinary momentum,” he said, and that timing put him in the middle of a place figuring out what kind of restaurant town it wanted to become. He went on to lead kitchens at Adele’s and Pinewood Social, two restaurants that helped define modern Nashville dining. “Those experiences challenged me to think bigger, lead teams, and create dishes that resonated with an evolving community,” he said.

Now he is at Conrad Nashville, running Blue Aster and Thistle & Rye with a clear understanding that a chef inside a hotel has to do more than make one good menu. Blue Aster is “more formal and elevated,” while Thistle & Rye is more relaxed and casual. The challenge is to give each restaurant its own identity without letting standards slip between them.

Grilled prawns

The dish he says best captures his Italy-through-Nashville point of view is the sweet potato raviolini at Blue Aster. “All of our stuffed pasta is made in-house,” he said, and this version brings together local goat cheese and sweet potatoes in a way that is seasonal, Italian in spirit, and rooted in where he is now.

Whole branzini a la cazuela

Chocolate hazelnut tart

That feels like the right way to understand Andrew Rodriguez. He is not trying to erase where he came from, and he is not trying to perform some borrowed version of place. He is cooking from New York, Sicily, Puerto Rico, and Nashville all at once, with every one of those places helping to build the story he’s telling on the plate.