RESTAURANT NEWS | TENNESSEE
Small-Plates and Pizza Concept Bravado Lands in Franklin's Cool Springs
Chef Sean Foley leads a kitchen built around fresh pasta, wood-fired Neo-Neapolitan pizza, and Italian-inspired plates meant for the middle of the table.
BRAVADO | MAP | INSTAGRAM
By Maria Rodriguez
6:26 a.m. ET, Oct. 15, 2026
AUTHOR BIO: With a day job that requires constant travel, Maria Rodriguez is likely a regular at your favorite restaurant. She’s reviewed restaurants since 2007 in magazines from Spain to Seattle.
At Bravado, the meal is built for the middle of the table. Small plates arrive first, a pizza or two follows, and the pasta lands wherever there's still room. It's a relaxed way to eat, and it's the point of the newest restaurant in Franklin, Tennessee. The kitchen is Italian-inspired and deliberately focused, with fresh pasta, wood-fired pizza, and a short list of entrées behind the sharing plates.
Bravado is the latest concept from POP Hospitality Group, the Nashville restaurant family founded by Kelly Black and built over more than 25 years from a single pizzeria. The group's other restaurants are The Row Kitchen & Pub, NashHouse, and Treehouse, all in Nashville. Bravado began with a soft opening for dinner on Sept. 23, then settled into full service in early October, with brunch added on Oct. 3 and lunch on Oct. 5.
Chef Sean Foley leads the kitchen. Small plates include whipped goat cheese with pistachio and honey, Tuscan risotto with wild mushrooms and truffle oil, patatas bravas, and meatballs with whipped ricotta. Brussels sprouts come off the wood fire with a whiskey maple gastrique. Salads run from Caesar and Caprese to beets with goat cheese, and entrées include chicken Milanese, Faroe Island salmon, pork tenderloin, and flat iron steak.
The pasta is made fresh with imported Italian semolina. There's radiatori alla vodka in a spicy vodka sauce, spaghetti bolognese built on a pork, beef, and veal ragù, fungi gemelli with wild mushrooms and Reggiano, and gamberoni campanelle with jumbo shrimp, parsley, and garlic butter. It's a short list, and that's by design. Black has worked in pizza his whole career and traveled to study it, and that preference for focus runs through the rest of the kitchen.
Pizza gets the same treatment. The dough uses Italian flour and ferments for 48 hours, the tomatoes are certified San Marzano, and the pies bake at high heat until the crust takes on the dark, blistered spots bakers call leoparding. Choices include a Margherita, four-cheese, wild mushroom, spicy pepperoni, and prosciutto. The group states its approach plainly: no seed oils, and imported cold-pressed olive oil, flour, and tomatoes as the starting point.
The room keeps things loose. There's a mid-century Italian influence in the design, murals that turn restaurant workers into acrobats, and one projection-mapped mural with a button guests can press to step into the picture. Basil, rosemary, sage, and mint grow on the back patio, and the basil goes straight onto the pizzas. Cocktails lean classic and seasonal, with non-alcoholic drinks alongside.
Three weeks in, Bravado already reads less like an opening and more like a routine: a patio garden, a short pizza list, and a table that fills up one shared plate at a time. In Cool Springs, that's a useful kind of restaurant to have.
The partners behind Apizza Regionale have opened an Italian café, bakery, and trattoria.
By MARIA RODRIGUEZ
