To realize his vision for Tailor, Vivek knew he needed a tight-knit team of people who obsessed over everything that goes into building a great restaurant, from the food to the hospitality to the story (of course). But it was about more than just finding these people. Vivek knew he had to create an environment more like that of a band, where every member wanted the audience to feel something from every single note they played. At Tailor, just like in a folk song, there is a deeper meaning in everything from the bread to how the candles are lit.

Over the course of our four-day trip, Tucker and I met with the team every day to observe their culture. We found that food is more than just sustenance at Tailor — every person is intentional in their choice to be there and the team takes care of each other. Tailor was no one’s plan B.

Culinary director Allie Evans loves making food so much she has “shower thoughts” about what to try next. (Garlic pickle butter was a recent idea.) She spent 15 years pursuing making the perfect loaf of bread (think the texture of Wonderbread, but the flavor of a French pastry you have to wait in line an hour for). “I just kept pushing,” she said. “Most breads are cooked to 190 degrees and I cook mine to 180 degrees because I like it a little doughy.” The item is simply called “Allie’s bread,” a well-paid homage to someone who worked on it for more than a decade. “Tailor is a place where my weird projects are celebrated,” she said. Often, those weird projects make it on the menu.

The same creative spirit extends to the business side of the house. Raised by two private investigators who frequently took her on surveillance outings, Tailor’s general manager, Jenna Pearl Leonard, studied human behavior early on in her life. She grew up working in diners and studied forensic psychology in college, and today, she draws on these experiences to predict the needs of her teams and guests. “I’m a creative person who thinks about the most efficient way to do something,” she said.

After working for Danny Meyer’s, Daniel Humm’s, and Keith McNally’s restaurants in New York City, Jenna moved to Nashville and now sweats the details in the Tailor dining room. When she interviews potential hires for a server position, she might ask them to walk around the room and light the candles on the tables. Why? It allows her to watch the path they take and see how their minds work. For the record, there is a correct way to do it: Take the path with the fewest steps.

One of the team’s priorities has been to open Americans’ eyes to authentic Indian food. “When Americans eat Indian food, they tend to see the similarities between the cuisines much more than they see the differences,” said Vivek. “The more diners learn about a cuisine, the more they learn about the people behind it.”

This being Nashville, a town built on vinyl records and music stories, every Uber driver has a story about the song they wrote or are writing. While the seats at Tailor have been filled with country stars, the difference here is they are not necessarily coming to be seen. They are coming because, as Kristian Bush from the multi-platinum group, Sugarland, told us, Tailor is the place you want to share with people you know will appreciate it.

“Vivek runs a master class in using food, but also himself and his life to tell his story,” said Bush. He likens Tailor to going to an arena show and then seeing a show at the Sphere in Las Vegas. It’s not that one is necessarily better than the other — it’s that the Sphere is a completely different paradigm. Tailor, like a Sphere show, exists in its own category.

After Bush plays a show at the Grand Ole Opry, he has a tradition of taking whoever played with him to the late seating at Tailor. “At our songwriter nights in Nashville, we tell the story of the song before we play it, and it becomes an art of putting your mind and heart in the right space to receive the music you are about to hear,” said Bush. “That is exactly what Vivek does with his stories about the dishes you’re about to eat.”

At the end of one reporting day, we asked Vivek if he would ever run out of stories to tell, doing it four nights a week, season after season. He laughed and replied, “It would take me a lifetime to even uncover 10 percent of what is out there.”

Even with great food and stories, the restaurant business is still hard. According to the Nashville Business Journal, restaurant attendance in Nashville is down 30 percent year over year. Contributing factors include rising rents, higher food costs, and a restaurant correction after years of growth.

Tailor, with its $125 tasting menu, delivers one of the best deals in town, but it is not immune to the downturn in restaurant visits. The team has brainstormed ways to generate new revenue. One idea is selling Tailor’s renowned chai — which Vivek’s dad developed over 10 years using Gujarati tea, a secret blend of spices, and fresh ginger — as a takeaway item. But most of the business’s success comes down to creating inventive menus for each season.

On Wednesday morning, Tucker and I sat in on the team’s planning process for their fall menu. The “rough draft” took up four single-spaced printed pages and included more than 50 ingredients listed across the eight dishes. But, we learned, the menu never really begins with ingredients — it starts with questions: What are your favorite memories of this time of year? What did your parents cook for you in the fall? What do you make for Thanksgiving? Every answer evolves into a story about rituals, traditions, family, and celebrations.

For 90 minutes, the team ran through the new hits they wanted to create. This is not a heavy metal band — no raised voices or thrown chairs. The mood was chill: a supergroup of folk singers digging into the historical canon while adding their own sound to the tradition. Take the Kerala beef fry burger. It’s a riff on the Indian dish of slow-roasted beef in masala with coconut bites and curry leaves that the Tailor team decided to recreate as a smash burger. And it has a story. “Kerala was a former colony of Portugal and not Britain, which means it has a big Roman catholic population,” Vivek explained. “For that reason, you see a lot of beef dishes there, which is rare to see in India.”

The team envisioned the Kerala beef fry as a masala-crusted crispy beef patty, where the beef is mixed with ground onions and chiles. Instead of American cheese, they would top it off with creamy coconut sauce. This dish captures the essence of Tailor. We may see, taste, and feel similar things — a burger! — but no one sees, tastes, or experiences anything the same. It’s like what Vivek’s grandmother once told him: “Even if I give someone my recipe, theirs will never taste like mine.”

“Early on, Vivek told me to let the infinite goal be my guiding light, not finite goals,” Jordan said. “At Tailor, our focus is to make sure people leave happier than when they came in. That is our guiding light.”

In that sense, Tailor may not be the antidote to all that pained Pete Wells about restaurants today — I still wanted to whip out my phone to tell someone about this experience. But then Tailor does not aspire to be a balm or a remedy to any particular industry ailment. It remains steadfast in following its guiding light. Tailor, and its first generation cuisine, is a live performance. It comes from a long line of food and tradition but it's the interpretation of that first generation. And when the second generation comes in, it's over.

As Tucker and I sipped our chai at the end of our meal, I realized that as delicious as the dinner was, I’d probably forget about something we ate, one day — what was that third course again? That is okay. We are not food critics, and this visit wasn’t for a restaurant blog. We came here to eat, sure, but what we wanted to uncover most were the secrets of incredible storytelling. Food is the medium, but the creative brilliance is in how to assemble the band and let each player write their best songs. Tailor’s band of chefs played their own tune and created an emotional connection that allowed us to gain a deeper understanding of their experiences, which in turn enriched our own.

They put something interesting into the world — and told us why it really mattered.

Our stories matter because they are ours and ours alone, and that is what people desire.