This is the story of two brothers, two grandmothers, a denied bank loan, and the worst possible year to start a food business. It ends with one of Nashville's most talked-about restaurants. But it started in somebody's kitchen with a paper bag full of fries.
Irene and Vesta. The Original Bag Ladies.
Before there was a truck. Before there was a restaurant. Before any of it, there was Grandma Irene Foster and Grandma Vesta Lou Sherrill.
James and Brandon Littleton grew up in Nashville. Summers meant one thing: the kitchen. Both grandmothers cooked fries the way people don't anymore. Hand cut. Double fried. Patient. Irene would cook them twice or three times before anyone touched them. Then she'd store them in brown paper bags to hold the heat and the crunch. Vesta did the same.
The fries weren't a side dish. They were the event.
"One thing we could agree on was fries. That's something our grandmothers really honed in on to make sure we ate."
Brandon Littleton, Co-FounderThat memory stuck. Not in a nostalgic, hashtag-throwback kind of way. In a this-is-actually-how-food-should-taste kind of way. You don't forget fries like that. You spend the rest of your life trying to recreate them.
The Bank Said No. Good.
Brandon spent years in finance at Bank of America and Merrill Lynch. James drove trucks and worked as an Uber driver. Two brothers, two very different paths, one shared obsession.
They had the concept. They had the recipes. They went to the bank with a plan for a brick-and-mortar restaurant. The bank said no. Not a soft maybe. A no.
A lot of people would have stopped there. James and Brandon did not stop there.
Getting denied a business loan is not unusual for first-time food entrepreneurs in Nashville. Getting denied and still opening is the part that separates the ones who make it from the ones who have a great idea forever.
Then 2020 happened. The year the world closed. The year nobody started a food business.
James and Brandon started a food business.
A $4,000 Trailer and a Drive to Georgia
They found a trailer frame for $4,000. Drove it to Georgia. Spent about $25,000 building it into a food truck. Brought it back to Nashville. This was not a careful, conservative plan. This was two brothers betting on themselves with everything they had.
In 2021, the Bag Lady's Fry Joint food truck showed up on Gallatin Pike in East Nashville. Day one: one customer order.
That is not a typo. One order. Day one.
By day four, the line was out the window.
The "Day One" in Day One Dust is not a marketing tagline. It is a reference to that first day on Gallatin Pike. One order. Zero momentum. Total commitment. The seasoning on every plate is named for the day they refused to quit.
Word spread the way things spread in Nashville: through people telling other people that they found something real. The truck became a fixture. Then a cult thing. Then a destination.
From Gallatin Pike to Buchanan Street
January 2023. Bag Lady's Fry Joint opened at 1402 Buchanan Street in the Buchanan Arts District in North Nashville. A real restaurant. The one the bank said they couldn't have.
The space is exactly what James and Brandon wanted it to be. 90s nostalgia everywhere. Hip-hop and R&B playing the way music should play in a restaurant, loud enough to feel it. Cinema and gaming references in the decor. A bar with local craft beer from Yazoo and Bearded Iris. A cocktail menu that takes itself seriously without being pretentious. The vibe is the product as much as the fries are.
Nashville Scene named it Best Loaded Fries in 2024. TripAdvisor reviewers called it one of the top 30 things you can eat in the city. The Google rating sits at 4.6 across 527 reviews. Not bad for two guys who couldn't get a bank loan.
1402 Buchanan Street, Nashville, TN 37208. Buchanan Arts District, North Nashville. Come hungry. Come with people. The fries are loaded and made to share, or not to share -- that's between you and whoever you brought.
The Truck Still Runs
Here is the part of the story that matters if you are planning an event: James and Brandon never parked the truck for good. They said from the start, "The food truck got us here. We would not abandon that."
The same truck that launched on Gallatin Pike with one order on day one now shows up at corporate events in Brentwood, weddings in Franklin, birthday parties in Germantown, and campus events at Vanderbilt and Belmont. The food is identical to what comes out of the kitchen on Buchanan Street. Same hand-cut fries. Same beef tallow. Same Day One Dust. Same obsessive attention to what Irene and Vesta would have wanted it to taste like.
If you want to bring that to your event, this is where you do it.
The bank said no. COVID said no. Nashville said yes. Loudly. Repeatedly. And the brothers kept cooking.
