Live Fire, a Long Table, and a Hollow Full of Cedars
There is a particular kind of November evening in Wilson County that the rest of the year spends building toward. The humidity has finally let go. The hardwoods along the ridgelines have turned, the cedars have gone deep green against them, and the light drops early and gold across pasture that has been grazed down to stubble. It is, if you are the sort of person who thinks about such things, almost aggressively good weather for eating outside.
Somebody has thought about it. On Saturday, Nov. 15, a farm-to-table benefit dinner will be held at Cedar Springs at Bone Hollow, the event property at 784 Phillips Road in Lebanon, from 5 to 8 p.m. The cooking will be done over live fire by Rambler, and the proceeds go to the Crohn's & Colitis Foundation.
Cooking with fire, on purpose
Live-fire cooking is having a moment nationally, but it is worth saying plainly what it means here: no gas line, no thermostat, no dial to turn down. The cook builds a fire, lets it burn to coals, and then manages distance and time instead of temperature. Everything that comes off it carries some smoke. It is older than the county, and it is unforgiving in a way that makes it a strange choice for a fundraiser and a wonderful one for a guest — you are watching somebody work without a net.
The setting does a lot of the work too. Bone Hollow is one of those Middle Tennessee place names that sounds invented and is not, and the ground around Lebanon has been growing cedar since long before anybody thought to put a table on it. The town took its name from the cedars — the biblical ones — and the limestone glades that make this stretch of Wilson County a little scrubby for row crops turn out to be exactly what eastern red cedar wants. Drive out toward Cedars of Lebanon and you are driving through the reason the place is called what it is called.
Why this particular cause
Crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis are chronic inflammatory conditions of the digestive tract, and there is an obvious, slightly uncomfortable irony in raising money for them at a dinner. It is not lost on anyone. It is also, arguably, the point: a disease that makes eating complicated gets fought with an evening built entirely around a shared table. Research and patient support cost money, and this is a way to move some.
If you want to go
The organizers describe the evening as intimate and have said seats are limited, which is the usual and honest signal that this is not a drop-in. It is a ticketed dinner on a working property, not a festival, and the capacity is whatever the long table holds.
Details and reservations are handled through the venue. Wilson County's calendar thins out between the fair in August and the Christmas parades in December, and a night like this lands squarely in that gap — which may be the best argument for it. There is nothing else quite like it on the schedule.
Closer to home, Mt. Juliet's own dining scene keeps adding rooms: Nicoletto's Italian Kitchen is building its largest location yet on Lebanon Road, and the city's first-ever Burger Week put thirteen local kitchens on the same list this summer.
