My family took a whirlwind trip to Nashville this past weekend. It was like one of those New York Times travel articles, “36 Hours in Nashville.” As soon as we landed, we unloaded my daughter who was to spend the weekend with her best friend who moved to Nashville a year ago. So me, my husband and eight-year-old JR were free to indulge our inner history geeks for the rest of the trip.

Zuzu’s best friend lives near Vanderbilt, so after dropping her off, we stopped for dinner near the university on the west side of town. After a quick trip to Nashville’s premier used bookstore, BookManBookWoman, where I found a copy of an Alice Medrich book that I didn’t own, we ate at Cabana, a hip watering hole with a capacious outdoor patio and private dining canabas indoors. We were there well before the well-heeled party crowd but still were able to enjoy the house-made potato chips with Gorgonzola sauce, sweet potato biscuits with peach preserves and local blackened catfish.

After a lovely meal, we headed back east toward our hotel, but we simply had to stop at Pied Piper Creamery, a local artisanal ice cream parlor in a charming residential neighborhood off the tourist track. We smiled at the clever flavor names — Chai Curious, anyone? — and quirky decor, but it was the flavors that filled us with joy. I was deeply enamored of my Some Like It Hot chocolate ice cream with cayenne and cinnamon and JR devoured his Banana Fanana Fo-Fudding. In short, Pied Piper is very worth a trip.

Saturday morning, we skipped the undistinguished hotel breakfast in favor of an outstanding meal at Marché Artisan Foods, a marketplace and cafe located in the charming Five Points neighborhood on the east side of Nashville. Operated by Chef Margot McCormack, Marché is a casual, family-friendly place to grab a quick yet extremely well-crafted bite.

My husband claimed that his chicken sausage and broccoli rabe frittata was one of the best things he has eaten all year. (I’m trying not to take that personally.) I opted for a light breakfast of whole wheat bread topped with ricotta and sliced local peaches and drizzled with local honey. So simple and yet so delicious. I must try to recreate this dish when our peaches are in season. I was also able to pick up a chocolate bar and a box of duck fat caramels from local chocolatier Olive & Sinclair at Marché’s small market of local products. That’s my kind of souvenir.

After breakfast, we drove out of town to The Hermitage, President Andrew Jackson’s plantation. This was the focus of the trip for the history lovers in the group. It’s an extraordinarily well done museum with informative exhibits about this complicated historical figure, beautiful grounds and an amazingly well-preserved house filled with family artifacts, from the bed Jackson died in to his library of books, many marked with his handwritten notes.

The exhibits emphasized how a plantation such as The Hermitage could not have survived with the labor of enslaved African-Americans and one could even visit the Field Quarters where the field laborers lived. JR was very interested in all of it and it was a delight to be there with him.

After a very fun and interesting morning at The Hermitage, we drove back to Nashville for lunch at The Silly Goose, a casual sandwich and salad place that had come highly recommended.  My husband and I each tried one of the creative couscous dishes and we all enjoyed the refreshing basil lemonade. The food was as good as advertised but the service left a little something to be desired.

Did you know that Nashville has a full-size replica of Athens’ Parthenon, complete with 41-foot tall statute of Athena? Well, it does. It is a remnant of Nashville’s Centennial Festival in the last 1800’s and is located fittingly in Centennial Park. JR loves Greek mythology so he was very keen to see Nashville’s Parthenon. Once there though, this Parthenon was not as interesting as JR has imagined. My husband and I were struck by the strangeness of the thing, but not especially interested in the art exhibits that the building contains either, so we quickly retreated to the hotel for a swim.

Dinner at Chef Sean Brock’s Nashville restaurant, Husk, was the part of the trip that I was looking forward to the most. I had made reservations for three as soon as we knew that we would be going to Nashville. This was my first opportunity to try this James Beard-award winning chef’s cuisine and my expectations were sky-high.

The restaurant itself is located in a beautiful historic home on a hill and feels like a step back in time. And the food was extraordinary. The standouts were the vegetable dishes which I cannot even begin to describe. But they were inventive and amazingly flavorful.  If you have a chance to eat at Husk, either in Charleston or Nashville, just take it.

Taking the notoriously picky JR to a restaurant like Husk was a challenge to be sure. We decided to let JR speak to our server himself to explain what he did and did not eat. Together, JR and our very patient server, Rob, worked out a few things for him to try, including some Carolina rice griddle cakes with pimento cheese and a cola-marinated belly ham on soft rolls. He ate some of both, and all of his cookies and cream ice cream. But the real culinary discovery for JR was grape Nehi. The kid could not get enough. So, in short, we took our 8 year old to sample the cuisine of one of the best chefs in the country and the thing he liked best was grape soda.

On Sunday, we only had time for a quick breakfast before picking up Zuzu, who did not want to say goodbye to her friend, and heading to the airport. In addition to my high-end Olive & Sinclair chocolate, I also could not come home without stocking up on Nashville’s signature indulgence, the Goo-Goo Cluster. Three boxes should last me for a while.

Although our time in Nashville was short and we did nothing related to country music whatsoever, we enjoyed the city immensely. I would highly recommend Nashville as a destination for families with kids and for anyone who likes good eating.