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New Flat Tire Diner popular, good from scratch




Main Street Nashville

A couple’s love of good food and passion for great service led them to turn a very successful food truck business into one of the newest and most raved about restaurants in Hermitage.

Add in an uncommon love story of being reunited years later to the mix, and you have the recipe for the instantly popular Flat Tire Diner Scratch Kitchen and Bakery owned by college sweethearts Chef Tom Mead, 47 and Cheryl Caballero, 51.

After operating the successful Rolling Feast food truck for more than six years throughout the mid-state, the engaged pair decided to turn up the heat and open a restaurant. More than a year ago, the Mt. Juliet couple was excited when they found the perfect location and signed a lease for their new venture.

But then a tornado struck the area, followed by a global pandemic that pretty much crippled the restaurant industry. Heartbroken and concerned for the community, but determined, the couple forged ahead with their plans. Although “taking twice as long and costing twice as much,” Flat Tire Diner opened last September and quickly became a community favorite.

“We do mostly everything from scratch here,” said Mead. From his prepared pastrami, smoked locally around the corner at Janks Smoke Shack, to the crunchy French toast, “he is the food artist,” said Caballero. “Half of it is the good food and the other half is the service experience, having people being taken care of and well attended to that is very important to us.”

She handles all the baking for the diner. Cinnamon rolls, muffins, bread and brownies are all made fresh. “It’s not bulk batch baking either. A lot of this stuff you have to make fresh every day,” said Caballero.

The pride in their work is immediately evident. “Everything with this building and everything in it has all been hand selected. Even every single picture was picked, she spent a year finding every picture she could with flat tires,” said Mead. The dining room walls are decorated with framed vintage Gil Elvgren pin-ups that all feature flat tire artwork.

The décor selection reminds the couple of a funny story in the middle of “food truck glory,” Caballero begins. The couple was working an event in Franklin. “We had one of those stressful nights, it wasn’t a great night.” The pair headed home in their separate vehicles when she gets a phone call from Mead telling her “I’m on the side of the 40 (Interstate 40) and the tires are gone.”

A couple weeks prior to that incident, the box truck’s tires had a slow leak that Caballero was repeatedly asking Mead to get fixed. He constantly had to use an air compressor to inflate the tires, causing them to be late to events, she believes. He finally “got tired of hearing me say ‘can we get it fixed, can we get it fixed,’” and one day Mead had the tires fixed at a shop. “We got the tires fixed, the leak was gone, and Cheryl was happy,” she recalls.

However, her joy with the tires was short lived after getting that late-night phone call from him on the side of the highway. “I’m imagining the truck on its side, but no, the truck is sitting on its axle. And guess what tires are gone, the ones that the guys fixed. The tires are gone and we found one in the woods,” she explains.

“The front tires literally came off while I was driving,” Mead said with a chuckle of disbelief.

The couple can now joke about that night and say that if Caballero would have left well enough alone, Mead would happily still be inflating the tires with his air compressor and an accident avoided.

After that night, Caballero told Mead, “I’m not working on a food truck forever. Either we get a restaurant or I get a real job, meaning I want my desk job back,” she said. That argument planted a seed for what would become the Flat Tire Diner.

When they were trying to think of a name for the restaurant and décor, she thought “the flat tire is why this all happened.” She soon started looking online for the 30s, 40s, and 50s artwork that now adorns the restaurant.

Getting started out west

It was a long road the couple traveled to get to Music City. In 1988 Caballero graduated from Escondido High School in San Diego with dreams of being an engineer after attending community college. However, a spur of the moment “crazy drive” to drop off a girlfriend at the University of Arizona changed her plans. A year later, the part time Denny’s Diner Company server was packing up all her belongings and moving to attend the Wildcats’ mining school on the Tucson, Arizona campus.

Almost immediately, Caballero sought and found work at Denny’s. There she met Mead, a Tucson native and fellow sever.

“This good-looking boy just happened to work there,” Caballero said with a bashful smile as she points to Mead. “He had the long hair thing going on in the back and rode a motorcycle. What can I say, I thought he was cute.”

After dating for four years, the two decided they should go their separate ways. Mead wanted to be a chef and moved to attend school at the California Culinary Academy in San Francisco. Caballero stayed in Tucson, changed her college major to business and graduated.

Eventually after graduating from the culinary academy with awards and Chef of the Year honors, Mead returned to Tucson around 2000 and was married. He racked up decades of fine dining experience as an executive chef at various high-end restaurants. Mead has two children ages 14 and 16, from his first marriage.

Caballero landed a job working for the Department of Occupational Safety and Health for the State of Arizona. During that time, she got divorced and remarried, and suffered “some sad moments in life.” She lost her brother and mother to colon cancer, and cared for her second husband who got critically ill. A new outlook on life after cheating death had him end their marriage.

During that 15-year span, “our paths crossed two times,” said Caballero. Once, she looked Mead up in order to deliver an important-looking piece of mail. The next time, his truck pulled up in her driveway unexpectedly while he was on his way to a fishing trip in Mexico.

“Out of the woodwork, here’s Tom,” she said. “We had another opportunity to catch up a little bit and see where we were. It’s just kind of funny.”

Reconnecting in Tennessee

In 2014, Mead moved east to Tennessee where he started a food truck business with his mother. Single again at age 45, Caballero sought out advice from long-time friends and that included Mead. The two reconnected and after getting reacquainted during a few months of long-distance dating, Caballero moved to Nashville.

With the couple working together on the food truck, their plan was to finish catering commitments and start working on the remodeling the new restaurant location.

“We’re in here doing demolition work and then the tornado hit. That was the first bump in the road,” said Caballero. “We couldn’t even get here for two days because you couldn’t get to this part of town. We didn’t even know if the building had been hit.”

Fortunately for them, the future diner was spared from the tornado’s path, but then restaurants started shutting down around them because of the pandemic. Continuing to build out the space, the couple discussed changing gears, but the excitement was kicking in and the diner started to look like what they wanted, so they stayed on course. Taking “twice as long and costing twice as much” they finally started hiring in September 2020.

“We just decided to push forward. After we hung a Help Wanted sign, the servers that came in and applied were fantastically qualified because they were all getting laid off. These were quality of service staff for sure that we couldn’t have hoped to recruit under any circumstance. So Covid helped us in that way tremendously.”

One of the first servers hired was Old Hickory resident Christine Fontaine, a 10-year manager with J. Crew who was sidelined last year during the pandemic. The busy single mom of an 8-year-old girl said “everything I saw the second I first met them is coming to fruition. I knew the food was going to be phenomenal here before it even opened. I had a really good feeling about Tom and Cheryl and I knew I could strive here even in the middle of a pandemic.

“Not only do they run a great business, but they’re good people. This is home now,” said Fontaine.

For Hermitage resident Annaleigh Rios, who was furloughed from the Opryland Hotel during the pandemic last year, Flat Tire Diner quickly employed her and she is relieved because business is bustling.

“Slammed, we are busy all the time,” said Rios. “People love us, all of us, they’re really good to us. I love working here. We’re a family. Tom is funny and understanding and Cheryl is just awesome.”

Like many businesses right now, Flat Tire Diner also has some staffing challenges. Mead hopes to be fully staffed eventually in order to concentrate on growing the menu and running more specials such as tacos and beers, he said.

They kept some of the Rolling Feast food truck’s most popular items on the diner’s menu including the chicken nachos. The Sonoran dog, a bacon-wrapped hot dog with beans, tomatoes and tomatillo salsa has made an appearance as a featured special. They pay homage to Arizona where you’ll see hints of their home in the Zoni Omelet to the Arizona Gunslinger salsa bottles on the tables.

The service and food was a hit for three travelers from Chicago recently, who ended up making several visits to Flat Tire Diner in the week they were in town. Coincidentally, the girls got a flat tire on their way to Nashville driving through Louisville. Before leaving the diner, Krista Owens got to put a pin on the restaurant’s flat tires happen map board.

“I did an internet search and this place had great reviews. The food is amazing and of course Annaleigh, she’s the best waitress ever,” said Owens.

The neighbors have also been very supportive, said Caballero and thinking about it makes her choke up with emotion. After a soft opening, the diner quickly gained regular customers who return frequently.

“They’ll look me straight in the eye and say ‘we want this place to succeed. We want you to stay.’ I’ve never had anybody be like that, not at any place that I’ve ever worked at. It’s just really cool,” said Caballero.

Tornado, pandemic and all things considered, “this last year has been really good,” added Mead,

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