There are secrets in the fruit tea at Gallatin High.
About 10 years ago, a parent passed the recipe to Kay Page, an assistant to the school’s band program who also runs the concession stand during football games. The drink quickly became a sensation. Assistant Principal Johnnie Anderson told me the school sells between 20 and 25 gallons at every game. “If there’s a night they run out before I get my cup, it’s very disappointing,” he said. “A few weeks ago I was lucky enough that Ms. Page gave me a gallon to take home on a Friday night. It was gone by Monday.”
“I did not share it with my family,” he added.
Even though Anderson loves the fruit tea, he’s unsure what’s in it, and he’s unlikely to find out. As far as he knows, Page and Bobby Luna, Gallatin High School’s longtime head basketball coach, are the only school employees with the recipe. That’s not for lack of trying. “We have a local restaurant in town that every so often will come up and try to get the recipe out of somebody at the concession stand,” Anderson said. “Because our fruit tea is better than their fruit tea.”
Right: Tango mint fruit tea from Chef’s Market/ Provided
When I asked if he thought these restaurant snoops could ever pry the recipe out of Page or her colleagues, he answered without hesitation: “That won’t happen.”
This is how you know that Gallatin High’s fruit tea is the real deal. Technically, anyone can make this beverage, which typically blends black tea, multiple fruit juices, and a little something extra like mint or cinnamon oil. However, for a fruit tea to be “Nashville official,” it needs a story.
And with apologies to every other city in the world, a bona fide fruit tea really does need to come from Nashville. As Jennifer Justus wrote in her detailed history, nobody is certain why the city adopted it as an official beverage, but the association has stuck. In researching this story, I spoke to several Nashville natives whose memories of fruit tea were just as meaningful as the beverage itself. “It brings back the nostalgia of being at home,” Anderson said. “I remember my dad drinking it and every so often letting us have a little bit.” Then he laughed. “He liked to keep it all for himself, and now I’m doing the same thing.”
When he was growing up in Nashville, fruit tea gave Vivek Surti a rite of passage. As a teenager, he loved the fruit tea at Baja Burrito, a locally owned burrito joint that’s been in Berry Hill for 25 years. One night, when he had just a little left in his take-out cup, he decided to mix it with whiskey that he snuck out of his parents’ liquor cabinet. “That was my first taste of booze,” he said.
Now Surti offers bourbon fruit tea punch at Tailor, his restaurant in Germantown that blends his Nashville upbringing with the Indian food his family ate at home. It’s meaningful that customers can try his first, illicit cocktail. It’s also important that Nashvillians sometimes refer to fruit tea as tea punch. “Punch” is derived from the Hindi word panch, meaning “five.” (This refers to the five most common ingredients: water, alcohol, fruit juice, spice, and something sour.) “A fruit tea punch is inherently Nashville and inherently Indian,” Surti said. “It’s our entire concept in one drink.”
Right: Tango mint fruit tea from Chef’s Market/ Provided
Even though Tailor has a seasonal menu, the bourbon fruit tea punch is always available. Similarly, fruit tea is a fixture at institutions like The Picnic Cafe, Chef’s Market, and Calypso Cafe. All of them have served the drink for more than a generation.
When Jim and Cheryl Hagy founded Chef’s Market in Goodlettsville in 1997, they immediately offered a mint fruit tea whose provenance is a generational saga. The recipe was created by Joann Tomlin, whose food had been popular for years at local cafes. She passed it to her nephew Andy Clough, who brought it to a restaurant where he worked with Jim. That restaurant used it as part of a promotional campaign, and they christened it Tango Mint Tea. The newly branded drink was a smash. When Jim left for Chef’s Market, he had permission to take it with him.
He’s still making Tango Mint Tea the way he was taught, back in the last century. “You have to steep it for at least an hour,” Jim said. “We make it in huge pots that we cover with plastic, because we don’t have lids that fit, and then we write on top when it’s going to be ready. That makes a really concentrated flavor that people like.”
He added, “We will never stop selling it. People sometimes come here just for that.”
David Parker said the same about the fruit tea at Calypso Cafe, a Caribbean-themed restaurant his cousin and her husband opened back in 1989. (It’s been located in Berry Hill since the mid-90s.) He took over earlier this year, and he knows that the beverage is bedrock. “Having grown up as a a customer [of the cafe] and now being the owner, I am mesmerized by how much interest there is in that tea,” he said. “There are people who drink it for their whole meal, then ask for a refill to take home. There are people who just come by and pick up multiple gallons and nothing else.”
Right: Fruit tea at Calypso Café/ Photo by Mark Blankenship
This has clarified his professional vision: “I’m not gonna be crazy and think I can make that better. If I did something to the fruit tea, I think it would create a riot.”
This is the level of intrigue that a Nashville fruit tea demands. If it doesn’t inspire potential riots, underage drinking, or concession stand espionage, then set the glass aside. You’re better off going thirsty.
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