Babychan arrived with a lot of expectations attached — it's the second concept from Brian Lea and Leina Horii, the husband-and-wife team behind Kisser, and Nashville's food community was watching. It has met every one of those expectations and then added a few of its own.
The strawberry sando is the dish people talk about first, and it earns the conversation — fluffy milk bread, vanilla whipped cream, mascarpone, fresh strawberries, assembled with the lightness that Japanese pastry culture prizes. But the katsu sando is the one that keeps bringing people back: properly breaded, properly sauced, served on bread that Horii makes herself. These are not novelty items. They're dishes built with genuine craft and executed consistently.
The coffee program matches the food in ambition. The Hokkaido latte and miso caramel latte are specific and well-conceived, the kind of drinks that feel like someone actually thought about what they should taste like rather than just adding Japanese ingredients to an espresso menu. The sake and Japanese beer selection is a nice bonus for the late-morning crowd that wants something besides coffee.
Babychan is Delicious because the Kisser team brought the same standards downtown and applied them to daytime dining, which Nashville was doing worse than it deserved. Get there early, expect a line, order the katsu sando and a strawberry sando to split. You'll understand immediately.
The Kisser team's daytime bakery is exactly what Nashville needed — Japanese milk bread, technique-driven pastries, and katsu sandos from a kitchen that knows what it's doing.