The past year has been a whirlwind for Tyler and Aubrey O’Laskey, the married team behind the rapidly growing Perenn group of bakeries and restaurants. With five locations already operating in Nevada, Middle Tennessee was not on their radar until a favorite customer moved to Franklin.
“He called us within a week and said we had to move here and open a Perenn,” Aubrey recalls. “I joke that we think he just missed our food and selfishly wanted to be able to have it again!” But the couple quickly warmed to the idea.
Aubrey shares, “We’ve got four kids and were looking for a place where we could have some space and that supported small businesses. We visited Franklin and stayed at The Harpeth Hotel. We immediately fell in love. It’s the quintessential small town—so charming! And people are much more generous with their kindness.”
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They found an ideal spot to open their first Tennessee venture, on the first block of Main St., as you enter Franklin from the north. The attractive storefront features large windows to let in natural light and ample parking nearby. Welcoming raised beds line the front of the building and provide a natural transition from outdoors to the cozy interior of the bakery and rôtisserie.
While the O’Laskeys are best known for their baking skills, they wanted to ensure that Perenn was more than just a place for coffee and pastries. “We’ve always wanted to have an all-day café with sort of a Northern European menu,” explains Aubrey. “We also wanted to make a good first impression with locals and visitors that we’re not a chain or a franchise. This space is a bakery, a restaurant, and a café.”
The goal is to create a “Perenn lifestyle,” where guests might stop by in the morning for coffee and a croissant, grab something from the retail case for lunch, then return for dinner or pick up a loaf of bread to accompany a home-cooked meal. The bakery is open from 7 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. (“Those are great hours for bakers,” Aubrey jokes.) Thursday through Saturday, the restaurant reopens at 5 p.m. for dinner service.
The staff resets the room for the evening meal, creating a moody, dimly-lit room with lots of candles. “It’s a completely different dining room at night,” notes Aubrey. “The bakery is so busy all day, but it’s calm and serene at night.”
The O’Laskeys are seeking to create a space for both locals and visiting out-of-towners, leaning into the pub culture of their beloved vacation spot of the Cotswolds in England. Local art decorates the walls, and low ceilings add even more intimacy to the dining room vibe.
The menu also leans Anglophile with a featured Sunday Roast (which is actually available during every dinner service). That complete meal is guaranteed to stick to your ribs with seasonal farmer’s vegetables, crispy schmaltz potatoes, and Yorkshire pudding. Other Northern European favorites on the tight dinner menu include a proper version of Bangers and Mash, Ora King Salmon Amandine, and a strip steak under a Béarnaise sauce.
The O’Laskeys’ Nevada operations utilize a hub-and-spoke production process with a central kitchen handling much of the cooking. To keep up with the volume of baking they anticipated for their Tennessee outposts, the couple knew that they wanted a central production facility. “We find a lot more consistency working with one team of bakers instead of trying to manage multiple kitchens,” explains Aubrey. “Plus, bread ovens are giant!”
Since opening their production kitchen in Tennessee back in August, Perenn has been able to take even greater control over almost every aspect of their processes. They mill their own flours using grains from local and regional farmers, and they can now source organic materials and avoid the use of seed oils.
Most importantly, the O’Laskeys have found a welcoming new home for their young family. Aubrey gushes, “We live on an acre in Thompson’s Station, and we’ve got room to plant a giant garden. The stone walls of Leiper’s Fork remind us of hiking in the Cotswolds. The best part is when we go on vacation, we’re not sad to come back home!”
Perenn
94 East Main Street, Franklin, TN 37064
(615) 979-9083
Reservations: resy.com
