Nashville has invaded New York, and there’s nothing weird about it

NEW YORK — It’s last call on Saturday night, and the Country Fresh band is polishing off its set with a hard-driving take on Johnny Cash’s “Ring of Fire.”

The crowd of tourists — who’ve come from around the globe to get a taste of Music City — are still on the dance floor, spinning each other around and taking selfies in front of the stage.

But soon enough, the “Fire” will be out, and these folks will close their tabs and head back out onto Broadway.

But not Nashville’s Lower Broadway. Broadway Broadway. Home to “Hamilton,” not Tootsie’s.

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This country bar, after all, is the Opry City Stage in New York’s Times Square, a brand-new $14 million project from Opry Entertainment, which owns Nashville’s famed Grand Ole Opry.

A few years ago, this would be the point in the story where you’d cue the “record scratch” sound effect.

“Nashville in New York?!” you’d be expected to exclaim.

What a jarring contrast, no?

Well, no. Not anymore, at least.

Sure, there were double takes when Garth Brooks played Central Park in 1997, or when the CMAs were held at Madison Square Garden in 2005. But in 2018, Music City and the Big Apple seem to have more common threads than ever before.

Times Square, for example, has morphed into an all-American mega-mall over the past 25 years, and one that the Opry brand fits snugly into.

And as Nashville has become a hip tourist hotbed — thanks in part to that 2013 New York Times piece that dubbed us an “It City” — more than a few New Yorkers have visited, and many have brought some part of Music City back with them.  

These days, you can find hot chicken, Hatch Show Print and all manner of honky-tonk flair throughout Manhattan and Brooklyn. I recently spent a few days in the city to cover the Grammy Awards for The Tennessean, and while I was there, I went looking for Nashville on the streets of New York.

A slice of Southern culture

Michael Hucko, 28, has lived in two places: Syracuse and Brooklyn.

“But I had always considered the idea of moving down to Nashville,” he says. “I've been down there on tour, and Nashville had a really cool punk scene. I like the South …generally," he says with a laugh. "I was afraid of getting ‘Easy Rider-ed.’ ”

For now, he’s enjoying a slice of Southern culture in the heart of Brooklyn’s Williamsburg neighborhood. We’re sitting at the bar at Skinny Dennis, an honest-to-goodness honky-tonk that’s served cheap beer (for Brooklyn, anyway) and live country music for the last five years.

I ask if anyone thought it was weird when a honky-tonk opened in the neighborhood.

“Nothing weird about it,” a patron next to us says, picking up a couple of tall boys for his table.

Brooklyn, in fact, is the site of several major Nashville-New York connections. The Brooklyn-based pizzeria Pizza Loves Emily is opening its first non-NYC location in Nashville’s Gulch neighborhood later this year. That might remind you of Two Boots, the midtown Nashville pizza joint that’s actually a mini-chain from New York.

East Nashville’s bed and breakfast Urban Cowboy was actually the company’s second location — its first opened in Williamsburg in 2014. And a few blocks from Skinny Dennis, the sign for a corner bar might look familiar to East Nashvillians.

It says “Clem’s,” but it has the same cursive font and black-and-white color scheme as the sign for Duke’s, a hip hang for rock musicians in East Nashville. That’s no coincidence: Duke’s owners Joey Plunket and Sara Nelson used to bartend here at Clem’s, and when they moved to Nashville and decided to open their own bar, they wanted to pay homage to their old employer.

What is a coincidence — a very strange one — is that Plunket and Nelson happen to be sitting at the bar at Clem’s when I walk into the place. They’re meeting up with old friends in Brooklyn this week, though usually they’re the ones being visited in Nashville.

“I think people love visiting (Nashville),” Nelson says. “That's one of the most fun things about having a bar down there. It's a super easy flight. We have a lot of friends who are musicians, and they'll come down, we'll book a show, and they'll have an amazing time.”

The Nashville brand travels well

New York restaurateur Curt Huegel clearly had a great time visiting Music City. In the fall of 2016, he opened a Nashville-inspired restaurant in Times Square. 

Printers Alley is named after Nashville’s famed nightclub district, and you’ll find Hatch Show Print posters lining the walls alongside numerous UT flags. 

“After their trip to Nashville, they just wanted to bring a little piece back to New York,” manager Andrew Fernandez says. “And to show people Southern hospitality.”

Like the Opry City Stage, Fernandez says Printers Alley gets a steady stream of tourists, either looking for something familiar or foreign in the restaurant’s country style. They also see a lot of UTK alumni, as they show every Vols game on their TVs. 

Their signature dish? The “Nashville hot chicken,” of course — though that menu item definitely isn’t limited to Nashville-themed places in New York City.

Peaches HotHouse in Brooklyn appears to be Prince’s or Hattie B’s of the five boroughs, earning rave reviews for its take on hot chicken.

“Not for the faint of heart,” it warns on its menu. “But it sure is delicious.”

Other successful stabs at the dish can be found at Harold's Meat and 3, and Sweetchick — where the "Nashville Fried Chicken" is woefully paired with the smallest glass of water around (I learned this the hard way).

Also unfortunate: I arrived in New York too late to see what was probably the most organic business doubling as a love letter to Music City. Carla Hall's Southern Kitchen — owned by Nashville native and "Top Chef" favorite Hall — had authentic hot chicken, beer from Nashville brewer Yazoo and goods from the Nashville Jam Company, Olive & Sinclair and other homegrown businesses. It closed last summer after one tumultuous year in business. 

But at this point, one shuttered business certainly isn't going to extinguish the "fiery ring" that's linked these two towns. Start spreading the news.