Nashville April 9-16, 2016 – Day 7

I started the day listening to the new Sturgill Simpson album on Spotify (A Sailors Guide to Earth). Sturgill’s music is a pretty good analogy for Nashville: it is pure country, but it is not; it sounds old-fashioned, but it is totally modern; and it is hip as hell.

Day 7 (our last day in Nashville as day 8 is lost to travel) started with yet another museum experience: The Musicians Hall of Fame. This is the museum for the music obsessed, as it is focused on the behind the scenes: studios, studio musicians and producer/engineers or as this hall puts it: “Come See What You’ve Heard”™. This hall is not on most tourist’s radar and it is in a part of downtown that is off the typical tourist path. A friend of mine insisted on it in a recommendation of what to do in Nashville and he was right on, it was a great experience.

 It has been augmented (just this month) by the GRAMMY Museum Gallery which somewhat focused on the GRAMMY awards, but more significantly on the music making process with interactive displays. It is an impressive interactive museum.

If you are a music nerd or musician, I highly recommend The Musicians Hall of Fame.

Next we headed over to lunch at Arnold’s Country Kitchen. Arnold’s is a cafeteria style restaurant where they serve “meat & 3” (an entree of meat of your choice and three sides).  The ambiance upscale soup kitchen, but the food is truly amazing. I had the best fried catfish of my life, a top 10 mac & cheese and a top 10 bread pudding.

Next we headed over to Broadway for some souvenir shopping. Once that was accomplished we stopped by the Beer Sellar – where they proudly permit smoking. It was dark, dank and smelled of stale beer and smoke – it reminded me of my youth, but did not create a sentiment to partake so we moved on to the George Jones roof deck (it was a perfect weather day in Nashville) for a beer. The rooftop was great with a nice view of the river and a good country cover band, but it may have the worst beer selection in Nashville. We stayed for the ambience and not the beer.

In need of a more serious beer we headed over to the Gulch neighborhood to a couple of brewery/tap rooms.

Jackalope Brewing Company was hopping and had an impressive beer line up for a small brewery. I had a maple brown ale infused with chai that was delicious. In addition to great beer the brewery is notable as being founded by women (Robyn Virball and Bailey Spaulding). The tap-room is homey, but of limited space.

Tennessee Brew Works is a short walk from Jackalope and it had a great tap-room with great outdoor space. They also have a bar food menu (we tried the sweet potato poutine 👍). The beer was good but honestly by this point in the trip my taste buds where a bit overwhelmed and their brews were a blur.

 We were ready for dinner and headed over to the Tavern. This is a classic gastro-pub with a contemporary ambience and eclectic menu. Sports is on TVs that are both strategically located and unobtrusive.  I had a fancy pot pie that had an amazing curry sauce.

That ended our final night in Nashville.  I plan to write one more post summarizing and highlighting the trip.