Garth Brooks, Trisha Yearwood Celebrate Opening Their Nashville Bar

Garth Brooks and Trisha Yearwood are formally the most recent residents in Nashville’s Neon Neighborhood, as they celebrated the grand opening of Country Music Hall of Famer Brooks’ Friends in Low Places Bar & Honky-Tonk on Thursday (March 7). The venue takes its title from the nation star’s signature 1990 hit.

In a press convention that night, Brooks instructed reporters of the two-year course of that has gone into creating Friends in Low Places Bar & Honky-Tonk, “A lot of love has gone into this building. There’s a lot of people who busted their a– to make this happen,” he mentioned, thanking the principally native crew who constructed the venue.

While there are practically a dozen nation star-themed bars and music venues both at the moment open or within the works in Nashville’s Lower Broadway — a testomony to nation music’s business energy — Brooks’ newly opened venue is full of distinctive components that honor not solely his storied profession, but additionally supply a special vantage level for Nashville patrons.

Located at 411 Broadway, the four-story, 54,715-square-foot venue encompasses a honky-tonk on the primary two flooring, together with a retractible stage (the middle of mentioned stage options the “G” brand from the stage at NYC’s Central Park, the place Brooks performed to an estimated viewers of greater than 1 million individuals on Aug. 7, 1997). Meanwhile, the fourth-floor open-air rooftop bar space, dubbed “The Oasis” from a line in “Friends in Low Places,” encompasses a seashore vibe with indoor and outside seating, 10-foot palm bushes and two full bars. The rooftop space additionally ideas its hat to the placement’s former venue, Paradise Park, with a refurbished neon signal above one of many doorways that learn “Paradise Park Food Stand, Burgers, Fries, Chicken.”

The first two flooring and the rooftop are open to everybody, whereas the third ground encompasses a trio of occasion areas, together with the members-only Sevens Club, decked out in an old-school Hollywood vibe. A curved bar, a pool desk and a piano, together with upholstered and leather-based chairs and couches, in addition to a jukebox, a hearth and insulated home windows give the third ground a homey, relaxed and decidedly un-Lower Broadway really feel.

Next to the Sevens Club, Yearwood’s imaginative and prescient and handiwork is distinct in a rentable area for events and occasions, with a glance much like the decor that Yearwood used for her Trisha’s Southern Kitchen present, with a spacious, totally functioning kitchen and seating space that leads right into a smaller seating space and a sublime convention room space. Yearwood famous that plans may embrace generally filming her cooking present within the kitchen area. The areas supply a setting for gatherings of as much as 250 company.

“I feel like Frank Sinatra could walk up to that bar and order a Jack and Smoke [a specialty drink offered in the venue] and feel very comfortable,” Yearwood tells Billboard of the Sevens Club. “It feels right. There’s these two floors of honky-tonks and when you step off that elevator on that floor, it’s like you’re in a residence. There’s crown molding, it’s rich, luxe furnishings and you go into that Sevens Club and it’s like, ‘Wow, are we on Lower Broadway?’ And even in the kitchen, there are wood ceilings, and that checkerboard floor. I fought for that checkerboard floor. Garth was like, ‘That seems like a lot,’ and I was like, ‘No, it’s a statement.’ And it’s beautiful.”

Personal touches are scattered all through the venue, together with the entrance entrance, the place patrons can see the bronze statue of Brooks, taken from Bakersfield, California’s Crystal Palace, the place Brooks proposed to Yearwood in 2005. The again wall of the venue is a mural of pictures from Brooks’ profession. Notably, Brooks’ touring group, together with Moo TV and Bandit Lites, oversaw the lighting, manufacturing and large LED display screen for the venue. The constructing additionally features a police substation that the group created in partnership with the Metro Nashville Police Department.

The menu displays Yearwood’s work as a bestselling cookbook creator and star of her Food Network cooking present, Trisha’s Southern Kitchen. The choices embrace fare from her cookbooks in addition to bar meals. Patrons can even style a copy of the bitter cream pound wedding ceremony cake recipe that Yearwood’s mom made for Brooks and Yearwood on their wedding ceremony day in 2005.

“I remember going to a restaurant in Memphis and being told that Elvis ate there a lot,” Yearwood says of bringing private touches to the venue’s menu. “I wanted to order what Elvis ate, so I ordered the banana and peanut butter sandwich. So, I felt like if you are a fan and this is the actual recipe, this is the cake, and my mom made wedding cakes on the side when we were little kids to make extra money, so this was her thing.”

“The goal here was to keep it simple,” Yearwood additionally instructed reporters of the menu. “Most of my recipes are things that my mom made, my mom and my dad, they were home cooks. That’s what we’re going for here. … It’s been a process of going through and saying, ‘This will work on a big scale.’ The menu is just where we’re starting. We’ll see what works and change it up as we go, because we have a lot of recipes to choose from.”

As effectively, a brand new six-episode docuseries on Amazon Prime Video offers a behind-the-scenes have a look at the design and development that went into creating the brand new honky-tonk. Brooks and Yearwood labored with Max and Benjamin Goldberg and their group from Strategic Hospitality, which has additionally labored on native Nashville eating places together with The Patterson House. The docuseries is produced by Amazon MGM Studios and Casey Patterson Entertainment, with Brooks, Casey Patterson and Carol Donovan serving as govt producers. The docuseries options Brooks and Yearwood working with the Goldbergs in addition to Jenny Deathridge Bratt and Camille Tambunting to create the area.

Brooks tells Billboard: “My favorite moments [in the documentary] is when you see the character of these people under fire –you’re against timelines, you’re up against budgets.”