The Best Restaurant in Nashville for Doing Deals

Walkking up to the house on Louise Avenue, I was looking for some outward sign. I half-expected the bricks at Jimmy Kelly’s to be glowing, radiating in some fashion, evidence of the power the steakhouse holds over Nashville.

It was almost two years ago, at the beginning of the mayor’s race, when former Scene editor Bruce Dobie, hanging out a temporary shingle in The Tennessean, cast aspersions on Megan Barry’s nascent mayoral campaign and her image as a progressive goo-goo who pushed living wages and anti-discrimination bills.

“Such accomplishments have prompted the Jimmy Kelly’s biz crowd to order a second martini and continue the search,” Dobie wrote.

Among Nashville’s political chattering class, the restaurant is a kind of code for the people who are perceived to run the city — a kind of Watauga Lite now that Nashville is too big to be run by a shadowy club of 20 or so CEOs. These are the guys who build convention centers, make sure the legislature doesn’t do anything too stupid, and keep the city’s climate business-friendly.

This is the restaurant where the deal was cut to bring the Titans to Nashville. And if you believe Mike Kelly, the affable third-generation proprietor, the place where Ned McWherter cut a deal for the Democratic nomination for governor. Now, some of Ned’s people dispute this, but standing in the foyer, surrounded by oak trim, dark walls and oil paintings of Cornelius Vanderbilt and the like, I want to believe Kelly. There is literally an upstairs backroom where you could horse-trade votes in private.

The last time I was at Jimmy Kelly’s was (continue reading)

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