For Trisha Yearwood, Developing the Menu at Friends in Low Places Wasn’t Business, ‘It Was Personal’

Garth Brooks’s and Trisha Yearwood’s Friends in Low Places Bar & Honky-Tonk is up and running on Broadway, where it joins the seemingly infinite number of celebrity-owned bars that line the Neon Neighborhood. The sprawling 54,715-square-foot space is the largest on Broadway and formerly housed the Downtown Sporting Club and Paradise Park.

The bar — named for what is arguably Brooks’s most famous song — pays tribute to each of the stars, from its decor to its food. Garth’s tour production crew designed the first two floors, which feature a wide-open bar space filled with enormous LED screens, tour-ready lighting installations, and two-story-tall artificial palm trees. There’s even a signature stage, repurposed from Brooks’s historic 1997 Central Park concert that earned him a record-breaking crowd of over one million people.

Brooks regalia aside, the bar has a not-so-secret weapon in the battle to dominate Lower Broad: a menu designed, in part, by Yearwood herself. The Food Network host and best-selling cookbook author was hesitant to get involved in Nashville’s hospitality scene, but once she decided to make the move, she was all in. “You can’t have a Garth Brooks bar and not have Trisha food in it,” she says.

“My first response when Garth suggested this idea was no. I’ve not dreamed of owning a bar. But you go downtown, you see all these bars by all these country artists, and I can’t imagine there not being something that represents Garth Brooks in this town,” she says, referencing Brooks’s massive musical legacy as the top-selling act of the past 20 years. Brooks’ accolades include two Grammys and 17 American Music Awards. He’s also the only artist in history to have released nine Diamond-certified albums.

“We decided if we were going to do it, we weren’t going to just license our names. We were going to really be in it.”

One way Yearwood personalized the endeavor was through the menu, where she turned to some of her favorite family dishes, including Jack’s Smoked BBQ Chicken Wings — her father’s recipe, smoked in-house. The menu also includes tributes to her mother: Mama’s Meatloaf and Gwen’s Fried Chicken and White Gravy, as well as G&T’s wedding cake, a nod to the sour cream pound cake Yearwood’s mom made on the couple’s wedding day.

Ben Fink

Ben Fink

“Every time we did a tasting, we were sitting in a room with 10 people tasting my mom’s meatloaf. It was so bizarre to me,” she says. “Like the cookbooks and the show, getting to share my family memories and those recipes with everybody is exciting.”

Many of those tastings happened on the bar’s third floor, which houses intimate private event areas and Trisha’s Kitchen, a rentable space where she can also test new recipes or host events. The design here is straight out of a stately country manor kitchen, with its checkerboard floor and clean, farmhouse-style cabinets. “It feels very much like you’re in someone’s home — except when you look out the window it’s Lower Broadway,” she says. It also echoes the set of Yearwood’s cooking show, Trisha’s Southern Kitchen, which she says could be filmed in the space in the future.

The food adds to the homey atmosphere, with even more of Yearwood’s signature dishes on the menu for banquets and events — like her jalapeno hush puppies. Yearwood says they’re best fresh out of the fryer, a feat not always possible in a busy bar, so the dish is exclusive to the event space.

“It’s about making simple food that’s good, and keeping that quality high,” she says. “We’re not going to make it complicated. And that’s been the premise of my whole thing with food: I’m a home cook — I’m not a chef.”

Friends in Low Places

That ethos extends to even the most unassuming of entrees: her take on chicken tenders. Inspired by Brooks, who as Yearwood notes “famously served frozen chicken tenders to his children before I came in,” Yearwood’s homemade spin on the bar menu staple is available throughout the space, including the the Oasis rooftop bar, a beachy space with indoor and outdoor seating, 10-foot palm trees, two full bars, and a dedicated chicken shack.

“We really want to be the place on Lower Broadway where you go have a cocktail and watch the game, but also you’re going to have the best chicken tenders and steak fries you’ve ever had,” she says. “It has such a great, comfortable vibe, and I think that’s because everything is curated by us. It’s personal, and I’m just so happy with it.”