Skull's Rainbow Room

The Restaurant

Skull's Rainbow Room occupies the original 1948 supper-club address at 222 Printers Alley - the gas-lit four-block historic alley wedged between Third and Fourth Avenues in downtown Nashville, two blocks east of the Ryman Auditorium and one block north of the Tennessee State Capitol grounds. The room was originally opened in 1948 by David 'Skull' Schulman, the colourful Nashville restaurateur whose Printer's Alley supper club became, across the 1950s, 60s and 70s, the senior gathering room of country-music Nashville: regular guests included Patsy Cline, Hank Williams, Marty Robbins, Roy Orbison, Loretta Lynn, Conway Twitty and Willie Nelson, and the room's nightly burlesque-and-jazz programme made Skull's the most distinctive late-night downtown destination in the American South for three decades. The original Skull's closed in 1998 following Schulman's murder in the alley - a Nashville crime story that has been retold in multiple country-music biographies - and the address remained dark for seventeen years before its 2015 reopening under the Bishop family hospitality group (Tom Morales and the AC Restaurants team), which restored the room to its 1948 architectural register while adding a contemporary steakhouse kitchen and a serious cocktail programme.

The kitchen project under executive chef Tom Morales is classical American steakhouse cooking with a deliberately careful sourcing programme - Allen Brothers prime cuts, Tennessee-raised heritage pork, Nashville-area grass-fed beef from West Wind Acres, Gulf Coast and Mississippi seafood. The menu's structural anchor runs the senior dry-aged steak progression (the 28-day dry-aged ribeye, the 16-ounce New York strip, the porterhouse for two, the filet mignon with bone marrow-and-red-wine reduction) supported by a careful starter section (the steak tartare prepared tableside, the oysters Rockefeller, the shrimp and grits with Tennessee country ham), a Southern-classics section (the cast-iron fried chicken on Tuesday and Thursday nights, the slow-braised short rib with cheddar grits), and a serious seafood programme (the whole grilled Gulf snapper, the pan-seared scallops with bacon-and-corn). The bar programme is the room's senior structural co-star: more than forty whiskeys including Tennessee bourbon (Belle Meade, George Dickel, Nelson's Green Brier), serious aged rum and tequila selections, a careful classical cocktail menu (the Manhattan, the Old Fashioned, the Sazerac), and a small but careful wine list of about one hundred and ten references with California and Italian focus.

The structural reason to visit Skull's Rainbow Room - and the reason the room books two to three weeks ahead for any prime weekend evening - is the nightly live music programme on the original 1948 stage. The room runs a senior jazz, blues and burlesque rotation Tuesday through Saturday with two sets per night (typically 8 PM and 10 PM), and the performers include Nashville's senior session musicians and a rotating cast of Music City touring vocalists. The burlesque programme - a deliberate continuation of the 1948 Skull's tradition - runs late on Friday and Saturday nights with carefully selected performers in the historical vaudeville-burlesque register. The room's acoustic design, the gas-lit Printer's Alley exterior context, the restored Art Deco interior (original brass fixtures, deep-red velvet banquettes, the small mahogany stage with its 1948 footlights) and the careful steakhouse-and-supper-club menu structure combine to produce one of the most historically resonant dining experiences in downtown Nashville. For a Nashville evening that needs to register as a deliberate Music City celebration rather than a default chain-steakhouse reservation, Skull's Rainbow Room is the structurally distinctive choice.