Date Night: Brown’s Diner, the Belcourt and the Villager Tavern

Date Night is a multipart road map for everyone who wants a nice evening out, but has no time to plan it. It’s for people who want to do more than just go to one restaurant and call it a night. It’s for overwhelmed parents who don’t get out often; for friends who visit the same three restaurants because they’re too afraid to try someplace new; and for busy folks who keep forgetting all the places they’ve driven past, heard about, seen on social and said, “Let’s remember that place next time we go out.”

Hillsboro Village might be Nashville’s most prolific and walkable choose-your-own-Date Night neighborhood. Act like a strapped student and do a progressive snack dinner of pizza and dumplings along the stretch of Belcourt Avenue closest to Vanderbilt’s campus. Blow it out at a steakhouse and one of the late-night spots on the other side of Belcourt where the dress codes ask you to “approach your wardrobe deliberately and with a sense of occasion” so as not to “diminish the experience of the room.” Or come as you are on this Nashville-natives route — the one most likely to still be around five years from now — where history and community never go out of style.     

Stop 1: Brown’s Diner

The smell of food frying in grease reaches 25 feet in every direction from Brown’s Diner, luring me in like one of those cartoon scents that hooks your nose, lifts you off your feet and transports you to the source. Brown’s has been around since 1927, so it pretty much always smells like that on the perimeter, whether food is actually frying or not. 

Husband Dom and I crossed the massive patio, which was empty because it was still too hot to even consider sitting in the shade at 5:30 on a Sunday night, and walked right into a set: A band played good old country music at one end of the shotgun space to a bunch of regulars on barstools at the other.

There are various cocktails listed on boards above the bar — margarita, salty dog, screwdriver — but the only real option is a longneck bottle of beer. Drinking anything else in a place like Brown’s would be ridiculous.

We moved through the bar and into the dining area where we settled into a slatted wood booth along the wall opposite the kitchen window. Water, fountain drinks and tea come in red plastic Coca-Cola cups. Condiments are corralled in a Busch Light-branded holder. A rainbow of sweetener packets is grouped together in the kind of plastic container you might use to take your leftover gumbo home. Above the door between the dining room and bar, a sign warns customers not to get their tinsel in a tangle.

So I didn’t get my tinsel in a tangle, even when I bit into my loaded egg burrito and was met with ice-cold tater tots and a sad, pale tomato slice where salsa should be. It was my fault for ordering food that wasn’t griddled or fried. I focused on the mozzarella sticks and fried pickles instead, both of which came sprinkled with “Nashville Hot” spices at our request. Dom out-ordered me with the burger, which never disappoints, and added a side salad covered in bacon, croutons and cheddar cheese to “have something healthy.” 

Looking around the room at the old framed photographs and the Budweiser clock that appears partially melted, I thought back to a conversation with a friend who recently left Nashville for Pittsburgh. She told me Nashville had “lost its grit,” and she’s not wrong — but she’s not all the way right. Despite some changes here and there over the past 98 years, there’s still plenty of grit at Brown’s, which is basic in the best possible way.

Stop 2: The Belcourt Theatre

From Brown’s we walked north on 21st Avenue toward Hillsboro Village, reminiscing about what used to be where: Boscos Restaurant & Brewing Co. where Hopdoddy is now; Pangaea boutique, which was replaced by Molly Green; and Jackson’s Bar and Bistro, now Ruby Sunshine, a chain brunch spot that’s the polar opposite of its neighbor, Pancake Pantry. 

The Belcourt at 100: The Film Center’s Past, Present and Future

The beloved Nashville nonprofit celebrates its 100th birthday this week

Thankfully the Belcourt Theatre is still the Belcourt Theatre, even after 100 years. I’ve had my mind blown in that building more times than I can count, going back 28 years when I saw Ma Vie en Rose, a Franco Belgian drama about a transgender girl. (On that note, the Belcourt’s Queer Qlassics series wraps up Wednesday at 8 p.m. with a screening of 2004’s D.E.B.S.) Dom, who you might remember needed a vegetable earlier in the night, got a bag of popcorn and a box of Sour Patch Kids on our way to the Manzer/Webb Screening Room upstairs, which seats a very cozy 34. Get there early unless you’re one of those weirdos who likes to sit too close to the screen. 

Its run is over now, but we saw Art for Everybody, a documentary about the life, death and dark side of Thomas Kinkade — the man who made millions off mall art. I need time to process once a movie ends, so we didn’t discuss it until we’d settled into our next stop, just around the corner. 

Stop 3: The Villager Tavern

We hadn’t been at the Villager for three minutes when the bartender rang the bell and announced to the whole bar, which is basically a hallway with dartboards at the end, that it was Grace’s birthday. So we all sang “Happy Birthday” to Grace while the bartender presented her with a dog bowl full of draft beer. Such are the strange and wonderful traditions of dive bars.

The Villager opened in 1973, and if you’re wondering how many people have come and gone over the past 52 years, all you have to do is look at the walls, where yellowed photos of patrons take up every available inch of space. 

Dom and I shared our take on the documentary over two-song sets by people who rolled in off the street with guitars on their backs, waiting for their turn to stand in front of the window and sing. Just as we were about to leave, the bartender took the mic and sang/cursed/scatted his way through “Sunny Side of the Street” and “All of Me.” Then he went right back to pulling beers, serving cups of gumbo and showing the college students with fake IDs to the door. 

Correction: A previous version of this article noted that the Villager Tavern sells chili rather than gumbo. We apologize for the error.