Diners at the Opry City Stage will eventually be greeted by a floor-to-ceiling photo of Darius Rucker’s backside. They’ll sit down and peruse a Blake Shelton-epigraphed menu that includes $12.50 “Edgehill Poutine” (tater tots, smoked sausage and pimento) and an $18.50 Opry Country Classic hamburger (that’d be a burger with lettuce and tomato). They’ll be entertained by a mix of classic country covers provided by a house band called City Grass and a flurry of Brett Young and Sam Hunt music videos blasted on a giant screen that wouldn’t be out of place in a major league baseball stadium. But before all of that, they’ll find themselves in the gift shop.
That’s because it is, in fact, impossible to enter Opry City Stage — the new Grand Ole Opry-themed destination in New York City’s Times Square — without also entering its gift shop, which occupies the first floor of the stupefyingly large four-story restaurant-slash-music-venue.
The restaurant opened in December, and when I visited on two separate trips last month, I was greeted by a life-size cardboard cutout of a grinning Luke Bryan. I wandered amid shelves of gift-shop T-shirts emblazoned with phrases like “Music & Whiskey. Nashville” and “I Love You Like Biscuits and Bluegrass.” The vinyl selection was made up entirely of a half-dozen or so Johnny Cash LPs, the debut Pistol Annies record and Little Big Town’s Pain Killer.
Located on a stretch of Broadway (not that Broadway) in Times Square directly between a Sbarro and M&M’s World, the Grand Ole Opry’s very first non-Nashville outpost arrives in New York as Music City continues its rapid growth as a cultural export. The Opry has plans to open roughly a dozen locations in the U.S.
The restaurant pays close attention to detail and has effectively produced the kind of stereotyped rendering of Nashville and its country music offerings that you’d find at one of the more generic Lower Broad tourist traps. At the same time, the Opry City Stage also feels like the inevitable culmination of a trend that has grown over the past decade-plus in New York City: the Southern whiskey bar, the default aesthetic for the countless watering holes, fried-chicken restaurants and upscale barbecue joints that have opened in gentrified neighborhoods throughout the Big Apple since the start of the 21st century.
Nearby is Printers Alley, a soulless midtown Manhattan sports bar that, aside from being named for a Nashville neighborhood, features half-assed-at-best nods to Tennessee — some UT flags and scattered Hatch Show Print posters. Compared to that and similar faux-Southern NYC establishments, Opry City Stage feels eagerly devoted to its theme. It’s practically Tootsie’s.
But what does the Opry’s first tourist outpost mean for the city of Nashville, which welcomed a record 14.5 million visitors last year? As Nashville continues to successfully promote itself as both a cultural brand worth exporting and an international tourist destination worth visiting, what version of country music — and the city itself — is it projecting?
Opry City Stage ultimately projects so many colliding and contradictory visions of Nashville and what it symbolizes — to lifelong New Yorkers, to international tourists and to country music-loving Americans visiting New York — that visitors are ultimately left with a dizzying array of empty country and Southern signifiers. The establishment presents Nashville as, first and foremost, a beacon of country music history, with its case of rhinestone-encrusted suits — some of them genuine Nudie suits, some of them just made in that style — lining the back row of the main dining room and endless photos of Dolly Parton and Carrie Underwood, beaming on the Opry stage, on the walls. It also presents Nashville as a haven of suburban upper-middle-class aspiration. Nashville as upscale Cracker Barrel, if you will. Men in suits stop by after their jobs in Midtown to enjoy “Bluegrass Breakdown” cocktails (cucumber-infused gin, St-Germain, lime and mint) while, on the big screen, Lauren Alaina and Kane Brown sing power ballads together atop a seaside cliff.
At the Opry City Stage, “country music” can mean almost anything: It’s a man smiling to himself as he sits alone, silently tapping his toe to a Jimmie Rodgers tune; it is a large, joyful group of middle-aged women dancing their way to their table to “Drunk on a Plane”; it is a group of foreign tourists reluctantly singing along to the house band’s light bluegrass arrangement of John Denver’s “Take Me Home, Country Roads.” Meanwhile two floors up, inside the City Stage’s ticketed concert venue, an emerging 14-year-old major-label star named Tegan Marie sings her latest single, “Keep it Lit,” to a packed room of preteen girls and industry onlookers.
As for the food, the wide-ranging assortment of options at Opry City Stage generally tastes exactly how you might expect the Times Square tourist-destination version of any food to taste. The barbecue ribs and brisket somehow manage to be simultaneously dry and drowned in sauce. The chicken in the Nashville Hot Chicken & Waffles is overly breaded and devoid of almost any spice. Otherwise, there’s Memphis Meatloaf ($21), gumbo ($15.50) or a shrimp po’boy ($21.50).
This Is How We Do It in Music City, the menu reads. Inside the Opry City Stage, the South is Nashville, and Nashville is the South.
On a recent weekday evening at the Opry City Stage, the brand-new restaurant was still finding its footing. Business in the massive two-story dining area was mostly slow, with just a dozen or so occupied tables and a smattering of people at the bar.
When the house band took the stage, they announced the anniversary of a couple in the dining room — the couple had apparently already left. An Asian tourist holding a bag from M&M’s World took a seat by herself near the stage. She ordered a bowl of tomato soup, looked up at the screen blaring the video for Brantley Gilbert’s “One Hell of an Amen” for a few short moments, then began to scroll through her phone.
The MC, Haly J (“When you see me, say hey!” she announces each time she takes the microphone) was doing her best to energize restaurant goers, offering free Opry merch every hour or so to any diner who could answer some simple country music trivia.
“Do you take shots?” she asked a bored-looking woman languishing at the bar — Francesca from Long Island.
“Yeah,” said Francesca.
“Who doesn’t?” said Haly J, before launching into her question.
“Do you listen to country music? What if I say, ‘Rock me mama …’ ”
“Like a wagon wheel,” Francesca responded, and was promptly handed a shot glass.
Meanwhile, the restaurant’s host was busy greeting patrons near the dining room’s entrance. As customers began heading downstairs to peruse the gift shop’s selection of whiskey, Nashville soundtrack CDs and Bluebird Cafe T-shirts, the host left each and every one with the same parting message.
“See you in Nashville!”
