Opening Of Morgan Wallen’s Nashville Bar Delayed After City Denies Beer Permits

Gonna have to wait a little longer to find yourself in This Bar. Morgan Wallen announced earlier this month that his downtown Nashville bar, Morgan Wallen's This Bar & Tennessee Kitchen, would be opening on Memorial Day weekend. But apparently everybody who was hoping to throw a chair off the roof...sorry, I mean throw back a beer, this weekend is going to have to wait a little longer. According to Scoop:Nashville , the bar's opening has been delayed yet again. The Nashville Beer Board denied both a catering permit and a temporary permit for the bar, though TC Restaurant Group, the hospitality company that partnered with Morgan for the new venture, says that the beer permit is not the reason that the bar is not able to open. Based on the reporting from Scoop:Nashville, it sounds like the denials of the beer permits are due to the fact that the Fire Marshal and the Codes Department weren't able to issue approval in time for the permits to be granted. And honestly that's not surprising, considering the work that remained to be done on the bar even earlier this week. From what I've seen, I thought it would be a stretch to get the place ready to open in time, and it sounds like their Memorial Day weekend plans were just a little too ambitious, with TC Restaurant Group issuing a statement to Scoop:Nashville confirming that the opening has been delayed: "We’re proud of our team who has worked tirelessly to prepare Morgan Wallen’s This Bar & Tennessee Kitchen for opening. The ground-up construction of a six-story venue launching with hundreds of team members is a tremendous amount of work and a complex process. When we open, we want This Bar to be an exceptional experience for guests. Unfortunately, the process requires more time, and we are not able to open and provide that experience this Memorial Day weekend. Rest assured, it will be well worth the wait. We look forward to welcoming guests soon." It's not the first battle with the city that Morgan's new bar has faced, after earlier this week the Metro Nashville City Council denied a request for a sign that was planned to hang over the door because of Morgan's past behavior. TC Restaurant Group, which also operates bars like Jason Aldean’s Kitchen & Rooftop Bar, Luke’s 32 Bridge, Miranda Lambert’s Casa Rosa and Lainey Wilson’s upcoming Bell Bottoms Up, had requested permission for an “aerial encroachment” for the sign to hang over the new bar, located at 107 4th Avenue North, just beside the Ryman Auditorium. The sign would have hung above the entrance to the bar, but because it encroached on a city right of way, owners needed to get permission from the council to install it. But the council made it clear that they weren’t exactly happy with Wallen right now – with many members speaking out against the singer and his behavior during a meeting this week. Council member Delisha Porterfield referred to not only Morgan’s latest incident when he was arrested for throwing a chair off the rooftop of Eric Church’s downtown Nashville bar, Chief’s, but also his racial slur incident from back in 2021 in arguing that he shouldn’t be granted permission for the sign: “We just passed legislation a little earlier tonight saying that we wanted to make sure that Nashville was a supportive place for everyone, so I don’t want to see a billboard with the name of a person who’s throwing chairs off of balconies and who is saying racial slurs and using the n-word, so I’m voting no.” And councilman Jordan Huffman also expressed his concerns: “Number one, Mr. Wallen is a fellow East Tennessean. He gives all of us a bad name. His comments are hateful, his actions are harmful, and you don’t belong in this town as far as I’m concerned. I’m tired of this city bending over to just make anybody happy that makes a comment that they want to. We continue to go down this road. I encourage my colleagues to vote against this.” Meanwhile, councilwoman Brenda Gadd said that TC Restaurant Group shouldn’t be giving Morgan another chance, incorrectly asserting that Morgan pledged to donate to the NAACP and then failed to deliver on that pledge: “Someone who continues to get second chances, I think the third party operator, surely they don’t need any reminder about his racist comments, using the n-word, his pledge to the NAACP for funding and then him never fulfilling that commitment. Mr. Wallen has also received many more opportunities since then, and he’ll receive one through other operators, but I can’t with a good conscience support this because of that.” Of course the sign isn't as big of a deal as the beer permit, so until they get those straightened out I guess it's going to be a little while longer before the bar finally opens. Sounds everybody's going to be ready to knock 'em back (knock 'em back, knock 'em back, knock 'em back) when this place finally does get around to opening...

Update:

TC Restaurant Group reached out to clarify that the denial of the beer permit is not the reason for the delay in the opening. So basically, they were so behind schedule that even if they had been able to get the beer permits it wouldn't have mattered because they weren't going to be ready anyway.