Best-of list · City Guide
The best bars in Nashville beyond the honky-tonks — craft cocktail rooms in The Gulch, live music in East Nashville, and the city's best craft beer bars.
The short answer
10 ranked rooms follow. How we picked is at the end of this guide.
The best bars in Nashville are not on Broadway. That is the first thing to understand about drinking well in Music City. The honky-tonks serve their purpose — they're loud, they're fun for an hour, and they're part of what Nashville is. But the city's serious drinking happens in The Gulch, East Nashville, and the Nations, in rooms that don't have neon guitars above the door. Here is where we send people who want to drink well.
Nashville's cocktail scene grew up fast once the city started attracting the kind of population that expected good drinks. The Gulch neighbourhood houses the most concentrated pocket of serious bars; East Nashville has the neighbourhood gems. Both reward the effort of leaving downtown. For a step-by-step guide to sequencing these neighborhoods into a single evening, our one-night Nashville bar itinerary covers the optimal route from happy hour in The Gulch through Broadway and into the East Nashville close.
How we picked
Nashville is a city that most visitors see only the loudest, brightest 10% of. The drinking that matters happens in East Nashville and The Gulch — neighbourhoods that have built genuine bar cultures independent of the tourist infrastructure on Broadway. Our recommendation: spend one night on Broadway to understand what the fuss is about, then spend the rest of your time in the places that Nashvillians actually go. For a structured route through all three zones, read our Nashville bar crawl guide.
James covers US bars for barsforKings. He has been visiting Nashville regularly since 2018 and considers the Patterson House one of the ten best bars in America for its category.
Last reviewed 2026-05-21 · The editors recheck hours and closures against current local coverage.