Brown's Diner has been serving out of a converted streetcar since 1927 by the usual account, which makes it just about the oldest restaurant still working in Nashville. It stands at Blair Boulevard and Twenty First Avenue South, and Metro property records put the Brown family on the lot in 1937. The accounts of the building say two retired cars were joined at right angles in a rough T. Most of the second car has since gone to make room for the kitchen, and a hobbyist who went over what is left doubts the frames came from any known streetcar. By Jim Love's account the diner's beer permit is the oldest still in use in the city. The reputation rests on a cheeseburger and on the people who ate it.
Hillsboro Village sits between Vanderbilt and Belmont and a short drive from the publishing houses of Music Row, so for decades the tables held songwriters with an afternoon to spend. Vince Gill has been eating there since his first trip to Nashville in the mid nineteen seventies, and in January 2026 he put out an EP with a song named for the place, a folk song, as he described it, about a little hamburger joint.
The diner has had three owners in nearly a century. Jim Love ran it for forty seven years and closed on New Year's Eve 2020. Bret Tuck, who had helped start Edley's Bar-B-Que, took it over the following month.
Getting there
36.1307, -86.8023
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