Fiddle-dee-dee: Nero's to be revived, supplanting Green Hills Grille

Nero's Grill aims to carry on spirit of famed 1960s/'70s restaurant and watering hole – at the expense of a tenant not at all happy about the outcome

Email | Print By E. Thomas Wood

For Proust, it was a madeleine. For Nashvillians of a certain age, it’s a scalded corn cake from Nero’s Cactus Canyon.

Like the sweet confection that Marcel Proust made famous in his epic novel Remembrance of Things Past, the corn cakes of Nero’s might well be expected to stimulate memories of a time and place long gone for those who made the Green Hills establishment one of Nashville’s most popular restaurants between 1958 and 1976. We’ll soon find out if the taste and aroma of those corn cakes, together with lightly charred steaks and game, can set off any Proustian reveries.

Nero’s is returning to life.

John J. Griswold, son of former proprietor Nelson L. “Nero” Griswold Jr., tells NashvillePost.com that he plans to open Nero’s Grill later this year on the site of the former Cactus Canyon and its Silver Slipper Saloon. The 77-year-old Nero himself, a cigar-chomping showman who flourished at a time when Nashville produced more than its share of legendary personalities – think Tupper Saussy; think Neil Cargile – will serve as a consultant to the restaurant. The Griswold family has continued to own the property, at 2122 Hillsboro Drive, since Nero’s closed in 1976.

Grille vs. Grill
The decision means that the flagship location of Green Hills Grille, itself a Nashville dining institution by now, will lose its lease at the end of June. “We are still trying to find a way to work things out – we’re making a final proposal tomorrow – but it sounds like John has made up his mind,” said Bill Lanham, who directs the Grille’s operations for Specialty Restaurant Development LLC. The Maitland, Fla. company owns the restaurant as well as Green Hills Grilles in Cool Springs, Huntsville and Knoxville. “We have given them a good opportunity to increase the rent and everything,” he added.

There will be no change of status for the neighboring Noshville diner, which also sits on Griswold-owned land.

“If John doesn’t want to renew our lease, we’re going to look for a place where we have more seats, more parking and more visibility,” Lanham said. “We’ll take our good food and our good atmosphere and go somewhere else.” He said SRD is working with a commercial real estate brokerage, which he would not name, and is “looking hard” at a couple of prospective locations where the Grille might move.

Lanham took a parting swipe at the property. “To tell you the truth, that place is kinda run down anyway,” he said. “I don’t know what he thinks he’s going to do with it when we take our concept and leave. But I’m not bitter about it.”

Game for anything
“I’ve been waiting to do this for 30 years,” says John Griswold. Throughout his career as an independent commercial real estate broker, he has had a notion to pick up where his father, tired of the restaurant trade’s long days and nights, left off in June 1976. With business partner Richard Smith, a Nashville accountant, Griswold is planning to re-create much of the atmosphere and menu of the original Nero’s.

Tom Allen, widely acclaimed for his work at Loews Vanderbilt Plaza and Belle Meade Country Club, will be the chef at Nero’s, Griswold said. Wild game, long a staple at the Nero’s of old, will feature prominently on the menu, along with steaks, both accompanied of course by the trademark corn cakes. Griswold hopes the facility will be down no more than 90 days after he takes possession in July, so that opening day can come in early October for what he anticipates will be a 225-seat restaurant.

Battling for bellies
Nero Griswold first set up shop with a meat-and-three diner next to Webb’s Amoco station, at the corner of Hillsboro and Hobbs Roads, in 1958. He charged 65 cents for the plate of meat and vegetables. He told the Nashville Banner in 1980 that this business had hummed along nicely until the B&W Cafeteria moved into the retail frontage under the nearby phone company building, roughly where the Fire of Brazil restaurant is now in the Green Hills Mall area.

“I believe I went through a whole case of Old Crow just watching all my customers walk in there,” Griswold recalled. “They were all dressed up – even the kids. B&W just had a lot more to offer.”

It was an early battle for the pocketbooks of folks living in the postwar suburb of Green Hills itself and the newer luxury homes further out Hillsboro Road. If a cafeteria could beat out a meat-and-three, then Nero would have to up the ante. Borrowing money “from Franklin to Amarillo,” he purchased the Hillsboro Drive property, a block away from his original site, and Nero’s Cactus Canyon and Silver Slipper opened for business in 1962.

The dominant element of the decor came from rustic burlap bags acquired from the Werthan Bag Company downtown. It was a look compelled by necessity, as there was no money to make the place look fancy, but the atmosphere and the food soon packed ‘em in. Residents of neighboring homes contested Nero’s first application for a beer permit, and Nashville would not vote in liquor by the drink until 1967, but somehow the Silver Slipper developed a steady clientele as well.

Nero’s became something of a sports bar before such establishments were consciously conceived. As Super Bowl game day became an instant if unofficial national holiday in the late 1960s, the restaurant became the site of an annual “wildlife feast” on the appointed Sunday. Herschel Greer, chairman of Guaranty Mortgage Co., hosted the gentlemen-only event, at which Nero rolled out courses of antelope, rabbit, venison, duck, goose, quail and dove, some hunted down in expeditions out West and all “prepared to Griswold’s own specifications in his massive kitchen,” as the Banner reported in 1974.

For the 1974 event, Nero placed eight TV sets in the restaurant’s four dining rooms to make sure all 150 guests could have a clear view of the Dolphins-Vikings game. The party seems to have been a bit like Sheriff Fate Thomas’s Sure Shot Rabbit Hunters Association dinners, which got started around the same time – a place to see and be seen for those with political and business stature or ambition. The 1974 crowd included gubernatorial candidates Tom Wiseman, Dortch Oldham and Nat Winston, along with top police officials Hugh Mott and Joe Casey, Metro Finance Director Joe Torrence, and senior personnel from “every Nashville bank.”

A place with a past
When John Griswold starts hanging things on the walls of Nero’s Grill, he will have to decide what memorabilia to choose from the items now lining the office he and his father share. But there’s no real memento of the time when that young guitarist took the stage with orders to entertain the dinner crowd on his 12-string.

After a while, Nero cocked a critical ear. “How long have you been playing that thing?” he asked.

“Well, about an hour,” said the player.

“No, I mean in your life,” responded Nero. He fired the guitarist then and there. Thus ended the first public performance of a picker and singer who would recount his baptism of fire at Nero’s to an interviewer decades later. His name was Kris Kristofferson.