After four dormant decades and amid an ongoing $30 million park revitalization, Centennial Park's former croquet clubhouse will once again welcome visitors inside on Aug. 29 when it reopens as the park's first full-service restaurant, Croquet Club.
Centennial Park's original croquet club was short lived. It opened in 1963 next to the courts Nashvillians had played on for years. It was on the back end of the croquet craze that swept across North America, so in the decade that followed, far fewer people played competitively.
Once the 1980s rolled around, the mid-century modern building's purpose deteriorated into nothing more than a glorified storage closet. Metro Parks even paved over the croquet lawn to replace it with a concrete event pavilion.
The building sat dormant and underutilized for nearly 40 years. Then a Metro Parks employee got an idea.
Assistant Director Tim Netsch wanted to restore the croquet clubhouse and give it a new purpose, and a cafe seemed like the perfect fit.
"It's been very community focused from the beginning, starting with the public-private partnership between Metro Parks and Centennial Park Conservancy, and then the local funders helping to make it possible," Centennial Park Conservancy President John Tumminello said. "Centennial Park is always a place of community."
Who's paying for the nonprofit Centennial Park restaurant?
Tumminello and his team raised around $1 million dollars to go toward the project, including contributions from the Frist Foundation and the Dettwiller Foundation. Meanwhile, Metro owns the building and is allowing it to be used for the restaurant rent-free.
The restaurant will also operate as a nonprofit, so any money made from it will go right back into maintaining Centennial Park.
Consultant and chef Crystal Bogan said that while some may assume a nonprofit restaurant would be insulated from the headwinds of Nashville's restaurant industry, that's not the case.
"We're going to be able to donate back and give back to the park," Bogan said. "But the fact that it's a non-profit doesn't affect that we still need to have a certain amount of people that come through the door and a price point that we have to hit. We're still paying food costs like everybody else. We're not getting free donations of food. We're paying local vendors. We refuse to have them cut their prices for us because they're also operating their businesses."
From the chef behind The Grilled Cheeserie
Crystal and Joseph Bogan have opened six restaurants together, including gourmet grilled cheese spot The Grilled Cheeserie.
When the Bogans were in the early years of operating their food truck, they would set up in the circle off of Park Plaza and sell sandwiches to lines of people just across the street from what it now Croquet Cafe.
"I remember every Wednesday we would come and serve here, and we were serving exactly next to this abandoned building," Bogan said. "It's such a full circle moment for The Grilled Cheeserie Team."
At the recommendation of Slim and Husky's founder Derrick Moore and Hermitage Hotel Managing Director Dee Patel, Tumminello approached Bogan about establishing the dining program.
What's on the menu?
Both Tumminello and Bogan quickly decided on a Southern picnic theme for the menu, and from there, it took off.
"I got to personally name every menu item, which is a very fun process, and a lot of it is honoring the influential women in Centennial Park," Tumminello said.
There's the Yellow Rose smoothie, named for the Nashville suffragettes who pushed Tennessee legislators to ratify the 19th Amendment and ultimately gave women the right to vote nationwide. There's the Athena picnic board, filled with cheeses, crackers and dried fruit and named after the 42-foot-tall golden statue inside the Parthenon.
And of course, Tumminello had to honor Nashville's favorite popstar Taylor Swift.
In her hit song "Invisible String," Swift sings about reading in Centennial Park, and there is a commemorative Taylor Swift bench near the cafe. It only felt right, Tumminello said, to name the sourdough grilled cheese the Invisible String Cheese in a kitschy nod to Swift.
Pastries will come in every day from Dozen Bakery, a full coffee bar is available with beans from 8th and Roast and HiFi cookies is supplying a specialty vanilla wafer crunch to top the banana pudding sundae. Plus, there are salads, wraps, dressed up hot dogs and loaded chips.
The menu item Tumminello might be the most excited for, though, is the soft serve ice cream.
"I've always had a dream of opening up a soft-serve ice cream stand," he said. "It all works out."
Croquet Cafe will open its doors at 12 p.m. Aug. 29, located at 2530 Park Plaza, and there is a free parking lot next to the building.
Hadley Hitson covers business news for The Tennessean. She can be reached at hhitson@gannett.com. To support her work,subscribe to The Tennessean.
This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: Exclusive first look: Centennial Park debuts restaurant Croquet Cafe
