Be Kind, Rewind, Order a Cocktail: A 90s Video Store Has Quietly Taken Over a Germantown Clubhouse
There is a particular sound that anyone over thirty can still summon on command: the mechanical clunk of a VHS tape being fed into a rewinder, followed by the long whir. For roughly two decades it was the sound of a Friday night ending. Then it wasn't the sound of anything at all.
It is back — sort of — in Germantown, where a pop-up bar called Back 2 The Video Store has taken over the Clubhouse at Sonny's Patio Pub on Sixth Avenue and turned it into a working replica of a neighborhood rental shop circa 1997. The conceit is simple and, judging by how quickly this thing has moved across the country, disarmingly effective: you walk into what looks like a video store, you browse the shelves, and the shelves lead you to a bar.
What you actually get
Admission starts at $18.20 per person including fees, and that buys 90 minutes of open seating plus one cocktail. Drinks are movie-themed. The room is stocked with the visual grammar of the era — walls of clamshell tape cases arranged by genre, lava lamps, the low warm glow of a picture tube. It is 21 and over. The run is finite: the store closes for good on September 19.
Before Nashville, the concept sold out in New York, Los Angeles, Miami and Chicago. That track record is worth noting mostly because it explains the ticketing model — this is a timed experience with a hard end date, not a bar you wander into at eleven on a Saturday and find a stool.
Why a video store, and why now
The nostalgia here is specific, and it is aimed at a wound that is barely twenty years old. At its height in the mid-2000s the largest rental chain in the country operated something like nine thousand storefronts worldwide. By September 2010 it was in Chapter 11. Today exactly one Blockbuster is still renting tapes and discs, in Bend, Oregon, and it survives largely as a pilgrimage site.
What died with the chains was not really the movies — those are more available than they have ever been — but the errand. Choosing a film used to require leaving the house, walking a physical aisle, negotiating with whoever came with you, and accepting that the one you wanted was already checked out. The algorithm has since removed all of that friction, and a surprising number of people turned out to miss the friction. Vinyl came back first. Film photography came back. Independent shops that trade in used physical media have quietly become some of the more reliable retail in this city. A bar that makes you browse a shelf before you get a drink is the same instinct, monetized.
The neighborhood is part of the joke
Germantown is an apt host. This is the oldest surviving residential neighborhood in Nashville, platted in the 1850s and named for the German immigrant families who built it out — a district that has been variously fashionable, industrial, nearly abandoned, and then fashionable again, and which now runs on restaurants that are booked three weeks deep. A retail format that no longer exists, resurrected as an experience, on a street that has already reinvented itself four or five times, is about as Germantown as it gets.
Practical notes: it is a pop-up, the seating window is 90 minutes, and the closing date is fixed. If you are building a night around it, our Nashville neighborhood guide covers what else is within walking distance in Germantown, and our guide to the honky tonks is there for whatever happens after your 90 minutes are up.
Be kind. Rewind.
