The First Hundred People Get a Hat. The Doors Do Not Open Until Ten.
There is a particular Nashville ritual that happens a few times a year on a stretch of Broadway most tourists never walk: a new restaurant opens, a line forms before sunrise, and somebody hands out hats. Monday is one of those mornings.
Raising Cane's opens at 1819 Broadway in Midtown on Monday, September 21. The schedule is worth reading carefully, because the interesting part happens two hours before you can actually order anything. A ribbon-cutting and a live DJ start at 8 a.m. The doors open at 10 a.m.
The first hundred people through get a hat and a card good for a free Box Combo, while supplies last. Twenty people aged 13 and older can win free Cane's for a year, with the drawing held between 6 and 7 p.m. and the winners named that evening. A musician performing as Barrett plays from 5 to 6 p.m. The company is also handing the Nashville Humane Association a check for $1,500.
Around 70 people have been hired to run it. It is the chain's third location in Nashville and its second near downtown, after the flagship that opened on Broadway in June 2024.
The corner it is opening on
This is the part that gives the morning a little weight. Midtown, along this run of Broadway between downtown and Vanderbilt, has spent two decades as the place where Nashville food concepts are born and then leave. Hattie B's started in one Midtown storefront and is now expanding across the metro. The traffic here is students, hospital staff, office workers and a constant churn of people walking to games — a reliable, unglamorous customer base that has made and unmade a lot of restaurants.
It is also, this month, a corner of the city with a funeral going on nearby. O'Charley's closed its remaining restaurants earlier this month, fifty-five years after the original opened in a room across from Vanderbilt — a few minutes' walk from where the chicken fingers go on sale Monday. One Nashville-born chain switched its lights off; a Louisiana-born one turns another set on. That is not a moral, exactly. It is just what this street does.
If you want the other end of the dining spectrum this week, two Nashville restaurants just landed on a national fifty-best list, and neither of them is giving away hats.
Practical advice, if you intend to be in that first hundred: the giveaway is tied to people through the door, the festivities start at eight, and Broadway parking in Midtown on a Monday morning is its own event. Plan accordingly, or come at two in the afternoon like a reasonable person.
