Brentwood's City Cafe Changes Ownership After 27 Years

BRENTWOOD, TN — For the first time in 27 years, Jerry Cunningham wasn't manning the counter at the City Cafe Monday. Cunningham, who opened the restaurant in a little frame house on Wilson Pike Circle in 1989 and grew it into a Williamson County institution, sold his meat-and-three to a quartet of locals, who officially took over the restaurant Monday, according to the Brentwood Home Page.

Rob Day, Mark Price, Frank Reeves and Jason Burns are the new owners of Brentwood's oldest operating restaurant, now in the Brentwood Place shopping center on Franklin Pike. The new owners, knowing they are taking over a successful restaurant rather than a failing one, do not expect to make many changes to the restaurant; all of the staff have agreed to stay on under the new owners.

“This is a meat-and-three and this is gonna stay a meat-and-three,” Price told the newspaper.

Cunningham opened the restaurant after Noble's Corner in the Traveler's Rest Inn closed, leaving a void in the down-home food scene in Brentwood in the late 1980s. He partnered with Hap Townes, the legendary proprietor of the eponymous meat-and-three on Humphreys Street in South Nashville near Greer Stadium, now the home of Gabby's. The late Hap Townes ran his restaurant, opened just after World War II by his father, for 40 years, attracting a bevy of regular folks and celebrities like Steve Wariner, Whisperin’ Bill Anderson, George Jones, Tammy Wynette, Brenda Lee, Reba McEntire, Les Paul, Mickey Mantle and Reggie Jackson.

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