The Silver Dollar, a honky-tonk-style restaurant in the Clifton neighborhood, opened on the last week of November 2011.
The interior of the former Clifton firehouse features “a lot of brick and wood.” The 43-foot-bar and seating booths were made with old wood from the Old Crow Distillery.
The menu features Midwestern favorites with a Mexican influence, 80 Kentucky bourbons and an extensive list of American craft beers.
Rick Rice the owner said, “We’ve had a really great reception” since the restaurant opened Nov. 22.
He hopes The Silver Dollar, which is open from 5 p.m. to 2 a.m. seven days a week, will bring a night crowd to the neighborhood.
“There really wasn’t any kind of night scene over on Frankfort Avenue,” he said.
The Silver Dollar was designed to attract customers from within and outside of the Clifton neighborhood, Rice said.
“We do want to be a destination point, but we want to be a part of the neighborhood as well,” he said.
The restaurant will extend its hours to include lunch in the spring, he said, and will add another 15 employees to the 35 employees it has now. |
Welcome to The Silver Dollar
The mid 1930’s bore witness to the large-scale exodus of people from Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas and Missouri to California. This dust bowl migration, as it became known, wrested hundreds of thousands away from their homes, their farms and their culture in search of a better life for their families. There were jobs in California, everybody said so, and fresh fruit and vegetables and a climate so mild that, as the song goes, people sleep out every night.
What they found however was something altogether different; they might sleep out under the stars but only because they couldn’t afford a place to live; yes they could pick cotton, as many had done back home, and they could follow the fruit as each crop was ready to harvest but when they went looking for a steady job, or a place to eat or just a place to pray, they felt unwanted, judged and stereotyped – the signs in the shops read “No Okies,” and even if they were from Arkansas they knew it meant them.
They were shunned by native Californians and forced to stick together; but the very things that were singled out to ostracize the Okies – food, dress, religion, music, their very way of speaking English – were the only things they knew. So, out of necessity they created a subculture of their own. And, from this crucible of prejudice was forged one of the great musical styles of the 20th Century.
It became known as the Bakersfield Sound, and it forever changed not only country music, but music. Just as Nashville was going the way of pop music and the vocal chorus, Okies like Wynn Stewart, Buck Owens and Merle Haggard were playing music as hardscrabble as their people - tough rhythmic music, characterized by the slap of a Fender Telecaster, wailing pedal steel and searing vocal harmonies. It was music meant to be heard over the incessant din of a honky tonk, of which Bakersfield had plenty; places like The Barrel House, Doc’s Club, Ethyl’s Corral, High Pockets and The Blackboard.
The Silver Dollar tries in its own way to honor this wonderful music, these great juke joints and the spirited people who inhabited them.
Check www.nightoutlouisville.com for a calendar of Louisville entertainment.
