If you walk into Germantown Pub around lunchtime, you’ll get a pretty good snapshot of the bustling neighborhood.
There’s somebody sitting at the bar with a laptop open. A couple of people from the offices nearby are grabbing lunch. Somebody else is posted up with a beer, even though it’s barely afternoon. The TVs are on, the bar is doing what bars do, and there’s a steady stream of people coming through the door.
That mix is part of what Naima Walker-Fierce, majority owner of Germantown Pub, loves about the place.
“Even if I weren’t involved, what I love about The Pub is that it’s arguably the only place in Nashville that’s truly racially and socioeconomically diverse,” she said.
That’s not necessarily what she set out to build when she first got involved with Germantown Pub. At the time, she was living in New York and working as a mergers and acquisitions lawyer. Her uncle Robert and cousin Julian had been talking about opening a sports bar, and Naima wasn’t exactly convinced.
“Working as a M&A lawyer, I thought the one thing you do not buy is a bar or restaurant,” she said.
Then, in 2014, she came to Nashville for a girls’ weekend, and the lightbulb went off. Germantown was already starting to look different. She happened to be in town for Oktoberfest, couldn’t get into a restaurant, and started looking at the neighborhood with fresh eyes.
“I thought, ‘This could be interesting.” Her interest wasn’t only about the business. Naima grew up in Pittsburgh, but her dad was from Nashville, and she had a connection to the city long before she started seeing Germantown as a restaurant destination. She saw an opportunity to understand a neighborhood she knew in a completely different way.
When her uncle eventually told her they had a lead on a location for the pub, she agreed to tap in. Naima was the only woman and the only Northerner involved in the business. What started as a lowkey investment eventually turned into Naima taking over as majority owner in the third quarter of 2017.
From there, she and her uncle Robert ran the pub together. Naima was still living in New York, so she spent the next few years traveling back and forth to Nashville about every other week, staying for several days at a time, and learning an industry she had never planned on entering.
Somewhere in that process, she started to understand what a neighborhood bar could actually be. “I realized how a neighborhood bar could be a place for people to meet, and I really loved the community aspect of it,” she said.
COVID changed the timeline.
Naima had already planned to move to Nashville, but when the city shut down in 2020, she was here. Instead of heading back to New York, she stayed. “I decided to stay and pivot.”
She’s been here ever since.
Now, she’s watching the city change from a different vantage point. The restaurant scene has grown. So have the costs of keeping a restaurant open. For independent businesses, there’s the price of food, labor, and property taxes, along with the competition that comes with more restaurant groups and national concepts entering the market.
Naima doesn’t think the answer is for Nashville to stop changing. She just wants people to remember to support the businesses that were already here. “We’re going to start an ‘eat local, eat often’ campaign,” she shared.
Her argument is pretty straightforward: if you love a neighborhood restaurant, pull up!
The economics of running a brick-and-mortar restaurant can make that support the difference between staying open and closing the doors. “If it’s not here, eat local somewhere else,” she said. “Don’t end up looking like every other city, where everywhere you go it’s the exact same restaurants.”
Germantown Pub has its own reasons to stick around.
Naima will tell you the food can hold its own against any sports bar in the country. The Trifecta Wings are one of the pub’s signatures, and her personal favorite is the vegan oyster mushroom wings tossed in Trifecta sauce. They’re a special and can sell out, so call ahead if that’s what you came for.
And, take it from me, that catfish sandwich and those drink specials? A hit.
There’s also homemade tartar sauce, award-winning burgers, a Nashville hot burger (where else are you finding that), and what Naima considers one of the best salmon sandwiches in the city.
But she’s not trying to turn The Pub into something it isn’t.
“We don’t aspire to be a lounge, and we don’t aspire to be fine dining,” she said. It’s a sports bar. It’s a neighborhood bar. It’s the kind of place where you can come in without making a whole production out of it.
And maybe that’s part of why people don’t always clock Naima as the owner when they walk through the door.
There’s a certain image people have in their heads when they picture a sports bar owner. Germantown Pub’s draft beer, college pennants, and TVs probably reinforce that picture before anyone ever meets the person behind the business.
Naima has noticed it. But as a Black woman business owner, the assumptions people make when they walk in don’t necessarily tell the story of who actually owns the place.
The family-owned part matters to Naima, too.
Her uncle Robert helped shape the culture of Germantown Pub by treating people like family. That sense of familiarity is still part of what Naima is trying to preserve as she runs the business through a changing Nashville.
Tourists come back every year. Regulars have been coming for years. People who once worked there still stop by. That’s the kind of longevity that can’t be bought with a marketing campaign.
For Naima, entrepreneurship has meant constantly figuring things out as she goes. After leaving a career in law for a business she initially never intended to touch, she’s found that unpredictability is part of what keeps her interested.
“Entrepreneurship is the most difficult thing anyone could do, because it challenges you to open the window and walk out on faith,” she said. “It forces you to be perpetually creative and nimble in a way that’s hard to find in a corporate job.”
Germantown Pub has required plenty of that faith. She learned the restaurant business from the ground up, moved across the country, and now finds herself trying to protect a neighborhood spot while the city around it keeps evolving.
She’s not interested in making Germantown Pub look like everywhere else, and that is what makes The Pub, The Pub.
Interview by: Ashley Currie
Photography: Jordan Johnson, Son of the Light
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I wanna come try it out! Have me a beer and some wings! It looks good!