Streetcar Taps and Garden: Bringing history along for the ride

By Pam Windsor

Since opening earlier this year, Streetcar Taps and Garden on Charlotte Pike has quickly become a local favorite. It’s a neighborhood gastropub with a warm, welcoming atmosphere and a menu crafted by Executive Chef Carter Hach that reflects a blend of influences from his Tennessee upbringing and family’s German heritage.

"We're a marriage of fun, kind of bar food takes on the comfort food of the American South and Germany, with a menu built to please beer-drinkers and families alike," he said.

Hach has a rich and expansive culinary background. He grew up cooking with his grandmother, noted Chef Phila Hach, herself a cookbook author, TV show host, and chef/owner of Hachland Hill Inn (her grandson later became the chef there.) He’s worked with and studied under other chefs, as well, and is also a cookbook author in his own right. “The Hachland Hill Cookbook,” published in late 2022, features stories about his grandmother and a collection of different recipes.

When he and best friend, Henry Beveridge, decided to open Streetcar Taps and Garden, it was an opportunity for Hach to create his own menu entirely from scratch. Nearly everything is made using ingredients from local farms and purveyors and cooked in Streetcar’s kitchen or in the smoker out back.

“The whole menu is very smoke-driven,” Hach explained. “Aside from the sliders and mushrooms and salads, most everything is touched by smoke, like the wings, the trout cakes, and the chicken.”

The smoke-driven approach to cooking comes, in part, from what he learned watching his grandmother.

“She wasn’t a pitmaster by any means, but the old Appalachian method of real wood-fire cooking and not cutting corners was something she instilled in me.”

Those smoked trout cakes he mentioned are one of his own original recipes. They’re listed as End of the Rainbow Bites on the menu.

I developed the trout cakes, and the recipe’s in my book, because I love seafood but I wanted to create something using Tennessee ingredients,” he said. “I wanted to make something similar to crab cakes using local trout from Bucksnort (a spring in Hickman County, Tennessee.) We smoke the trout and make the cakes, then they’re seared on the flattop. That’s something special and very different, for sure.”


Other menu items worth noting are the Vegan Cowboy (a Frito pie), the Smashville Sliders, TN Mushroom, the Back Yardbird, Taproom Toast Points with jalapeño pimento cheese, specialty sandwiches, and a couple of German items such as the Berliner BBQ Plate featuring currywurst.”

“We have some German beers, too,” Hach said. “We have imports as well as domestics and a pretty good selection of tap beers from around the country, too.”

Wine is also available, along with specialty cocktails like the Hachland Hugo, which is a German cocktail with prosecco, St. Germaine, mint and Topo Chico; or the Spring Creek with Tanqueray London Dry Gin, green chartreuse, cucumber, and lime.

Streetcar Taps and Garden has both inside and outside dining with the beer garden in the back, a big draw. The building itself has a lot of history with strong ties to the local community.

“This space housed the oldest grocery in West Nashville,” Hach said. “And we named the restaurant 'Streetcar' because there used to be a streetcar line that went through Nashville, and this was the last stop before leaving town and heading out to the old state prison. We wanted to create something that honored the history, so we kept the old brick and rafters.”

It’s a perfect fit for the gathering spot he and Beveridge wanted Streetcar to become.

“I want people who come here to feel a sense of being well taken care of,” Hach said. “I want people to feel warmth and hospitality at the core.”

In addition to great food and drink, there’s also live music during the summer on Monday, Tuesday, and Saturday evenings. Streetcar Taps and Garden is open for lunch and dinner seven days a week, located at 4916 Charlotte Pike, Nashville, and online at streetcartaps.com.

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