Margot Café & Bar Prepares to Say Au Revoir in 2026 | Options

On Tuesday, June 5, 2001, Margot Café & Bar welcomed its first diners right into a restaurant created within the shell of a 70-year-old constructing on the nook of tenth and Woodland within the wilds of East Nashville. The unique exposed-brick partitions have been dressed up with copper cookware and classic pottery, the tall home windows hung with drapes pulled again to the wood frames, and gleaming tables set with contemporary flowers or herbs positioned in opposition to banquettes on both aspect of the polished concrete flooring. That night time, chef-owner Margot McCormack and her workers — seen by the go into the tiny kitchen — cooked for 120 individuals, every of whom reserved certainly one of 75 seats in the primary eating room, on the petite comma of a bar or on the mezzanine. 

That determine will undoubtedly be eclipsed on Friday, June 5, 2026, when — after 25 years and multitudes of cheese plates, bottles of bubbles, buckets of Provençal olives, acres and acres of regionally grown produce, and untold multitudes of roast chickens and seasonal fruit tarts — the ultimate service will happen. 

The momentous determination to shut Margot and record the property on the market got here within the wake of what McCormack describes as her hardest 5 years in enterprise. Margot’s 5 Factors neighborhood was hit by a lethal twister simply previous midnight on March 3, 2020, nearly instantly adopted by COVID chaos — a double whammy that delivered a knockout blow to Margot’s sister restaurant Marché. Then there have been private well being points, head-spinning adjustments within the Nashville restaurant trade, and the evolution of a unusual, artsy, artistic, fiercely impartial neighborhood that each nurtured and benefited from Margot. 

McCormack ruefully observes that opening Margot could be inconceivable in immediately’s Nashville, however she delights in telling the story of its scrappy begin.

A West Nashville native, McCormack landed her first kitchen job on the legendary — and deservedly notorious — Faison’s in Hillsboro Village, the place she was paid $4 an hour. Naturally, that impressed her to make a profession of cooking, which led her to the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, N.Y. She then constructed her résumé in Manhattan and upstate New York eating places, the place she met her future spouse Heather Parsons. 

In 1995, McCormack returned to Nashville, intent on opening her personal restaurant. The first step was reestablishing Nashville connections, beginning with taking the chef job at F. Scott’s restaurant. Noting the emergence of impartial, chef-owned eating places in underserved city neighborhoods (Sasso in East Nashville in 1998, Caffé Nonna in Sylvan Park in 1999, Mirror on pre-12South twelfth Avenue in 2000), she moved to step two. Over espresso one morning at close by Bongo Java Roasting Firm with Fred Grgich — who had helped open Nonna — McCormack spied the accessible constructing in 5 Factors; landlord March Egerton gave them a glance. 

“It was a multitude,” McCormack recollects. “The roof had a extremely large gap in it, and the house was so uncooked. However I might see it. The primary time we walked in, I mentioned, ‘There’s the kitchen, right here’s the eating room, there’s the bar, there’s the loos.’ If I can see it, I can do it. I noticed Margot.” 

McCormack and Grgich persuaded Egerton to renovate the second flooring so they may have sufficient seats to serve alcohol. They introduced in Jay Frein, and every of the three put $25,000 within the pot and gave their bank cards a exercise. “It price us about $150,000 to open Margot,” McCormack says. “Nobody might try this immediately.”

They did a number of bodily labor themselves. Parsons dove into demo and constructed the bar. Because it turned clear that one thing was taking place within the former service station, which had been vacant for 10 years, neighborhood residents started poking their heads in, saying hiya and bringing welcome items. 

McCormack sought out native farmers to help her intent to alter the menu each day. Margot has neither a freezer nor a walk-in, so the whole lot has a particularly quick shelf life — what is available in should all exit. Tana Comer of Eaton’s Creek Organics was first. “She got here in sooner or later with a basket of her stunning greens that she had picked and washed that morning,” says McCormack. “The whole lot she introduced me by all of the years was excellent, and he or she set the bar for everybody else.”

Within the days earlier than social media, the Margot crew needed to get the phrase out old-school type, calling contacts on the cellphone. As soon as opening night time was set, they started taking reservations — additionally by cellphone, written down by hand. McCormack needed to inform her mom to cease telling her pals, as a result of they have been full. 

Margot rapidly established itself as a culinary vacation spot, neighborhood landmark and progress catalyst. The kitchen was an academy for younger cooks, and the front-of-house set the usual for heat {and professional} service. The bar turned recognized for its unpretentious method to wine. The restaurant was the location for numerous birthdays, first dates, engagements, child showers and anniversaries, standard holidays, East Nashville-centric occasions, Bastille Day and the annual launch of Beaujolais nouveau. Plus celebrations of Julia Youngster’s birthday.

McCormack and Parsons had a dedication ceremony in 2006 — the identical yr they opened Marché Artisan Meals — had a son, Jacob, in January 2011, and legally married in Cape Cod in 2013. 

Key to Margot’s sustainability and McCormack’s bodily and emotional well being was the arrival in 2011 of younger Hadley Lengthy, then a scholar at a Washington, D.C., culinary faculty who utilized for an externship with Margot. She put him at Marché with cooks Matt Davidson and Kat Britt for a yr, earlier than “poaching him” for herself. “He had a burning want to study and was only a breath of contemporary air,” she says. “He and Kat have been simply the very best, and we had a lot enjoyable.”

The 2020 twister destroyed properties and buildings within the neighborhood and broken Margot; some of the enduring photographs of the times following was the outside cookout the restaurant threw for 500 of its closest pals — a beacon of sunshine at nighttime. COVID was much more debilitating, prompting layoffs, service pivots, extreme monetary pressure and exhaustion. It was additionally when McCormack’s spouse delivered an commentary that broke by. “Someday she mentioned, ‘You spend all of your good power on the restaurant, and once you get residence, you don’t have something left for Jacob and me.’ That reduce proper to my coronary heart.”

McCormack went in that night time and advised Lengthy it was her final night time shift — that she would work lunch, however he was the man. In July, 2022, he took over the Margot kitchen as govt chef. 

Because the restaurant approached one other milestone, she once more took private {and professional} inventory. “I’ve spent 24 years within the restaurant searching the kitchen window at that nook, and I adore it, however I’m achieved,” she tells the Scene. “It’s time. Time for one thing new, for the constructing and for us.”

The announcement of Margot’s closing service practically seven months earlier than it truly occurs was influenced by the abrupt closure of Marché. “It didn’t get the fanfare it deserved — individuals didn’t get their final order of French toast or say goodbye to their favourite server. Margot and all our individuals deserve that.”

So think about the following seven months the Margot Farewell Tour — a final wonderful hurrah of the most effective, most significant, most beneficiant, impactful and beloved eating places to ever take residence in Nashville, and act accordingly.

“We’re going to have loads of celebrations,” McCormack guarantees. “It’s going to be enjoyable.”