The chief concern of any bar proprietor is that no one will present up.
Inside half-hour of opening on Monday afternoon, Chapstick — the sister institution of East Nashville’s The Lipstick Lounge — was packed out.
“That is all the pieces I hoped for and extra,” Christa Suppan, co-owner of each Chapstick and Lipstick, tells the Scene.
And it is simply in time for the WNBA playoff season.
Yvonne Hawkins, director of particular initiatives and athletic tradition for Vanderbilt College ladies’s basketball, says the crew has seen extra season tickets offered this yr than up to now 10-plus years. (It’s a mixture of the rise in reputation of ladies’s sports activities and the standard of the crew, she says.) Nashville WNBA, a fan membership that hosts watch events at space bars, has moved its watch celebration to Chapstick too.
Chapstick slated to open in early 2025 in East Nashville
“If I need to see a ladies’s sport, I do know it will be on,” Hawkins says. “I do know the place to go. I haven’t got to go and say, ‘Hey, can you place the sport up?’”
Chapstick, which is hooked up to its sister bar, is also a spot to observe Vanderbilt ladies’s video games throughout March Insanity, Hawkins hopes.
“I feel ladies’s basketball, ladies’s sports activities general, are at an all-time excessive,” she says. “I feel a giant a part of that’s they’re exhibiting them on TV, so individuals now can establish the gamers and groups. It’s thrilling.”
With a guiding message of “sportsball for all,” the bar options 39 tv screens that can present sports activities of every kind. Throughout its first week of enterprise, the bar is scheduled to stream Nationwide Soccer League, Ladies’s Nationwide Basketball Affiliation, Main League Baseball and Nationwide Ladies’s Soccer League video games.
Tessa Ortiz-Marsh and her teammates hope that extends to native skilled ladies’s sports activities, like ladies’s sort out soccer crew the Tennessee Trojans. The Lipstick Lounge is without doubt one of the sponsors of the crew, which performs within the spring.
Opening day at Chapstick, Sept. 15, 2025
“We’re actually excited to have a spot that is going to amplify ladies’s sports activities,” Ortiz-Marsh tells the Scene. “That is going to present us an area as ladies athletes to actually showcase ourselves and to affix as a group that can permit us to assist each other.”
The primary patron by way of the door was Kathy Austin, who was additionally one of many first individuals to go present up at The Lipstick Lounge when it opened in 2002. Lipstick, which operates below the slogan “a bar for people,” is certainly one of solely 38 open and working lesbian bars in the US registered with the Lesbian Bar Mission, and claims the title of Tennessee’s sole lesbian-owned and -operated bar. Austin additionally praises the constructing’s accessibility for disabled patrons.
East Nashville’s The Lipstick Lounge is certainly one of few remaining lesbian bars within the U.S.
“I’m so comfortable for them,” Austin says of Suppan and co-owner Jonda Valentine. “They’ve had lean years the place it was robust to make sufficient cash. Even so, they gave away some huge cash and didn’t cost legs and arms. I feel all of us tried to rally round them once they had robust occasions, and if all of us had robust occasions, they rallied round us. It’s actually a group bar. It’s the East Nashville group and homosexual group. It’s a individuals group.”
Chapstick presents a patio, a eating space, a dart board and a pool desk. It serves burgers, sandwiches, quesadillas, nachos, fries and different appetizers. The positioning at 1400 Woodland St. has grown, however Suppan says the person care has stayed the identical.
“We hope, on the finish of the day, that we make individuals really feel essential, as a result of they really are,” Suppan says. “They’re one other piece of the material of our group, and we genuinely need to see them succeed and be nicely and be comfortable. If we are able to proceed to foster that, it is a mutual factor. It’s a give-and-take. We get to really feel the love too.”
