Skull's Rainbow Room | Nashville Traveler

Nashville's most storied supper club, reborn in Printer's Alley. Burlesque shows, stiff martinis, and a throwback vibe that honors the original Skull's that ran from 1948 to 1998. The jazz is excellent, the cocktails are stronger than they look.

David "Skull" Schulman opened the original club in 1948 and ran it as the unofficial mayor of Printers Alley for half a century, holding court in rhinestone Nudie and Manuel jackets and dyeing his poodles red and green every Christmas — one of which was a gift from Elvis. Andy Griffith worked the room as a house comedian, Willie Nelson played in the house band, and Waylon Jennings, Hank Williams, The Supremes, Johnny Cash and Bob Dylan all took that stage at one point or another. Schulman was murdered in the club in 1998, and Skull's closed for good soon after — a dark ending to one of the alley's defining rooms.

Phil Martin bought the building in 2015 and rebuilt Skull's from the studs up, and the version running today is a genuine restoration rather than a theme-park copy. The original checkerboard stage survived and is still what the burlesque dancers and jazz combo work on, and Schulman's actual stage jackets hang framed on the wall as the closest thing the room has to a shrine. At 140 seats it's intimate enough that the trumpet from the nightly jazz set carries to every table, whether you're at the bar or tucked into a booth.

The kitchen runs a proper supper-club menu — steaks, seafood, the kind of food built to be eaten slowly over a second martini — and it's picked up recognition from Condé Nast, OpenTable and Yelp along the way. Burlesque performances go up twice nightly Thursday through Sunday starting around 11 p.m., with a cover kicking in at 9 p.m., and the routines lean toward the artful and campy rather than raunchy. Come for dinner and the earlier jazz set if you want conversation; stay past 11 if you want the full late-night version of the room.

It suits a date night that wants some theater built in, a bachelorette or birthday group looking for something classier than a honky-tonk crawl, and anyone curious about the actual history of Printers Alley rather than its current daytime tourist version. Reservations are worth making on weekends — the room is small, the crowd skews toward people who've done this before, and the kitchen closes at 11 p.m. even though the club itself runs until 2 a.m.