Photo: AI-generated imageThe Assembly Food Hall outpost of East Nashville's beloved beer-garden burger joint, serving the same hand-ground patties and house-made brats without the wait for a table across town.
The Pharmacy started in 2011 on McFerrin Avenue in East Nashville, when Dutch transplant Cees Brinkman set out to fuse the communal, long-table culture of a German beer garden with the nostalgia of an American soda fountain. It worked well enough to become one of the neighborhood's defining restaurants, and the stall inside Assembly Food Hall downtown brings that same kitchen's burgers to the tourist-heavy blocks near Broadway without requiring a trip across the river.
The draw is the beef: hand-ground in house and smashed on the flattop, with sauces, pickles, and bratwurst also made from scratch rather than shipped in. It's a straightforward, unfussy menu built around doing a small number of things — burger, brat, fries, shake — very well, which is exactly the kind of stall that holds up inside a 30-vendor food hall where a lot of neighbors are chasing novelty instead.
It suits the food-hall crowd well: order at the counter, grab a stool near the bars or up on the rooftop, and eat something that would be a destination restaurant on its own merits if it weren't sharing a room with two dozen other kitchens.
Highlights
- —Hand-ground burger patties and house-made bratwurst, same recipes as the East Nashville original
- —Milkshakes and phosphate sodas made in house
- —Order at the counter, then find a seat anywhere in the hall or on the rooftop
- —Good pick if you want a proper sit-down-quality burger without leaving Assembly