By Estevan Chavez
“We’re going to make sure Kentucky wins this Maxim party tonight, so everybody raise a lot of hell, drink a little Jim Bean,” yelled the man on stage.
The tone was set, the beer was poured — but it was the girls the crowd was waiting for. For the next hour, the energy of the mob would be focused on the two or three Maxim girls making their way through the bar. Understandably, though, since it’s not every day that a local pub like the Golden Nugget gets rated in the nation’s top five best neighborhood bars.
Of course, it’s also not every day a college student gets to go to a bar party and call it work.
Last Wednesday, Maxim magazine hosted part of its search for the best neighborhood bar in the nation right here in Louisville. The Golden Nugget, located on Hikes Lane, made the top five. Maxim hosted celebrations at each of the top five bars to determine the winner, and Louisville was the smallest town on the list. It was also the last town Maxim.
After I agreed to the assignment — mere hours before the event — I realized my ill-preparedness. For a job like this, a few interviews would just not be enough. Readers would want more. I was going to need a photographer.
It took a little persuasion and a lot of legwork to track him down. My photographer was walking down the road when I spotted him. I might have blown right by him, but when I halted at a traffic light, as luck would have it, the photographer sat waiting for the bus at that very same light.
“I’m on my way to a job interview,” he said.
I promised Maxim girls. That was enough to convince him.
The crew of the Golden Nugget was still setting up when we arrived. People had already begun to file in to the small bar and the hum began to drown out the jukebox.
Inside the door, a gorilla-like bouncer directed us to Travis Rose, one of three partners running the Golden Nugget. Rose and Shannon Cain run the bar’s day-to-day operations. Joe Stier, the third partner, lives in Florida, but his family has owned the bar since it opened in 1962.
Rose said Stier’s grandfather and great-uncle built the bar. But for five years now, the Stiers’ direct relationship with the Golden Nugget has been severed.
“No family is still involved with the Nugget, but a lot of them still hang out,” Cain said.
Cain began to work at the bar five years ago; Rose was hired a year later. In the past five years, the two have managed to keep the same staff, which they say makes for a very close atmosphere. However, the continuity of the staff makes quite a contrast with the diversity of the bar’s visitors.
Who the crowd is “depends on your time of day,” Rose said.
He described the Golden Nugget as three different bars. When the doors swing open at 10 in the morning, a group of retired workers come in. The place is theirs until the five o’clock after-work crowd comes in to take advantage of happy hour. Later in the evening, the mood changes, and there is usually live entertainment or a DJ. The clientele changes again with the late hours — nights are mostly for college-aged people.
But Maxim party night was the exception. People of all ages and ethnic backgrounds were enjoying the atmosphere. Soon the small crowd had ballooned to mob proportions — there was no place to sit and not many places to stand. The different strata of regulars were all gathered to support the momentous occasion for the Golden Nugget.
“This really shows us we have 40 years of regulars,” Rose said.
It’s the regulars to whom Rose and Cain feel they owe a lot. Without its many loyal customers, the Golden Nugget would never have received the standing they did. The top five list was determined by the number of votes bars received online. Rose and Cain set up a computer at the end of the bar with the Maxim site always open, and supporters voted in droves.
Four Jim Beam girls and one from Maxim worked the room, handing out T-shirts.
Of course, I tried to get an interview with one of them, but it proved difficult to move through the sea of people.
The mass of people celebrated the Nugget’s success, screaming and raising glasses into the air. The community has a lot of love for the bar, and the bar loves the community.
On Sunday, radio station 94.7 announced Maxim had named the Golden Nugget the best neighborhood bar in the nation.
