Nashville

While visiting family in Nashville in 2018, Sid’s founder Paul Devitt reconnected with Cowboy Keith Thompson, his old friend from Silk City in Philadelphia. Cowboy Keith had a couple of friends, Kira Small and Glen Pangle, looking to open a piano bar. He brought them to the original location in New York and after an extensive search for the right location, they landed in East Nashville, opening in 2020.

About the Operating Partners

“How did you guys get into this?” is the number one question people ask Glen Pangle and Kira Small, Sid Gold’s Nashville operating partners. Answer: equal parts nostalgia and kismet with a dash of Wonder Woman.

Kira Small has been a touring singer songwriter, backup singer and session vocalist in Nashville for over 20 years, but the 5 years she spent behind the piano at Austin, Texas’s beloved Donn’s Depot in the 90’s were formative in more ways than one. Glen Pangle was 20 years into an offshore career in oil and gas exploration when he and Kira got married. They quickly developed a shared love of cocktails (making and partaking), collecting vintage barware and seeking out interesting bars wherever their travels took them. Lamenting the lack of anything back home in Nashville remotely resembling Donn’s magical piano bar cocktail lounge vibe, they casually started a conversation about what it would be like to open a place of their own.

Glen’s offshore tenure came to an end not long after. “I keep thinking about that piano bar idea…” he said, more than once, and the formerly casual conversation turned purposeful. Considering that neither of them had ever even worked in a bar before (and correctly concluding that drinking/playing in bars does not qualify one to own/operate a bar) they thought it wise to reach out to a handful of friends who’d already taken that leap for advice.

Enter Cowboy Keith Thompson: producer, sound engineer, tour manager and 30-year veteran of both the Nashville music community and the neighborhood of East Nashville. He’d taken Kira to Sid Gold’s in NYC while they were on tour together with Lynda Carter (yup, Wonder Woman!), since it was owned by his old friend Paul Devitt who he’d recently reconnected with after their Silk City days together in Philadelphia.
Cowboy: “Let me get this straight – you want to open a PIANO BAR?”
Kira: “I mean…we’re thinking about it?”
Cowboy, with a startled chuckle: “Well, Paul wants to open a Sid Gold’s in Nashville, and he’s looking for partners.”
Kira: “Set up a meeting!”
That was fall of 2019.

Fast forward through a tornado and global pandemic, Sid Gold’s Nashville opened for business one year later in October of 2020. It has become a gathering place that the community has embraced and claimed as their own and the team couldn’t be prouder.