Bongo Java opened on March 28, 1993, at 4 p.m., on Belmont Boulevard. That is the answer. Every other claim to “oldest” in Nashville coffee traces back to something that branched off from Bongo, closed and reopened somewhere else, or is counting from a different starting point. Bongo has been at the same address, in the same house, for over three decades.
How Bongo Java Started
Bob Bernstein moved from Skokie, Illinois to Nashville in 1988 to work as a reporter for the Nashville Business Journal. He planned to stay two years and move somewhere with more going on. Instead, he fell out of love with journalism and stayed in Nashville. His observation was simple: the city needed a real coffeehouse, a gathering place where musicians could write, students could study, and people could just be. He found a 19th-century house on Belmont Boulevard, drew up a business plan illustrated with Far Side comics, found a few investors who believed in it, and opened.
The timing was not obvious. Nashville in 1993 was not the city it is now. The hip crowd Bongo initially attracted, as Bongo’s own history describes it, was a 30-and-older mix of musicians, progressives, and people who had reluctantly ended up in Nashville. A few years later, Belmont University expanded across the street, and Bongo became what it still is today: something between a student gathering spot and a neighborhood institution.
What Made Bongo Nationally Famous
In December 1996, an employee noticed a cinnamon roll had formed a shape that looked remarkably like Mother Teresa. The Nun Bun, as it became known, made international news. It became a strange piece of early-internet lore. Bongo ran with it. The bun was eventually stolen on Christmas Day 2005, which made news again. Even this minor saga is more Nashville history than most coffee shops generate in a lifetime.
More substantively: Bongo was the first Nashville coffee company to commit to 100% organic and Fair Trade coffee. In 1999, Bongo helped co-found Cooperative Coffees, a consortium of independent micro-roasters that buys directly from small-scale farmer cooperatives worldwide. For a neighborhood coffeehouse in Tennessee in the late 1990s, that was not a small thing. It placed Bongo alongside coffee operations on the coasts that were far better resourced.
Bongo’s Broader Family
The Bongo operation eventually grew into a small empire. In 1996, a second location opened in Hillsboro Village as both a coffee shop and roasting facility. That location eventually split: the roasting operation became Bongo Java Roasting Co., and the cafe became Fido, now a full-service all-day restaurant with a coffee bar that uses Bongo’s beans. Fido won “Best Coffeehouse” in the Nashville Scene’s annual readers poll for 14 consecutive years alongside Bongo Java itself.
The East Nashville Bongo location reinvented itself in 2018 and became Game Point, Nashville’s first board game cafe, offering over 700 curated games free to customers alongside Bongo coffee, craft beers, and wine. It remains open until 10 p.m. nightly.
Why Bongo Still Matters
Bongo Java on Belmont Boulevard is not the most technically sophisticated coffee shop in Nashville. It does not pull shots on Slayer espresso machines or offer single-origin pour-over flights. What it does is hold a corner of the city that no newer shop can replicate: the corner that was there before Nashville was cool, before the bachelorette parties, before the honky-tonk expansion, before anyone was writing articles about Nashville’s transformation. The house is still the same. The porch is still there. The students are still coming. In a city that has changed faster than almost any other American city in the past 20 years, that continuity is not nothing.
The Belmont location is at 2007 Belmont Blvd and opens daily at 7 a.m.
Sources
- Bongo Java official history: https://www.bongojava.com/pages/history
- Bongo 101 page: https://www.bongojava.com/blogs/news/bongo-101
- NashvilleLife.com on Bongo Java: https://nashvillelife.com/Bongo-Java/TN
- Yelp listing confirming 1993 establishment: https://www.yelp.com/biz/bongo-java-nashville-2
- NashvilleBeans on Bongo Java history: https://thenashbeans.com/blog/nashville-coffee/bongo-java/
- Nashville Guru coffee shop guide: https://nashvilleguru.com/1577/nashville-coffeehouse-guide