Latest construction timeline for planned tavern, event center in downtown Gainesville

Conner Evans, The Times, Gainesville, Ga.
·3 min read

Jul. 5—The Bourbon Brothers Smokehouse and Tavern and Boot Barn event center in downtown Gainesville could start hosting live concerts early next year.

"We're going to have a great slate as soon as we open, and we expect to have some real headliners to kick it off in a grand fashion," Notes Live COO Bob Mudd said Tuesday, July 5.

Construction is ongoing at the site where Engine 209 once stood at 315 Broad St., and, despite some common supply chain delays, Mudd said the project is on track for both its restaurant and event center to open in the first quarter of 2023.

The 15,000-square-foot event center will seat more than 400 people for regular concerts, sharing the site with a 9,000-square-foot Bourbon Brothers restaurant that will serve breakfast, lunch and dinner. It will be one of few restaurants in downtown Gainesville with dedicated parking, and 40 public parking spaces were recently built by the city next door at Poultry Park.

The project was initially set to open before the end of 2022, but delays in getting steel and other materials have set it back, similar to many other construction projects since the COVID-19 pandemic.

"The supply chain doesn't just impact the construction industry," Mudd said. "(It also affects) fixtures that go into a restaurant, such as fryers, evacuation hoods, and all of those things are having the same issues that the construction industry is having. So we've assembled some great partnerships and they're having to buy out a lot of what it takes to get a restaurant open much earlier than we normally would, just to make sure we secure it."

Carroll Daniel Construction, which is building the project, is helping address some supply chain issues with a Steelworks facility in midtown Gainesville that is expected to be operational soon. Miscellaneous metals, handrails, ballards and structural work will be done at the facility, including work for Bourbon Brothers, CEO Brian Daniel has said.

"They have been very aggressive and creative to come up with solutions to keep our timeline going," Mudd said of Carroll Daniel.

Both the restaurant and event center are steel buildings, meaning long lead times, Mudd said; they've seen long waits for HVAC equipment and windows.

"It's starting to loosen up a little bit," he said. "But we were careful not to start the project until we had all of the elements understood in terms of their timeline, because we didn't want to get halfway down the runway and not keep the project momentum going."

Phase one of Solis, a 220-unit apartment complex across Jesse Jewell Parkway at 1000 Everly Way, is nearly all leased, and there will be plenty of residents within walking distance of the new venue as soon as more apartment developments are complete. The National, Midtown apartments and phase two of Solis will add hundreds more residents and guests to downtown and midtown Gainesville over the next two years as development continues.

Notes Live is the new name for the company that operates Bourbon Brothers, known as B-Entertainment until April. Notes Live has plans to go public soon, Mudd said, and it will announce plans for more projects in markets like Gainesville in the next year.

"We're looking at places very similar to Gainesville, close to major metropolitan areas but just outside where we're seeing significant expansion into that city and where there's opportunity to grow both in the hospitality and entertainment sectors."