Staff Photo Nick Brothers
Nomad’s Music Lounge, in addition to live music, features a menu of exotic hand-crafted drinks, craft beer, and tasty vegetarian appetizers, sandwiches, quesadillas and desserts.
After traveling and managing bars in Fiji, Australia and Cambodia and being a long-time supporter of live music in northwest Arkansas, Jeremey Brown along with Brittany Cusanek have opened south Fayetteville’s newest vegetarian restaurant, avant-garde bar and live music venue.
Nomad’s Music Lounge — not to be confused with the Dickson Street food truck Nomad’s Natural Plate — features a menu of exotic hand-crafted drinks, craft beer and tasty vegetarian appetizers, sandwiches, quesadillas and desserts. Located at 1431 S School Ave. where Tanglewood Branch used to be before closing down in October of last year, Nomads opened in early February.
Before moving overseas, Brown owned and operated the Music Hall in Fayetteville from 2002 to 2009. After returning and getting experience managing local restaurants, Brown and Cusanek had the intention of doing a Music Hall 2.0. Although now, the restaurant-music-venue hybrid is looking to showcase local and regional talent beyond the hardcore and metal genres 1.0 was known for.
“The music hall never sold booze and never sold food, but it did really well and supported local bands,” Brown said. “So I said lets create a new concept that’s not the music hall that is more mature for an adult audience and involves more genres. (Nomads is) like a really small House of Blues that’s all vegetarian with craft cocktails and mixology.”
Brown, the nomad himself, helms the bar of 18 craft beers (and Budweiser) on tap from around the country and an array of exotic house-made infused liquors, ginger beer and mixology gadgets.
“The bar program is just as important as the food,” Brown said. “We do local beers, but we also do complex beers because our cocktails are complex.”
For those looking for an affordable cocktail in town, Nomad’s creative drink menu doesn’t have a drink more than $10. Better yet, if anything at the bar seems mysterious or exotic, just ask Brown about it. Most everything at the bar he stocks has a story or history lesson about them, whether the rum you ordered is what British soldiers often drank, or how the damiana flowers used in your infused drink are named after the Incan goddess of fertility.
One of the bar’s signature drinks, Around the World in 80 Dashes, contains chili infused Trader Vic gold rum, spiced and dark rum, house vermouth, house flana rum, Fiji kava bitters, and milk thistle in a tumbler glass. The opaque drink is smoky and deep, finishes wet, and despite the various alcohols it doesn’t taste as strong as you’d expect. Nomads also makes their own ginger beer that they use in in their take on the Moscow mule, the Juicy Lucy.
Staff Photo Nick Brothers
Co–Owner Brittany Cusanek is proud to serve the Rustic Cheese Board, which features three types of artisan cheese, toasted baguette, cashews, dried apricots, pickled beets, quail eggs, raspberries, jalapeno and agave.
Depending on which drink you order, you might be in for a show, too. Take for example Nomad’s Cuban Smoked Rum Runner. Before making the drink, the bartender sprays a homemade blood orange bitter on a chili pepper, lights it on fire, and then places a dome over the glass and smokes the glass while suffocating the fire thus giving the glass a smoky flavor for the drink with cigar leaf infused rum.
The all-vegetarian menu, developed by Cusanek, features several interesting options with a few reinvented Mexican style dishes. For example, they serve blueberry salsa where instead of tomatoes, the main ingredient is blueberries. One of the popular dishes is the Captain Capri. which is a bruschetta-quesadilla hybrid. Cusanek is also proud to serve the Rustic Cheese Board, which features three types of artisan cheese, toasted baguette, cashews, dried apricots, pickled beets, quail eggs, raspberries, jalapeno and agave.
When it’s time for shows, the kitchen closes down at 8:30 p.m. and the staff clears the furniture out of the room to turn Nomads into a 100-person capacity standing-room-only music venue. This month, Nomad’s live music calendar will include Thunder Lizards on March 7, Born Cages on March 12, Old Ties on March 13, Clark Buehling March 17, and He Is Legend with Shawn James and the Shapeshifters on March 19.
Nomads is also in the process of building a 6 by 6 foot stage, similar in size to Smoke and Barrel’s, for the bands to play on.
In an effort to engage local visual artists, Cusanek is also curating the walls of Nomads to serve as showcases for local art. Those interested in submitting their work can contact the restaurant at nomadsmusiclounge@gmail.com.
While the south Fayetteville location poses a challenge for Nomad’s, the restaurant is near the bike trail and the city’s work to reinvigorate the area is promising, Brown said. Once the warmer months come through, the restaurant will host several patio events encouraging all to bring their pets and enjoy things like alcoholic slushies.
