Nye’s Bar on East Hennepin Avenue is one of the oldest bars in Minneapolis, and it has been misunderstood for years.
People who remember the old Nye’s Polonaise Room — the full-tilt polka palace that Ruth Adams Bronson ran for decades, the one that Rolling Stone once called the best bar in America — tend to walk in expecting some preserved museum of that era. Red booths, accordion music, kielbasa on the menu, perhaps a ghost. What they find instead is a neighborhood bar that has been quietly updated without pretending to be something it’s no longer. The polka bands are gone. The pierogi are gone. What remains is a good, no-drama bar on the wrong side of the Mississippi that most people from southwest Minneapolis only visit when they’re already running late for something at the Ritz or Bauhaus.
The room itself still carries the bones of the original space — curved booths along the wall, wood paneling that has absorbed roughly fifty years of cigarette smoke and varnish, a bar that is long enough to seat strangers comfortably without conversation. The lighting does the right thing, which is to say it doesn’t expose anyone unfavorably. There is a certain pleasure in sitting at a bar that was clearly designed by someone who understood that lighting is not decorative.
The drink prices are honest. A well cocktail runs around six or seven dollars depending on what you’re ordering and when. Tap beer is poured without theater. If you need a cocktail with six ingredients and a garnish situation, this is the wrong address. If you need a gin and tonic that arrives quickly and tastes exactly like a gin and tonic, you are in the right place.
The crowd is genuinely mixed — in age, in neighborhood, in reason for being there. On a Friday night you’ll get people who parked before a show at a nearby venue and decided the show could start without them. On a Tuesday it’s regulars who arrive in the same order, apparently, every week. The bartenders are attentive without performing attentiveness, which is a skill that takes years to develop and cannot be faked.
The location itself is part of what keeps it from getting overrun. East Hennepin doesn’t get the foot traffic of Uptown or the food-destination crowds of Northeast proper. It sits just far enough from both that you have to actually mean to go there. This is a good filter for a bar.
People sometimes ask whether Nye’s is worth visiting now that it isn’t the Nye’s they read about. That question contains its own confusion. The Nye’s they read about closed in 2016, went through a renovation, and reopened as something that shares a name and an address. Whether that makes it the same bar is a philosophical question the bar itself does not appear interested in resolving. It opens at three in the afternoon, pours drinks at a reasonable price, and doesn’t ask you to explain yourself. That’s enough.
Parking on East Hennepin is free on street in the evenings. Plan for $5–10 in drinks if you’re staying an hour.
