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Remember When? the Brass Register was a power bar

Times Free Press archive photo / A brass cash register sits behind the bar at the Brass Register restaurant in 2006. New owners had tried to recreate as much of the ambiance as possible from the original restaurant, which opened in 1973. Times Free Press archive photo / A brass cash register sits behind the bar at the Brass Register restaurant in 2006. New owners had tried to recreate as much of the ambiance as possible from the original restaurant, which opened in 1973.

By Mark Kennedy November 14, 2025 4 min read

In the 1970s and 1980s, the place was so popular that people called it by its initials, the “BR.”

The Brass Register, a bar and restaurant opened in 1973 and located across Georgia Avenue from the Hamilton County Courthouse, was Chattanooga’s “power bar” for more than 25 years.

A lunch spot and nighttime watering hole favored by attorneys, county officials and, in one journalist’s words, people who “just came to be seen,” the BR was indeed the home of a vintage, National-brand cash register as seen in the accompanying photo from the Chattanooga Times Free Press archives.

An anonymous Brass Register patron told The Chattanooga Times in 1977: “Some people come here to see and be seen. I come here to drink and be drunk.”