09/15/2026
Nye's Polonaise Room sat on Hennepin Avenue in Northeast Minneapolis for 66 years, and Esquire once called it the best bar in America.
Al Nye opened it in 1950 in the heart of what was then a heavily Polish neighborhood. The Polonaise Room came a few years later, and the place settled into the form it kept until the end.
The interior never changed and that was the entire point. Gold vinyl booths. Wood paneling. Tufted upholstery. Chandeliers. A curved bar with a mirror behind it. Everything looked like 1964 because nothing had been touched since.
Two rooms, two personalities. The piano bar had Lou Snider at the keys for decades, playing standards and taking requests, and the crowd sang along. The Polonaise Room had the World's Most Dangerous Polka Band, which played Friday and Saturday nights for years and was genuinely as advertised. Accordion, horns, and a room of people doing polka in a Minneapolis bar in the 2000s.
The food was Polish American. Pierogi, kielbasa, cabbage rolls, and prime rib because it was also a supper club at heart.
The crowd was the unusual part. On a Friday night you would find people in their eighties who had been coming since Eisenhower sitting next to art students from the neighborhood, and both groups were there for the same reason and got along fine.
Esquire named it the Best Bar in America in 2006, which brought national attention Nye's never asked for.
It closed in April 2016 after the family sold. A development went up on the site. A smaller Nye's bar opened in the new building, which is not the same thing and nobody pretends otherwise.
The neon sign was saved.
Everybody in Northeast has a Nye's story.
