Twelve Years on the West Bank: The Music Box Supper Club Throws Itself a Party
On Wednesday, Aug. 19, the Music Box Supper Club does something Cleveland venues rarely get the chance to do: it celebrates a birthday. The room's 12th Anniversary Party lands mid-week, and twelve years is no small thing in a business where the Flats have watched more clubs open and close than anyone cares to count.
The Music Box opened in the early fall of 2014 on the West Bank of the downtown Flats, at 1148 Main Ave., in a building that Cleveland nightlife veterans will recognize as the old Club Coconuts. Instead of chasing the megaclub model that historically boomed and busted down here, the Music Box went the other direction — smaller, warmer, sit-down. The layout is the whole pitch: a downstairs Supper Club where you eat dinner while a band plays a few feet away, an upstairs Concert Hall for the ticketed shows, and a rooftop deck looking out over the Cuyahoga and the downtown skyline. Cleveland Magazine readers rewarded the approach, voting it Best Live Music Venue in 2017 and 2018.
What the anniversary really marks is a bet that paid off. When the Music Box opened, the received wisdom was that the Flats were finished as a music district — too much history, too many ghosts of clubs past. Twelve years of sold-out tribute nights, jazz brunches, and supper-club sets later, that obituary reads as premature. The venue found a lane that the Beachland, the Grog Shop, and Mahall's don't cover: the night out where the music comes with a plate and a river view, and where you can hear the person across the table.
The programming around the anniversary tells the story. This month alone the Concert Hall hosts a Revival ABB Allman Brothers tribute (Aug. 14), a Steely Dan brunch, a Beatles brunch, and an Aerosmith tribute, while the Supper Club runs Reggae Sundays, murder-mystery dinners, and a Marvin Gaye tribute. It's unapologetically a crowd-pleaser's calendar — and in a city that sometimes treats accessibility as a sin, there's something to be said for a room that just wants you to have a great Saturday.
Twelve years in, the Music Box has quietly become the answer to a specific Cleveland question: where do you take someone who wants live music but also wants to sit down, eat well, and watch the sun go down over the water? The answer is on Main Avenue, and this month it's blowing out the candles. Grab a table upstairs, grab a drink on the roof, and raise one to a Flats club that beat the odds by refusing to be a nightclub.
Sources: Music Box Supper Club — About; Music Box Supper Club — At-a-Glance Concert Schedule