ICE raids in Nashville force Kid Rock’s restaurant to stop serving: “there was no one in the kitchen to cook the food”

Kid Rock’s conservative business partner, Steve Smith, saw his Nashville restaurant empire hit with raids by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) last weekend. These reports come from The Scene, a Nashville-based outlet, which covered the raids and the response by the restaurant’s managers.

The country singer licenses his name to Smith, who owns a restaurant called Kid Rock’s Big Ass Honky Tonk Rock N’ Roll Steakhouse, a five-story venue with four live music stages and six bar in the city’s downtown. The steakhouse was one of 3 restaurants in the area that told undocumented workers to leave on Saturday evening before ICE arrived.

Kid Rock’s close relationship with Donald Trump

A vocal supporter of former President Donald Trump, Kid Rock has become a prominent figure in conservative circles, often weighing in on culture war issues.

In 2023, after Budweiser featured a transgender content creator on its beer cans, he famously announced a boycott and posted a video of himself shooting cases of the beer in his backyard.

As for the recent ICE raids, neither the singer nor his business partner has commented publicly on whether or not they formed part of the decision to send their workers home.

Kid Rock is one of many Trump supporters who profit from undocumented labor

One employee told The Scene that management acted quickly once they learned about the raids, doing what they could to protect their undocumented staff. But the timing couldn’t have been worse: the raids coincided with major sporting events in the city. As customers poured into the steakhouse around 9:30 p.m., the employees who hadn’t been sent home were swamped. “There was no one in the kitchen to cook the food,” the employee told a reporter from The Scene.

The situation underscores the essential role undocumented immigrants play in the hospitality industry. While many conservatives publicly support strict immigration policies, including mass deportations, they also rely heavily on the labor of undocumented workers, whose vulnerable status often makes them easier to exploit.

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