There are 37 Nash & Smashed locations on our map — 26 open and 11 coming soon. Thirty-six of them are in the United States, clustered where the brand grew up: Virginia and Maryland first, then Washington DC, then a scatter through New York, South Carolina and North Carolina.
The thirty-seventh is 9,000 miles away, and it is open.
Where it is
Nash and Smashed Canberra is at 210 Anketell St, Greenway ACT 2900, Australia. It trades 9am to 10pm Sunday through Thursday, and 9am to 11pm on Friday and Saturday.
That is the whole entry, and it is a genuinely unremarkable-looking row in a database — which is the point of this post. On the locations page it sits in a group of one, under a heading that reads "Australia," beneath Virginia's sixteen and Maryland's twelve. There is more about the store on the Australia page.
What a single overseas store changes
Quite a lot, structurally. Here is the map by state and territory:
- Virginia — 16
- Maryland — 12
- Washington DC — 4
- New York — 2
- South Carolina — 1
- North Carolina — 1
- Australian Capital Territory — 1
Seven states and territories. Two countries. Every one of those numbers is a sentence we can now write about the brand, and all of them turn on a single address in Greenway. The ACT row is the same size as the South Carolina row and the North Carolina row, and it is the one that changes the shape of the sentence.
It also sets a standard that is easy to underrate. A second country is a second set of food regulations, a second supply chain, a second labour market, and a menu that has to survive all three without becoming a different restaurant.
What travels and what we cannot yet tell you
The constant is the kitchen. Hand-breading and frying to order are conditions on how the food is made everywhere the name appears, not market-by-market decisions, and they do not soften because a store is a long way from the others.
The menu is where we have to be careful. The 58 items on our menu page come from the US point-of-sale export, and we are not going to quietly imply that every one of them is on the board in Greenway. Availability differs between markets — that is normal, and pretending otherwise would be the kind of small dishonesty that makes the rest of a page untrustworthy. Order from the Canberra store's own ordering link on the locations page and you will see its actual menu.
The interesting part is the part we have not written
A chicken shop that started in the Washington DC suburbs now has a store trading Friday nights until 11pm in the Australian Capital Territory. There is a real story in how that happens — the decisions, the timeline, the things that had to be solved twice.
We are not going to make it up. When we can tell it properly, it will be here.
In the meantime: find your nearest store, or browse by city if you want to see what is near a particular neighborhood.