With her new series "The People's Places," contributor Jennifer Justus will provide short takes on longtime local restaurants, markets and bars that deserve another look.
Spend a few minutes at Rae’s Gourmet Sandwich Shoppe downtown and you'll notice that the folks behind the counter know the names of just about every customer walking over from government or office buildings nearby.
“Mr. McCallister, what you having today, hon?” says owner Kim Malone as she looks up to greet a guest.
Another regular — Richard Fletcher, who works in the Nashville City Center building next door — says he's been known to pre-pay and let Rae's “just make something for me.” He’s been a customer since day one and calls it a warm place with staff like extended family. “People joke, for several years,” he says, “I would go there every day.”
Born and raised in Nashville, owner Malone took a job at age 13 at dearly departed theme park Opryland USA. By 18, she had begun working at Opryland Hotel, where she met her future husband Daniel. After many more jobs in hospitality between the two of them — Cracker Barrel, Morton’s of Chicago, Merchant’s — the couple bought their sandwich shop from a guy who Daniel had worked with on catering jobs. Kim and Daniel were building a life and living together around their love of food. That was 2002, and Rae’s (an acronym for Really Awesome Eats) has been in business serving local workers from Union Street ever since.
But then came 2020, and things got more complicated.
After 33 years with Kim, Daniel was diagnosed with esophageal cancer. He died from the disease in January. Then the tornado came through, followed by the pandemic, which closed the restaurant for two-and-a-half months. When Rae's reopened, its catering business — a big part of Rae’s revenue — had all but dried up. The shop also doesn’t have a parking lot or a drive-thru window, and with offices nearby at just 10 to 20 percent capacity (if at all), foot traffic dwindled substantially too. Then in October, longtime beloved employee Fred Battle Sr., who Kim calls family, needed a kidney transplant. He then lost his wife Janice suddenly the day after Christmas. And recently, a bomb detonated on Christmas morning just a few blocks from Rae's has Nashville — and particularly the downtown district — shaken.
Still, Kim is determined to keep the doors open.
“When Daniel first got sick, he asked me if I wanted to close the restaurant," says Kim. "I really thought about it, and you know, working together and living together, this is all we’ve done. I told him I wanted to keep it open in his legacy.”
Kim remembers how customers would marvel at their relationship. “People were like, ‘How do you live together and work together?’” she says, adding that they drove to work every morning too. “Pure love I guess is what you call it.”
These days, Kim runs the shop with just the help of a former regular, Stephen Luther, who joined the staff about a year-and-a-half ago — just before they found out about Daniel’s cancer.
“I used to come in here every day for a Black and Bleu [sandwich],” Luther says. A musician who moved to Nashville from Houston to attend Belmont University, Stephen previously worked at the Escape Room nearby. Kim eventually offered him some advice. “You ought to just work here,” she told him. “You’ll save yourself some money.”
Now, like his boss, Stephen calls folks by their name and order too.
“How’s it going, Anthony — Black and Bleu?” he says, greeting a guest.
The Black and Bleu is indeed one of the shop’s most popular sandwiches. Tender slices of beef layer against the soft interior of a Charpier’s baguette. The crisp outside of the New Orleans-style roll keeps blue cheese crumbles snuggled in, with a mayo spiked with Cajun spices and Worcestershire.
The Monte Cristo is another favorite — honey-smoked turkey and ham wrapped around a tunnel of crisp bacon and held together with a cheese sauce made from a roux of flour, butter, cream and a solid shake of black pepper. Regulars also know the daily specials by heart — beer-cheese soup on Thursdays, for example, and crab cakes on Fridays.
And then there’s dessert. “People go crazy for those brownies,” Stephen says.
Guests can call them like a pool shot — corner, edge or middle. On a recent visit, for example, Stephen handed me a middle, the most popular, wrapped in wax paper and marked with an “m.”
“We would have so many people in here saying, ‘Do you mind if I get a center, an edge?” Kim says. “And you would know, 'Oh, that’s Katie’s, she’s gonna want a ‘filet,’ the middle, because that’s what she called it.' We finally started writing on the paper.”
Kim says the original brownie recipe just comes from a box, but Daniel tweaked and doctored it for about six months until it became his own — even specifying a baking time of 43 minutes. “Not sooner, not less,” Kim says. Back when people could gather more freely, Rae's was known to make batches of 200 for weddings.
Kim hopes those days of will come again. In the meantime, she’s staying safe with precautions in place at the restaurant — and a heart to keep the doors open for Daniel.
“This was his baby and what he always wanted,” she says. “I want to keep it up and running as long as I possibly can.”
Lunch is served at Rae's from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. on weekdays only. After a short break, the restaurant plans to open again on Jan. 4.
