Austin Ray
It’s hard to believe 15 years have passed since Nashville restaurateur Austin Ray opened his first M.L.Rose Craft Beer & Burgers location on Eighth Avenue South — but it also feels like the neighborhood fixture has been there forever.
In fact, it was named The Melrose Neighborhood Pub when the first pint was pulled in 2008. Of course, it was immediately confused with the venerable Melrose Billiards across the street, leading to many missed connections between drinking buddies who were at the wrong bar. Patrons quickly developed their own way of differentiating between the two, referring to the flood-prone subterranean billiards room as “Dirty Melrose” and the burger bar as “Clean Melrose.” Ray later rendered the issue moot by purchasing the pool hall in 2016 and changing the name of his pub to the more locationally generic M.L.Rose Craft Beer & Burgers.
Now, with multiple locations already open throughout the greater Nashville area, Ray is preparing to expand M.L.Rose even further, with locations in Inglewood, Franklin and — in a bit of breaking news — his newest spot at 2145 Nashville Pike in Gallatin.
Ray is a Nashville native, a Hillsboro High graduate and the son of Nashville’s first female sheriff, Gayle Ray. So his connections to the city run deep, as does his experience in hospitality. “I’ve cooked or washed dishes from the very beginning,” says Ray. “From age 13, I worked catering parties, in the Corner Market production kitchen making sandwiches and at Mad Platter.”
He knew he wanted to attend a college with a strong hospitality program — “It was the only identifiable passion I had at the time” — so he selected Boston University and continued working in kitchens and bars throughout college. “I had a helluva good time working in Boston, and at the end of the program they hook you up with one of the big companies in the industry,” Ray explains. “I just didn’t jibe with them, so I returned home because I knew I wanted to do something on my own.”
After a short time running a micro-catering operation out of his Oak Hill apartment, Ray was introduced to another young local entrepreneur who was looking to bring something new to Nashville — Benjamin Goldberg. “We had the same ideas and energy,” says Ray. “We both appreciate the luck of the timing to meet each other at that time.”
The result of Ray’s collaboration with the future Strategic Hospitality co-founder was a trendy nightclub named Bar Twenty3, which brought a modern, urbane vibe to the still-sleepy Gulch neighborhood. The duo followed up that success with City Hall, a midsize performance venue that filled the gap left by the closing of Ace of Clubs and 328 Performance Hall, victims of the revitalization and expansion of SoBro and its new bridges and skyscrapers. City Hall had a good run, but unfortunately, Ray and Goldberg only had a three-year lease on the property, and the life span of Bar Twenty3 as a nightclub had run its course. Both venues closed in 2008. Bootmaker Lucchese now occupies the former Bar Twenty3 address; City Hall became an Urban Outfitters.
Undaunted, Ray plunged forward into his next project. “The Melrose Pub was the polar opposite of Bar Twenty3. I needed a good neighborhood pub where I lived. The concept was going to be more of a spot for drinking than eating, and I had only scratched out a 10-item food menu on a piece of paper. Immediately, I saw we were going to have to add more, so the food program grew and grew.”
During the renovation of the former home of legendary Nashville gay bar The Chute, Ray worried about what he was taking on. “The roof was leaking, and the place was dark and dingy,” he says. “I just stared out the window and wondered, ‘What the hell am I doing here?!’ At that moment I saw two young women jog by on the sidewalk, and I realized that residential was really taking shape in Melrose. Before that, a lot of people never even knew the neighborhood was already named Melrose; they thought it was named after the pool hall!”
Ray hosted a wide cross section of the neighborhood at the bar and acquired regulars from day one. More importantly, he listened to them as he started to expand the M.L.Rose empire with his second location in Sylvan Park in 2012.
“I learned you don’t tell people how to use your restaurant,” he recalls. “We opened Sylvan Park, and it wasn’t long before we brought in high chairs and put the changing tables in the restrooms. You weren’t always able to get a salad at M.L.Rose, but we changed that quickly.”
Not everything Ray touched turned to gold, though. He attempted to revitalize another Melrose tradition by bringing back The Sutler eight years after original owner Johnny Potts lost his lease. He also converted the basement of The Sutler into a cocktail bar called Rambler. Unfortunately, after seven years of trying, Ray closed both spots.
“The Sutler — that was an easy way to learn a hard lesson about the cost of live music in Nashville,” says Ray. “We thought that adding a music program to a restaurant wouldn’t cost too much, and you can get free music. You just don’t want it! And Rambler, that was a really pretty room that just happened to flood sometimes.”
While all of this was going on, Ray opened yet another concept, his sausage-and-beer hall Von Elrod’s, just steps from the Nashville Sounds’ First Horizon Park in Germantown. Initially working with a fellow Gulch culinary pioneer, chef Jason Brumm of Radius10, to develop sausage recipes, Ray put together another of his outstanding beer lists to complete the biergarten vibe. Even as Von Elrod’s was growing, Ray also opened new M.L.Rose locations in Capitol View in 2017 and Mt. Juliet in 2021.
With 15 years of growth behind him, Ray still looks forward, recently announcing upcoming M.L.Rose locations in Inglewood as well as in Franklin, where he will take over a former Chili’s building on Columbia Avenue. The latest scoop is that the seventh M.L.Rose will open sometime in the next year in Gallatin at 2145 Nashville Pike. This newest announcement is the first time Ray has found a way to involve outside investors in the real estate at one of his restaurants, and the first time he’s raised money for an M.L.Rose, but he says it might not be the last.
With so many irons in the fire, why does Ray want to keep expanding? His answer is more about people than profits.
“I have a really amazing team of people who are smarter than I am in their fields,” Ray says. “It’s a superpower. Seeing people come up through the company feels good, and as the father of two, it’s deeply satisfying to foster development in humans.”
Over his career, Ray has seen big changes in the Nashville hospitality landscape, lived through recessions, tornadoes, a pandemic and periods of intense restaurant expansion and competition, but he has weathered the storms. He also appreciates how lucky he has been along the way.
“It would be 10 times harder to open a neighborhood pub today,” he notes. “I hope landlords continue to identify talent and foster it like the ones who took a chance on me. I’ve got some clarity on what it takes to have success and how our neighborhoods react to what we’re doing. We can see it in our [profit and loss], but it took every bit of 15 years to get all these factors in place.”
He has one last cautionary note to share.
“It’s not lost on me how great it is to live close to where I work. A great city needs great restaurants and great people working in them at every level. Unfortunately, it’s becoming much more difficult for folks to live near where they work, and we have to do better at making that possible for them or the whole system breaks down.”
