Date Night: Melrose Billiard Parlor and Sinema

Date Night is a multipart road map for everyone who wants a nice evening out, but has no time to plan it. It’s for people who want to do more than just go to one restaurant and call it a night. It’s for overwhelmed parents who don’t get out often; for friends who visit the same three restaurants because they’re too afraid to try someplace new; and for busy folks who keep forgetting all the places they’ve driven past, heard about, seen on social and said, “Let’s remember that place next time we go out.”

When my husband Dom got home from work before our recent Date Night, I was in a hot shower enjoying the quiet and a new bar of soap that smells exactly like my Strawberry Shortcake doll circa 1983. Though he knows I don’t like to chat when I’m in a shower of solitude, he walked into the bathroom, backpack still slung over his shoulder, to relate the following tale: 

While Dom was walking to his truck with a courtesy umbrella he’d “borrowed” from a downtown hotel near his office, a woman stopped in the middle of the Germantown sidewalk as he approached. He thought she stopped because his luxury umbrella was taking up too much of the sidewalk, and apologized as he passed. 

“That’s not why I stopped,” she told him. “I stopped because you look just like a painting.” 

Dom is a man who takes great care with his style: He felt uniquely seen and was giddy that something about his look stopped a passerby in her tracks. This inspired us to recount the time a woman in a Long Beach coffee shop remarked on his “strong Roman nose.” I felt a pang of … not quite jealousy, but longing. I’ve looked at this man for more than 20 years now; what I wouldn’t give to see and appreciate the cut of his jib for the first time. 

Stop 1: Melrose Billiard Parlor

It’s unlikely that anyone is stopping on Eighth Avenue to take in a rare moment of beauty. Though the stretch between Thompson Lane and Wedgewood Avenue is home to more housing, goods and services than ever before, it’s disjointed, devoid of any sort of cohesive urban planning and embarrassingly unwalkable — as if the avenue itself is saying, Don’t linger here: Just get what you need and go on with your business. And if you listen — and don’t take the time to see something old through new eyes — you’ll miss out on an incredibly historic, wildly diverse, two-landmark Date Night. 

Melrose Billiard Parlor opened in 1944 and has operated continuously in the same subterranean spot on Eighth Avenue ever since. When it opened, Nashvillians racked up balls on fresh pool felt while Allied troops hit the beaches of Normandy on D-Day. My mother, who turned 80 in April, was a month-and-a-half old. Ownership has changed hands a few times over the years, most recently in 2016 when Austin Ray of A.Ray Hospitality (M.L.Rose, Von Elrod’s) took over. 

Nothing and everything is special about Melrose Billiards, which is grungy, dark and somehow both dirty and clean in all the best ways. I love the red door with its circular window and the way we left the blinding heat behind as soon as we got on the other side of it. I love the long staircase down, the graffiti-covered walls and the sticker-covered machine at the bottom offering free popcorn to scoop into plastic cups. I even love the perfectly greasy, previously frozen pizza available by the slice in a warmer at the end of the bar and the requisite Home Depot gallon bucket to catch the drops from leaky pipes in the ceiling, some of which are wrapped with Christmas lights.

I do not, however, love bar games — mostly because I’m terrible at them. I spent my college years serving fellow students chili cheese nachos in bars. Dom spent his college years in bars perfecting his foosball technique. I lost two straight games of shuffleboard because I don’t really understand how to keep score and don’t want Dom to explain it to me, and split a two-game set of tabletop Ms. Pac-Man before heading back up the stairs and very briefly into the sunshine.   

Stop 2: Sinema

Eighty years ago, when Date Night options weren’t quite as plentiful as they are now, we could’ve left Melrose Billiards, walked 20 feet and caught a movie at the Melrose Theatre, which opened in 1942. Though the timeline is fuzzy, it eventually shut down, sat empty for years and amazingly wasn’t destroyed to build a drugstore. Ten years ago this month, the theater became Sinema, which came in hot with Top Chef alum Dale Levitski behind it and has cycled through many executive chefs since. 

As a former theater, Sinema is gorgeously preserved, though the transition from movie house to restaurant still doesn’t feel seamless. This starts with the movie-poster-size menu out front, which is a sure sign that the selections don’t change often. (Though there are daily tweaks like the catch, vegetable and type of meat and cheese on the charcuterie board.)

Sinema is a vast, two-level space with the dining room downstairs and a lounge upstairs, connected by one of those sweeping staircases that always make me feel like I should be wearing a ball gown. Spaces this big and beautiful need lots of people inside to feel alive. When you enter, there’s a bar to the left and the host stand at the far end of a deep foyer. If there’s no one in the bar — which was the case both when we arrived for a (very easy to get) 6:30 Friday night reservation and when we left two-and-a-half hours later — it feels very empty and stilted. In my experience, once the vibe feels off, it usually stays that way. And it did. 

We started by sharing the pierogi and the bold beets and carrots salad with whipped feta and root-top pesto, even if both read more fall/winter than spring/summer. I doubt Dom would order the scallops again — a normally light dish in an oddly winter-ish presentation with cider-braised pork belly and butternut squash. My crab and corn cappelletti read spring, though in a heavy stuffed pasta.

We ordered the must-have mocha crumble at the table and asked for it to be delivered to the lounge so we could experience that space. If I had to do it over again, that’d be the play from the get-go. The best view in the restaurant is from the bar with the movie screen to the left — Dirty Dancing on the night of our visit, with Patrick Swayze grinding out sweaty summers in the Catskills. In the dining room, the only signs you’re in a vintage movie theater are framed photos of actors on the walls.

Sinema’s storyline doesn’t feel strong to me. I hate to say this, because though I always want to be honest, I also want to celebrate a restaurant that’s reinvented an important piece of Nashville’s history, and has the balls to offer upscale dining in a part of town where the most recognizable restaurant is Fat Mo’s. If Sinema were a movie, I wouldn’t recommend you sit through the whole thing. Instead, have a drink and an appetizer or dessert and pause to appreciate a view you won’t see anywhere else in town, as you would a painting.