Café Roze

Café Roze is an all-day café and restaurant at 1115 Porter Road, on the corner of Greenwood Avenue in East Nashville's Lockeland Springs, from chef-owner Julia Jaksic. Jaksic came to Nashville with a substantial New York résumé — she has been executive chef of Employees Only Singapore and was formerly of Jack's Wife Freda — and she described the concept before opening in terms the restaurant has stuck to: an all-day café serving breakfast, lunch and dinner, meant to be a communal space, with coffees to go in the morning, breakfast, lunch meetings, meet-ups with friends for a bite, and afternoon rosé. That is close to a literal description of how the room is used now. It runs from 8am to 10pm every day of the week, which in practice makes it one of the few places in the city where the same address works for a morning coffee, a mid-afternoon meeting and a proper dinner, and the kitchen is vegetable-forward without being restrictive. It has been recognised in the Michelin Guide's American South selection.

The non-alcoholic side is worth understanding for what it is, because it is a bottle list rather than a cocktail list. The menu carries two clearly headed sections — "N/A Wines & Kombucha" and a separate "N/A Beer" — so a non-drinker is choosing from named, labelled products in the same way a wine drinker chooses by the glass. Lyre's Classico non-alcoholic sparkling comes as a 250ml serve at $12, and the St. Agrestis non-alcoholic Negroni is $9 for a 200ml bottle, which is a genuinely bitter, adult drink rather than a sweet one. Walker Brothers citrus kombucha is $8 and Athletic Brewing's Cerveza is $7. The advantage of this approach is reliability: bottled products taste the same on a busy Saturday as on a quiet Tuesday, and they are easy to check before you arrive. The limitation is that there is little built to order, so anyone hoping for a bartender-made zero-proof cocktail should ask what the bar can put together rather than expecting a printed list of them.