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20 years and counting

Beef O'Brady's keeps its small-town flavor while enjoying the boom in the sports bar business.

By ANDREW MEACHAM
Published August 5, 2005

Many of the earliest customers at Beef O'Brady's predicted the worst. How, they asked, often pointedly, did owners think they could run a bar with no pool table, no dartboard and no hard liquor?

Sean Mellody, who was 15 when his father launched the first Beef O'Brady's on S Kings Avenue, remembers the taunts.

"That was the hardest part, just getting those people out," said Mellody, 35. The restaurant stuck to its formula of a "family sports pub" that closed at 11 p.m. and in which food outsold alcohol by a 4-1 ratio.

Those who rejected that concept left. Times were rough that first year. Then the new customers started coming.

Twenty years later, they're still coming.

Despite an onslaught of competitors and the death of founder Jim Mellody in 2002, patrons continue to munch on chicken wings and relive gridiron moments at the original "Beef's." Mellody's smiling photo hangs just inside the front door, surrounded by scores of shamrocks, each bearing the name of customers or families often seen at the restaurant.

A former insurance adjuster, Mellody had tried his hand at several restaurants by the time he spotted a sandwich shop for sale in 1985 at 210 S Kings Ave.

"My heart sank," Jeanette Mellody said. She feared a restaurant would consume all of the couple's time.

Yet she was the one to coin "Beef O'Brady's," a combination of Jim's mother's maiden name and their desire to serve the best steak in town.

To keep God in the picture, they put the Irish Blessing on the menu ("May the road rise to meet you; may the wind be always at your back..."). They found steak a difficult item to master, but through a friend's visit in 1986 learned of a new food craze sweeping the Northeast: blue cheese dressing, a few celery sticks and chicken wings.

Satellite TV became a fixture in 1987, when Brandon High infielder Jody Reed cracked the starting lineup of the Boston Red Sox. Mellody, an avid Cubs fan, now wanted to see the Red Sox play as well.

Mellody worked from 7 a.m. until 11 p.m., seven days a week. But family members say he still found time for them and that he was fiercely loyal to his staff. Once he vaulted the bar to eject a customer who had insulted a waitress.

He learned the customers' names, sometimes giving them nicknames. A customer who got tipsy and forgot to pay his bill became known as Dine & Dash. A regular named Ross was christened Dress for Less.

"It was a form of abuse, really," said Jeanette Mellody, 63. "But they loved it."

They loved the wings, too.

In 1989, Jim Mellody knocked down a wall to add a dining room. In 1990, he added franchises in Bloomingdale and Plant City.

But even as Mellody was benefiting from a nationwide boom in sports bars and a growing list of Beef O'Brady's franchises, a small-town flavor remained at Kings Avenue. Teachers could run tabs over the lean summer months before school resumed. When high school football teams wanted to watch videotapes of Friday night games they had just played, Mellody would toss the coach his keys at closing time and go home.

Teams would lock up the restaurant, then leave the keys over an awning for Mellody to retrieve in the morning.

Mellody began sponsoring youth sports teams, charity golf tournaments, and free meals for honor roll students. Insurance executive Ryan Odiorne, a customer since Beef O'Brady's opened, remembers Mellody as tough but kind.

"Jim was old school," Odiorne said. "It was Jim's way or no way."

He added, "He did a lot of things for people nobody knows anything about."

A seminal moment came in 1998, when Mellody sold his controlling interest in the restaurants to Family Sports Concepts. Under the agreement, Mellody retained 25 percent of all Beef O'Brady's restaurants. Instead of owning the Kings Avenue and several other locations outright, the founder became another franchise owner.

"He kind of did business the old way," current president Nick Vojnovic said. "He had a lot of handshake deals, deals written on the backs of napkins."

There are now 170 Beef O'Brady's restaurants, mostly in the eastern United States, with combined annual profits of $112 million. An ownership group consisting of Jeanette Mellody, her sons Jim Jr. and Sean, son-in-law J.J. Massaro and daughter Melissa makes decisions on the Kings Avenue Beef O'Brady's and 16 others.

The corporate managers have not lost sight of the restaurant's folksy beginnings. Vojnovic said that only "owner-operators" are sought as franchise owners, not absentee landlords. To qualify, prospective owners must live near their store, Vojnovic said.

Mellody died at 63, just 11 days after being diagnosed with liver cancer. His death has left a hole in the community and in the family, who came together earlier this summer for a three-day anniversary celebration.

"I don't want to be maudlin and say, "Oh, nothing means anything now that he's gone,"' Jeanette Mellody said. "Life goes on. But it certainly diminishes this success."

[Last modified August 4, 2005, 08:43:14]