Ray's Place has been on East Main Street since the 1970s, which in Kent terms makes it an institution. It's an unpretentious dive bar — cold beer, no frills, no pretension — that has survived precisely because it doesn't try to be anything other than what it is. Students love it, alumni make a point of returning to it, and the staff have largely seen it all.
There is nothing complicated about Ray's: you show up, you order a beer, you sit with whoever you came with. That's the point. In a town shaped by a university, a bar that has outlasted multiple generations of students earns its reputation.