Three property owners who have never coordinated a calendar together are all finishing something in Green Hills this September. A volunteer park nonprofit is throwing its tenth annual festival. A national residential developer is opening the first full-service restaurant it has ever built inside one of its own communities. And the mall at the center of the neighborhood is rotating through the busiest run of tenant changes it has seen in years. None of these three groups planned around each other. They just happened to land in the same three-week stretch, and that overlap says something about where Green Hills is right now that a single announcement never could.
The Restaurant Vertis Green Hills Never Had
Vertis Green Hills has been Southern Land Company's flagship mixed-use project on Richard Jones Road for years now, built around apartments and ground-floor retail. What it has never had, until this month, is a restaurant of its own. That changes on September 16, when Lupo Notte opens at 2035 Richard Jones Road as Southern Land Company's first full-service restaurant, a notable admission for a developer that already runs dining rooms at Westhaven Golf Club in Franklin but has never put a stand-alone kitchen inside one of its residential communities before.
The team behind it has real Nashville roots. General Manager David Rehrmann has worked front of house at A Voce in New York and at Modern Italian and Zuzu here in town. Executive Chef Owen Lane grew up on a family farm in Leipers Fork, spent close to three decades in restaurant kitchens, and most recently ran the line as Executive Sous Chef at Pastis before stops at Audrey and June in East Nashville and The Boardroom inside Southern Land's Westhaven community in Franklin. The space itself was designed by Southern Land's in-house team working with Nashville firm HASTINGS Architecture, with a courtyard expansion that HASTINGS Principal David Bailey has described as adding the feel of a lantern glowing into the development at night. Southern Land Company founder Tim Downey has called it simply the next great culinary addition in Green Hills, which is a high bar for a restaurant that hasn't served its first plate yet.
What matters for anyone who already lives near Richard Jones Road is less the hype and more the gap it closes. Vertis has had retail tenants since it opened, but nowhere to sit down for dinner without leaving the property. That's the piece Lupo Notte is built to fill.
The Mall Is Filling In Its Own Gaps at the Same Time
A few blocks away, the Mall at Green Hills has been working through its own version of the same problem: a retail center that has spent the last several years adding fashion brands faster than it's added places to eat. That wave hasn't stopped. Burberry finished relocating within the mall this August. Edikted, a brand new to the Nashville market, is opening this September. Rowan follows later this fall. All three land on top of a spring and summer that already brought SKIMS, Vuori, and Mountain High Outfitters online, plus Oota Egyptian Eatery in late May, which quietly became the mall's own small answer to the same dining question Lupo Notte is now answering on a larger scale a few blocks away.
Put those two threads together and the pattern gets clearer. Green Hills' two biggest commercial properties, a shopping mall run by a national REIT and a mixed-use community run by a national real estate developer, are both spending 2026 adding the thing they were missing: places to actually sit down and eat, not just shop and go home. That's not a coincidence of timing so much as two separate owners reaching the same conclusion about what the neighborhood has been asking for.
Ten Years Later, a Second Full-Service Kitchen
There's a quieter anniversary buried in all of this. Etc, chef Deb Paquette's globally driven restaurant tucked behind the mall on Bedford Avenue, opened its doors in August 2016. That means this restaurant, which has spent a decade as one of the few full-service, chef-driven kitchens in the neighborhood outside of chain casual dining, just passed its tenth year in business right as Lupo Notte prepares to open on the other side of the neighborhood.
Etc isn't going anywhere and Lupo Notte isn't replacing it. But for the first time in a long while, residents on the Richard Jones Road side of Green Hills won't have to cross the neighborhood for a sit-down dinner that isn't a chain. Two different chef-led kitchens, in two different pockets of Green Hills, running at the same time, is genuinely new math for a neighborhood that has spent a decade with essentially one answer to that question.
The Park Festival Closes the Loop
None of this replaces what Green Hills already does well, and the calendar makes that point directly. On Saturday, September 12, the Green Hills Park Festival returns for its tenth year, running from 3 to 9 p.m. at Green Hills Park on Lone Oak Road. It's free, family-friendly, and pet-friendly, with a new Pups & Pints pop-up this year giving dogs their own off-leash market area alongside the usual local vendors and food trucks. The evening wraps with an outdoor screening of Toy Story at dusk. The whole event benefits Friends of Green Hills Park, the all-volunteer nonprofit that has run it since the beginning, and it remains the one night of the year where the neighborhood's oldest tradition and its newest development sit inside the same few blocks of each other.
For residents who'd rather keep their evening centered on what's already worked for years, Hillsboro Pike still has the Bluebird Cafe, the songwriter's room that's been drawing locals and visitors into its acoustic sets since long before Vertis broke ground. Green Hills Grille, reopened in 2015 by restaurateur Steven Smithing after the original two-decade run closed in 2008, is still doing the same casual, full-bar business it always has. New development doesn't erase the old anchors here. It just gives residents more reasons to plan an evening without leaving the neighborhood at all.
What This Actually Means If You Live Here
Stack the dates and the picture is a neighborhood compressing years of separate plans into one calendar month. September 12 is the festival. September 16 is Lupo Notte. Edikted lands sometime in the weeks around both. Rowan follows before the season is out. None of these four things required the others to happen, and none of the three owners behind them were working from the same plan. But if you live within walking distance of Hillsboro Pike or Richard Jones Road, you can spend one September doing a lap of the festival's dog market, a new Italian dinner a few blocks away, and a look at two brand new storefronts at the mall, all without getting on 440 once.
That's the actual news here. Not that a restaurant opened, or that a mall added a store, but that three institutions with nothing to coordinate on all decided, independently, that this was the month to finish what they started.
If any of this changes how you're thinking about staying put, upgrading, or just understanding what your home is worth in a neighborhood that's clearly still building, Andy Lusk is always glad to talk it through. Get your free home valuation whenever you're ready to see where things stand.
