On Wednesday night, the courtyard at Vertis Green Hills gets a second restaurant. Lupo Notte, an Italian concept from Southern Land Company with house-made pasta and wood-fired pizza, opens at 2035 Richard Jones Road on September 16. It joins Char, the steakhouse that has anchored that same courtyard since September 2018, which means the building now has two full-service restaurants sharing one address for the first time in its history.
That is not really the story, though. The story is that if you have been keeping a mental map of where to eat in Green Hills this year, you have probably noticed it keeps redrawing itself around the same two properties, and the mall at the center of the neighborhood is barely on it.
The Building That Grew a Second Restaurant
Char has been Green Hills' steakhouse of record for eight years, a Southern-style dining room from 4 Top Hospitality, the same group behind Etch and Amerigo, with a piano bar that runs nightly and a main room that seats 140. It has had the Vertis courtyard to itself the entire time.
Lupo Notte changes that math. The kitchen is run by Executive Chef Owen Lane, a Tennessee native who grew up on a family farm in Leipers Fork and has spent nearly thirty years in restaurants, most recently as Executive Sous Chef at Pastis, with stops at Audrey and June in East Nashville and The Boardroom in Franklin. General Manager David Rehrmann came from A Voce in New York and from Modern Italian and Zuzu here in Nashville. This is not a satellite concept run by a regional group. It is Southern Land Company's own first full-service restaurant, built and staffed with the same intention the company applies to Vertis itself.
Put those two restaurants in one building and you get a small preview of a pattern that shows up everywhere else in the neighborhood this year: when a new restaurant wants to open in Green Hills, it is choosing Vertis or it is choosing Hill Center, and it is very rarely choosing the mall.
The Mall Stopped Building Restaurants
Walk the tenant list at The Mall at Green Hills over the past several months and a theme emerges that has nothing to do with food. Coach opened in mid-May. Oota, an Egyptian and Mediterranean eatery serving falafel, hawawshi, and baba ghanouj, followed in late May, and it is the exception that proves the rule since it is the one true restaurant on this list. Vuori arrived in June. Mountain High Outfitters followed in July. Burberry relocated within the mall in August, which is worth knowing if you went looking for its old storefront recently and came up empty. Luxury arrivals over the same stretch have included SKIMS, Dolce & Gabbana, Christian Louboutin, Alo Yoga, and Hollister.
That is a fashion calendar, not a dining guide. If you have been waiting for a new sit-down dinner option to open inside the mall itself, this construction cycle was never built to give you one.
| Property | What opened or arrived in 2026 | What it's building toward |
|---|---|---|
| The Mall at Green Hills | Coach, Oota, Vuori, Mountain High Outfitters, Burberry (relocated), SKIMS, Dolce & Gabbana, Christian Louboutin, Alo Yoga, Hollister | Retail and luxury shopping |
| Vertis Green Hills | Lupo Notte (Sept. 16), joining Char | A two-restaurant dining courtyard |
| Hill Center Green Hills | Continued additions to an existing lineup | An open-air retail and casual dining corridor |
Where Hill Center Fits In
Across Hillsboro Pike from the mall, Hill Center has been building a different kind of lineup for a while now, one that Nashville Scene readers have voted the city's best shopping center. Its roster includes West Elm, Anthropologie, Shake Shack, and CAVA, a mix of home goods and fast-casual dining that has made it the second half of Green Hills' new restaurant story even though almost none of its recent additions came with a press release attached.
A third address worth knowing if you eat out in this neighborhood regularly sits a few blocks off the main corridor at Bedford Commons: etc., chef Deb Paquette's second restaurant after her original Etch downtown. It is open for lunch and dinner Monday through Friday and dinner on Saturday, with a smaller and more adventurous menu than Char's steakhouse formality. It sits far enough from both the mall and Vertis that most people treat it as its own destination rather than an extension of either cluster.
Line those three properties up and the pattern holds. The mall is optimizing for shopping. Vertis and Hill Center are absorbing nearly all of the neighborhood's new restaurant energy. Each answers to a different landlord and a different strategy, and none of them are coordinating with each other, but the net effect is a Green Hills where where you shop and where you eat are increasingly two separate walks.
The Renovation Everyone's Still Waiting On
The mall's retail focus this year is tied to something bigger. In February, Simon Property Group announced a $250 million investment split across three of its properties, including The Mall at Green Hills, following its full buyout of former co-owner Taubman Realty Group in November 2025. The plan calls for a complete exterior transformation: two-story flagship entrances, jewel-box spaces built for luxury boutiques, and new landscaping designed to reposition the mall as what Simon has called Nashville's definitive retail destination.
By June, shoppers were still waiting to hear what that actually means for them day to day. In a WSMV report from that month, mall visitors were far more focused on a problem the announcement hadn't addressed.
"It's hard. It's a nightmare. It's really bad."
That was one shopper's read on mall parking, and another put it more simply: she now picks which days she shops based on how bad she expects the lot to be. Mall General Manager Norah Buikstra, who has worked there for 25 years, told WSMV the property has evolved constantly over that time and pointed out that roughly 70 percent of the mall's parking actually sits inside its parking decks, even though most visitors head straight for surface lots first. She did not say whether the renovation would add parking, only that there was more to come.
As of that report, Simon had not given a construction start date. If you shop at the mall regularly, that is the piece worth tracking. The retail transformation is coming. What it does to parking during construction was still unanswered as of that reporting, and neither the ownership group nor mall management had committed to specifics at the time.
What This Actually Means If You Live Here
None of this changes what Green Hills is. It is still the neighborhood where you can walk from a Tudor-style house or a newer infill build to Trader Joe's, Whole Foods, and a dozen restaurants without getting in a car. But the shape of that walk is shifting. The mall is becoming a purer shopping trip. Dinner has migrated across the street and around the corner to Vertis and Hill Center, and a Wednesday night reservation at Lupo Notte now sits in the same courtyard as an eight-year-old steakhouse rather than standing alone.
If you already live here, that is useful to know before you plan your evening. If you are watching this neighborhood from the outside and wondering what its retail and dining core actually looks like day to day, this is it: three properties, three separate timelines, and a restaurant map that increasingly points away from the building most people still think of as the neighborhood's center.
Knowing which corner of Green Hills is actually building what, and why, is the kind of detail that only shows up when you are paying attention to a market block by block rather than reading a headline. That is the same lens Suzanne McMillan brings to every Green Hills listing and every buyer conversation in this neighborhood. If you are curious what any of this means for your own street or your own home's position in this market, reach out and start the conversation.
