The Nashville Scene reported on a small converted house on the north side of McGavock Pike near Riverside Drive that has cycled through four names in recent years. It started as Perk & Cork, a coffeehouse and wine bar. Then it became Fort Louise, a modern American restaurant with a patio built for lingering. Then it was Lou. Now it is Curry Boys BBQ, and the line runs out the door most nights.
Four concepts moving through one small footprint sounds like a warning sign. In most commercial corridors, that kind of turnover means the location is cursed, the rent is wrong, or the foot traffic never showed up. In Riverside Village, it means the opposite. The building keeps changing hands because operators keep wanting in, not because they keep failing out. That distinction is the actual story of what has happened to Inglewood's dining scene over the past eighteen months, and it is easy to miss if you only skim the list of what opened.
Turnover Is Not the Same Thing as Instability
Curry Boys BBQ landed in that building in March of last year. The team behind it made the James Beard Award semifinalist list for Best Chef: Texas in both 2023 and 2024, and they partnered with Adam Lathan, one of the owners of The Gumbo Bros in the Gulch, to open the Inglewood location. Co-owner Sean Wen has described the response as something close to disbelief at how fast the neighborhood absorbed a brisket bowl paired with green curry and Thai green salad.
What makes the story worth telling isn't the menu. It's where the staff eats on their own time. The Curry Boys crew has regular standing orders at Mitchell Delicatessen next door and at Sabell's across the street, and their post-shift hang is Village Pub and Beer Garden, the dog-friendly porch bar that has anchored that corner for years. When a new operator moving into a building with a four-name history immediately starts eating at the neighbors' places and drinking at the neighbors' bar, that tells you the block is not competing with itself. It is filling in around a set of businesses that were already there, not replacing them.
That is the pattern to watch for if you live here, because it predicts which new openings will stick and which will just be the next name on that same door in eighteen months.
What Filled In Around the Curry Boys Building
The turnover at 1304 McGavock Pike is the most visible thread, but it is not the only one. Over the course of last year, the same intersection of Riverside Drive and McGavock Pike absorbed a run of new tenants that, together, turned a handful of longtime holdouts into something closer to a full block.
Golden Prawn #3, a Chinese American takeout concept from chef Chad Newton's group You Are Here, took the small storefront that used to house Castrillo's Pizza. Sho Pizza Bar brought wood-fired, neo-Neapolitan pies to the same stretch, drawing lines out the door and down the block on busy nights. Bite-a-Bit Thai Sushi and Ladybird Taco filled out the sushi and breakfast-taco slots. Dose Coffee holds down the southeast corner, and the Tennessee Cobbler Co. runs a food truck on the corner slinging fruit cobbler à la mode.
Then there's dessert. Hattie Jane's Creamery, the small-batch ice cream maker with roots in Columbia, opened a scoop shop at 1317 McGavock Pike, its first foray into East Nashville after years of looking for the right neighborhood fit. The shop is fully part of the local rotation at this point. When Hattie Jane's ran its annual National Ice Cream for Breakfast Day promotion this past February, the Riverside location was listed alongside the Donelson, Columbia, and Murfreesboro shops as a full participant, not a soft-launch afterthought.
If you're mapping out an evening in the neighborhood right now, the walkable radius around that one intersection covers:
- Curry Boys BBQ for barbecue with a Thai-curry lean
- Golden Prawn #3 for Chinese American takeout
- Sho Pizza Bar for wood-fired pizza
- Bite-a-Bit Thai Sushi and Ladybird Taco for lunch options
- Mitchell Delicatessen and Sabell's, the longtime sandwich and coffee institutions that never left
- Village Pub and Beer Garden for the dog-friendly porch beer
- Hattie Jane's Creamery for the walk after dinner
- Dose Coffee and the Tennessee Cobbler Co. food truck rounding out the corner
That is not a strip of competing restaurants. It is a set of businesses that increasingly treat each other as suppliers, regulars, and after-hours company.
A Different Kind of Bet Is Being Placed on Gallatin Pike
While Riverside Village filled in one independent chef at a time, a different kind of growth has been landing a few blocks over on Gallatin Pike proper, and the contrast is worth sitting with.
Nick the Greek opened its second Nashville location at 3701 Gallatin Pike in January, following its debut downtown at Nashville Yards. The Inglewood restaurant is owned and operated by Jordan Nari of Nashville Mediterranean, LLC, who holds the rights to develop six more locations across Greater Nashville and Chattanooga over the next four years. That is not a chef betting on one building. That is a franchise operator using Inglewood as the second stop in a rollout plan, which means someone ran the numbers on this stretch of Gallatin Pike and decided it could support repeatable growth, not just a single good year.
Set that next to Golden Prawn's Chad Newton, Curry Boys' James Beard semifinalists, or Hattie Jane's Claire Crowell spending years hunting for the right neighborhood before landing here, and you get two different kinds of evidence pointing at the same conclusion. Independent operators are choosing Inglewood because they want to be here. A national franchise is choosing it because the data already says the customers are here. When both signals show up on the same half mile of road within the same year, that is a stronger case for a neighborhood's staying power than either one alone.
The Layer in Between
A third layer has started filling the space between those two, one block over on Riverside Drive itself. Open Invite, a collaborative retail house from Allison Holley of Apple & Oak and Anna Schowe of Whiskey Water, opened at 2215 Riverside Drive as a shared retail and gathering space. Nearby, Lost and Found brought stacked shipping containers, permanently parked food trucks, and a dedicated lawn to the neighborhood, with a patio bar called Fortunate Sun anchoring the drink side. Co-owner Kelly Boutwell has said the goal was for the space to work as a neighborhood gathering place first, and the tenant list backs that up: every partner involved either lives in Inglewood or already runs a business there.
There's a quieter version of the same signal a few miles away. When Soy Cubano, a longtime East Nashville favorite, opened a satellite location in The Nations on the west side this year, it kept its original East Nashville spot running the whole time. That is the same signal as the Curry Boys building, just running in the other direction. Businesses that are struggling contract. Businesses that are working expand without giving up what they already have.
There is more coming. Crazy Gnome Brewery, currently on Main Street, is reportedly prepping an Inglewood-area property for its next phase, and a rooftop cocktail bar called The Greenwood is expected to land nearby with food service. Neither has a firm opening date yet, but the pattern of the last eighteen months suggests they will slot into the same rhythm: new operators showing up and quickly acting like they've always been here.
What This Means If You Already Live Here
The lesson in that four-name building on McGavock Pike isn't really about restaurants. It's about how to read change in a neighborhood you already call home. Turnover at a single address can look like instability from the outside. On the inside, if the businesses around it keep sending each other customers and keep showing up at each other's bars after close, that address isn't failing. It's just popular enough that everyone wants a turn.
If you've been meaning to check out what's new around Riverside Village or along Gallatin Pike, this is the season to do it. And if watching your own neighborhood fill in this fast has you wondering what it's done to your home's value, Christian Wilson Homes can walk you through what's actually happening on your specific block, not just the headline numbers.
