If you drive past Vertis Green Hills today, you will see the awning going up for Lupo Notte, the Italian restaurant that opens its doors this evening at 2035 Richard Jones Road. That is not a small addition to the neighborhood's dining scene. It is the second full-service restaurant to land inside the same building in under a decade, and it confirms something residents have probably sensed without being able to name: Green Hills has quietly split into two different destinations that used to be one.
For years, the Mall at Green Hills was the answer to both questions, where do I shop and where do I eat. That is no longer true, and the reason is not a mystery. It shows up in what each address has been building toward all year.
The Corridor Two Doors From the Mall
Char has anchored the ground floor at Vertis since it opened on September 17, 2018. It is a Southern-style steakhouse from 4 Top Hospitality, the same group behind Etch and Amerigo downtown, with a piano bar that runs every night and a main dining room that seats 140. For eight years it was the only sit-down restaurant in the building.
That changes tonight. Lupo Notte is Southern Land Company's first full-service restaurant of its own, built inside the same courtyard as Char, and it is not a small operation. Executive Chef Owen Lane grew up on a family farm in Leipers Fork and spent nearly three decades in restaurant kitchens before this, 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 has run rooms at A Voce in New York and at Modern Italian and Zuzu here in Nashville. The menu leans on house-made pasta, wood-fired pizza and locally sourced ingredients, served in a space with an expanded courtyard that architecture firm HASTINGS designed to glow at night.
Put Char and Lupo Notte in the same building and you have two full-service kitchens sharing one address, one Southern-style steakhouse and one Italian dining room, both drawing from outside Nashville's most recognized kitchens for their leadership. That is not a coincidence of leasing. It is a deliberate bet that Green Hills wants more than one reason to book a table on Richard Jones Road.
What the Mall Is Actually Building
Meanwhile, a five-minute walk away, the Mall at Green Hills has spent 2026 adding stores, not restaurants. Coach opened in mid-May. Oota Egyptian Eatery, a fast-casual counter serving falafel, hawawshi and baba ghanouj, followed in late May. Vuori arrived in June, and Burberry relocated to a new spot within the mall in August. None of these are sit-down dining additions. They are fashion and fast-casual, and that pattern lines up with what Simon has said about its plans for the property.
The redevelopment Simon has announced for the roughly 1,053,000-square-foot mall, which is anchored by Nordstrom, Dillard's and Macy's and holds more than 100 stores and restaurants, centers entirely on the shopping experience. The company has described grand two-story flagship entrances and what it calls jewel-box spaces sized for luxury boutiques, plus new landscaping around the arrival points. As of a recent construction update, the exterior work still had no public start date, but the tenant announcements the company promised have already started arriving in the form of the store list above.
Here is the shape of it: the mall is optimizing for the walk from your car to a boutique door. Vertis is optimizing for the two hours you spend at a table. If you have found yourself shopping at the mall and then driving somewhere else for dinner this year, that is not an accident of scheduling. It is two different landlords making two different bets on what Green Hills residents will pay for.
The Quiet Third Address
There is a third piece of this that most people miss because it never announced itself with a press release. Hill Center, the open-air shopping center that Nashville Scene readers voted the city's best, added Rejuvenation, the lighting and home furnishings retailer, back in August 2025. It has kept adding to its roster on a slower, quieter timeline ever since, without the kind of square-footage announcements that accompany a mall redevelopment.
And a short distance from both clusters sits Bedford Commons, home to etc., chef Deb Paquette's second restaurant after her original Etch downtown. It runs a smaller, more adventurous menu than Char's steakhouse formality, open for lunch and dinner Monday through Friday and dinner on Saturday. Because it sits apart from both the mall and Vertis, most regulars treat it as its own trip rather than a stop on the way to somewhere else.
Line up all three properties and the split becomes obvious. The mall is chasing retail. Vertis and Hill Center are absorbing almost all of the neighborhood's new restaurant energy between them. If you have been waiting for a sit-down dinner option to open inside the mall itself, this year's construction cycle is not built to give you one.
The Wellness Layer Nobody's Talking About
Vertis has also been filling out a second floor that has nothing to do with food. The Collection at Vertis brought in four health and wellness tenants this August and early September: Spoke & Weal, Core Power Yoga, The Set Studio and SculptHouse. The fifth piece, Paint Nail Bar, a salon chain built around elevated safety and sterilization standards, is set to open later this fall. Combined with two restaurants and a rooftop of luxury apartments above it all, Vertis is turning into something closer to a self-contained evening than a single stop.
Two Dates for Your Calendar
If you want to see the neighborhood at its most itself this season, two dates matter more than any store opening.
- Green Hills Park Festival, held last weekend at Green Hills Park on Lone Oak Road, marked its tenth year with live music, more than 25 local makers selling ceramics, woodwork and textiles, food trucks, a Bearded Iris Brewing Co beer and wine setup, a Pups & Pints area for dogs, and an outdoor screening of Toy Story at dusk.
- Fall Fun Fest returns to the Mall at Green Hills on October 10, from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m., set up on the lower level out front of Dillard's with games, crafts, face painting and a selfie station for families.
If you want a lower-key evening, the Bluebird Cafe on Hillsboro Pike keeps its usual rotation of songwriter rounds running through the fall, which remains one of the few things in the neighborhood that has not changed shape this year.
What This Means for Your Week
None of this requires you to do anything differently tomorrow, but it does explain something you may have already noticed without quite placing it. A trip to the mall right now is a shopping trip. A dinner reservation is a Vertis or Hill Center trip. Those used to be the same errand, and this year they stopped being one.
For residents who have lived here through the mall's earlier phases, that split is worth watching. It tells you where the next round of investment is likely to land, and it tells you that if you are hoping for a new full-service restaurant to open at the mall itself anytime soon, the current construction plans are not aimed at giving you one.
We live and work in Green Hills too, and we like knowing this stretch of Hillsboro Pike well enough to notice when its shape changes. If you are curious about what any of this means for your own address in the neighborhood, or you just want to talk through what is opening next, Oak Leaf Real Estate would love to hear from you. Let's grab some coffee and start your real estate journey.
