It Used to Be a Piggly Wiggly. Thirteen Months After Opening, It Made the National List.
Bon Appétit has named Junior, the live-fire restaurant at 907 Dickerson Pike, to its 2026 Best New Restaurants list — the magazine's annual national survey of the places that opened recently and mattered. The distance between that sentence and where the building started is the interesting part.
The room was a Piggly Wiggly. It sits on Dickerson Pike, a corridor that spent decades as the part of town people drove through on the way to somewhere else, and which has spent the last several years being discovered, rezoned and argued over. Junior opened there in August 2025. It has been serving dinner for barely more than a year.
Who built it
Junior is chef and owner Philip Krajeck's third Nashville restaurant, and the lineage matters. He opened Rolf and Daughters in Germantown in late 2012, back when Germantown was still explaining itself to people, and Folk in McFerrin Park in 2018. He is a James Beard Award semifinalist. He built Junior alongside chef Brian Mejia and a crew drawn from the other two kitchens — which is to say this was not a debut so much as a third act by people who already knew each other's shorthand.
The cooking leans old rather than clever. There is a live fire in the kitchen and a substantial stack of wood outside for smoking, and the stated philosophy runs toward French technique and serious sauce-making rather than the fermentation-forward style that has dominated ambitious American menus for a decade. In a city whose national reputation is built on honky-tonks and barbecue, a restaurant that stakes its case on finesse and a sauce station is doing something genuinely contrary.
The practical details
It is a small room: 50 seats, with a 16-seat patio in the plans, and a wine list running to about 150 selections. Dinner is served five nights a week, Wednesday through Sunday. Anyone who has watched what a national list does to a 50-seat dining room already knows the assignment — reservations at places like this get materially harder within days of an announcement like this one, and Junior was not an easy table before.
A pattern worth noticing
This is not an isolated flare. Nashville has been collecting this kind of recognition steadily: a Five Diamond rating landed on Eighth Avenue South, and a Gallatin Avenue kitchen made a national best-Mexican list. Three different honors, three different corridors, none of them downtown.
That last detail is the real story. The tourist map of Nashville dining is roughly six blocks long. The list-making map now runs up Dickerson Pike, out Gallatin Avenue and down Eighth — streets where the rent was cheap enough, recently enough, for an ambitious kitchen to take a real swing. Junior is what that looks like when it works: an old grocery store on a road nobody was writing about, and a chef with two proven rooms behind him deciding to open the third one there.
If you are building an eating itinerary around any of this, our Nashville neighborhood guide breaks down where to eat, stay and wander in every district in the city.
