A Three-Deck Pizza Oven, a Chef Out of Pastis, and a Wednesday in September
Green Hills is not short of places to eat, which makes the ones that arrive with something to prove more interesting than the ones that simply arrive. Lupo Notte opens Wednesday, September 16, at 2035 Richard Jones Road, inside Vertis Green Hills, and it comes with an unusual pedigree: it is the first full-service restaurant ever opened by Southern Land Company, a Nashville firm whose day job is building places, not running them.
That is a genuinely different starting point. Most restaurants are opened by restaurant people who then go find a room. This one was opened by the people who built the room.
Who is actually cooking
The kitchen is the part that will settle whether this works, and the hire there is a serious one. Owen Lane takes the executive chef role, arriving most recently from Pastis in Nashville. He is a Tennessee native with close to thirty years in restaurants and hospitality — long enough to have opinions, and long enough to have learned which ones to keep to himself on a Friday night.
The menu was developed in collaboration with Chef Manlio Melloni of Westhaven Golf Club, and David Rehrmann runs the front of house as general manager. It is a small detail, but naming a general manager in an opening announcement is a decent sign. Restaurants that intend to be hospitable tend to think about the dining room as early as the kitchen.
What is on it
The framing is upscale Italian, which is a phrase that can mean almost anything, so the specifics matter more than the label.
Pasta is made in house. Pizzas run twelve inches and come out of a three-deck oven — a piece of equipment that tells you the pizza is not an afterthought bolted onto an Italian menu, because nobody installs a three-deck oven to make six pizzas a night. There are shareable plates including a wagyu beef carpaccio and the house's own Lupo meatballs, entrees built around fresh seafood, and a rotation of daily specials leaning on locally sourced ingredients.
The room itself is pitched as light-filled and contemporary, which, given who developed the building, is probably the one claim in the whole announcement that is safe to take at face value.
Where it lands in the neighborhood
Green Hills has spent the last several years turning into a legitimate dining destination rather than a place you ate because you were already there shopping. Vertis Green Hills is part of that shift — a mixed-use project of the sort that only works if the ground floor gives people a reason to linger after the stores close.
A full-service Italian restaurant with a real chef is exactly the kind of anchor that does that. Whether it becomes a neighborhood regular or a special-occasion room is the open question, and twelve-inch pizzas suggest the owners would like it to be both.
If you are planning around it
Opening night is a Wednesday, which is a deliberate choice — it lets a kitchen find its rhythm before the first real weekend. If you would rather let them work out the kinks, give it a week.
In the meantime, Nashville's dining year has already produced plenty worth eating through. Our look at the city's turn on the national best-new-restaurants list is a good place to start, and if you are building a genuinely special evening, the city's newest Five Diamond dining room is the high end of the scale.
