Eat Drink Nashville: Restaurant openings boom in June

Plus, how a struggling local brewery turned things around

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May 28, 2026 5:02pm EDT

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Eat Drink Nashville

NEWS FROM NASHVILLE'S DINING SCENE. CHEERS!

Thu May 28 2026

Mackensy Lunsford | Senior dining reporter / Southern Kitchen editor

@mackensy

Hello Nashville! Mackensy Lunsford, Tennessean senior dining reporter, here with your weekly food news.

Right now, what's got our attention is the sheer volume of restaurants opening this spring and into early summer.

Some of the biggest changes are happening in Wedgewood-Houston, a fast-evolving neighborhood where cornerstones such as Bastion and Jackalope Brewing Co. mingle with more recently opened transplants like Pastis, Hermès and Aba.

In June, famed restaurateur Kevin Boehm will open Momotaro and Alla Vita there, both expansions of wildly popular Chicago restaurants under the umbrella of Boka Restaurant Group. The group will also debut a new concept called Middleman, a cocktail bar that connects the two other concepts on the corner of Houston and Martin streets.

But long before his smash success as a restaurant owner, Boehm opened a restaurant in Nashville that became a key part of its history. Read more about that here.

Here's more of what's going on around town:

•	A 4,530-square-foot restaurant with breakfast bowls, lattes, fresh-squeezed juice, protein-forward smoothies and artisanal pastries has created 100 new jobs in the Cool Springs area. Read more here.
•	In an industry marked by closures and churn, a select few Nashville restaurants and bars are finding success and expanding. Mother's Ruin, the popular New York-founded cocktail bar that opened a Nashville outpost in 2019, is one of them. Here are more recent openings and closures.
•	Just three days before Kane Brown's on Broadway would open to Nashville's crowds of tourists on May 22, dozens of construction crew members busied around on all four levels of the 11,400 square feet that previously housed The Valentine. One man finished off the stage as another hammered in wooden steps leading up to the rooftop. Read more here.
•	When businessman Steve Barone bought Nashville craft brewery Jackalope in 2024, it was a failing business, a reflection of a contracting industry. Here's how he turned it around.
•	Over three months after a fire destroyed parts of the kitchen and roof, East Nashville Asian restaurant Hawkers reopened on Main Street for its first dinner service since February on May 13. Read more here.