For most of the last decade, if you wanted a sit-down dinner in Green Hills, the mall was where you went. North Italia for handmade pasta, a long lunch that turned into an early dinner, maybe drinks after at one of the anchor stores' café counters. That habit is ending this year, and not by accident.
The Mall at Green Hills is in the middle of a major renovation focused on its exterior and its retail lineup. Two nearby buildings took on most of the neighborhood's new dining this year, each on its own timeline.
The Mall's Renovation Centers on Retail
Simon Property Group took full control of The Mall at Green Hills after completing its buyout of the remaining stake from Taubman Realty Group on November 3, 2025. Three months later, in February 2026, Simon announced a redevelopment described as an investment of "over $250 million," a figure that covers three centers together, Green Hills alongside Cherry Creek Shopping Center in Denver and International Plaza in Tampa, not Green Hills alone. Construction on the Green Hills work was expected to begin sometime in 2026, focused on the exterior and arrival experience: two-story flagship entrances, smaller "jewel-box" spaces built for luxury boutiques, and new landscaping around the building's face.
What arrived at street level this year tells the same story in miniature. The mall's 2026 tenant list read like a fashion calendar:
- Coach opened in mid-May
- Oota Egyptian Eatery followed in late May, a counter-service concept serving falafel, hawawshi, and baba ghanoush
- Vuori arrived in June
- Mountain High Outfitters in July
- Burberry relocated to a new spot within the mall in August
None of that is a full-service restaurant. Oota is the closest thing to a food addition, and it's built for quick service, not a table and a wine list. The mall's own renovation, footprint unchanged, tenants apparel and lifestyle brands almost across the board, is optimizing for browsing and buying, not staying for a meal. The announced work centers on shopping, and the new full-service dining has opened next door.
The Restaurant Energy Went Two Doors Down Instead
Walk across Hillsboro Pike to Vertis Green Hills, the mixed-use tower Southern Land Company built at the corner of Hillsboro Pike and Richard Jones Road, and the picture flips completely. Char, the Southern-style steakhouse from 4 Top Hospitality, the same group behind Etch and Amerigo, has anchored the building's ground floor since it opened there on September 17, 2018. It seats 140 in the main dining room and runs a piano bar nightly, the kind of place that's been a known quantity in Green Hills for going on eight years.
On September 16, 2026, it got company. Lupo Notte opened in the same courtyard, Southern Land Company's first full-service, in-house restaurant concept, an Italian menu built around house-made pasta and wood-fired pizza. The kitchen belongs to Executive Chef Owen Lane, a Tennessee native who grew up on a family farm in Leiper's Fork and spent time at Pastis, Audrey, June in East Nashville, and The Boardroom at Southern Land's Westhaven community in Franklin before landing here. General Manager David Rehrmann brings a different résumé, restaurant openings and operations at A Voce in New York City and stints at Modern Italian and Zuzu in Nashville. The space itself was designed by HASTINGS Architecture, with a courtyard expansion the firm describes as adding the feel of a glowing lantern at night.
That gives Vertis two full-service restaurants sharing one courtyard for the first time since the building opened. The mall optimized for retail. Vertis absorbed the dining.
Hill Center Grew Without Announcing Anything
The third piece of this puzzle sits across Hillsboro Pike in the other direction. Hill Center Green Hills is an open-air lifestyle center, the kind with parking right outside each storefront instead of a shared interior corridor, and Nashville Scene readers have voted it the city's best shopping center. Its recent growth has come without the press releases that accompanied the mall's redevelopment or Vertis's restaurant openings. Rejuvenation, the Portland-based lighting and home furnishings retailer, debuted there in August 2025. British fashion retailer Boden picked Hill Center for its own Nashville arrival not long after.
Put the three properties side by side and the pattern is hard to miss. Three different landlords, three different strategies, three different calendars, and together they've divided Green Hills into a retail half and a dining-and-lifestyle half without anyone drawing a formal line.
The Fourth Address People Forget
There's a fourth spot worth knowing if you eat out in Green Hills with any regularity, and it belongs to neither cluster. Bedford Commons is home to etc., chef Deb Paquette's second restaurant after her longtime Etch downtown, open for lunch and dinner Monday through Friday and dinner on Saturday. The menu is smaller and more adventurous than Char's steakhouse formality, and the address sits far enough from both the mall and Vertis that most regulars treat it as its own destination rather than an extension of either corridor.
The Neighborhood Runs a Fifth Calendar Too
None of this touches the part of Green Hills that doesn't answer to a landlord at all. The annual Green Hills Park Festival, a free neighborhood event built around live music and local makers, ran on September 12, 2026, at Green Hills Park, with an outdoor screening of Toy Story at dusk, a beer and wine bar pouring Bearded Iris Brewing Co, lawn games, food trucks, and a dog-friendly Pups & Pints area. More than 25 local makers set up that day selling ceramics, woodwork, jewelry, textiles, candles, art, tea, and packaged treats.
That festival didn't need Simon's construction schedule, Southern Land's restaurant plans, or Hill Center's tenant announcements to happen. It runs on its own clock, the same weekend every September, regardless of what's under renovation across the street.
What This Actually Means Right Now
If you live in Green Hills, the practical takeaway is straightforward. The mall's construction cycle is going to keep sharpening what it already does well, apparel, accessories, the kind of national retail brands that want a flagship presence. For a sit-down dinner, it's a short walk to Vertis, where Char and Lupo Notte now share a courtyard, or to Bedford Commons, where etc. runs its own quieter operation.
Three buildings, three timelines, one neighborhood. None of them are waiting on each other, and none of them needed to.
Green Hills keeps changing in ways that don't show up on a single press release, and that's exactly the kind of detail worth having someone track for you. If you're weighing a move into this pocket of Nashville, or you already live here and want a read on how these shifts affect what your street is worth, Lisa Landyn and The Luxe Collective are glad to walk through it with you. Schedule a free consultation whenever you're ready.
