New Homeowners Stroll a Line When Shopping for Outdated Nashville Favorites | Options

Opening an unbiased restaurant is difficult. Shopping for a well-liked, beloved restaurant and preserving it going? That’s one other problem fully. 

Restaurateurs who achieve this study shortly that it’s a balancing act. There’s the necessity and want to replace and enhance an acquired enterprise, and there are the wants and wishes of devoted clients who really feel some possession of the eating places they’ve been frequenting for many years. Typically, these units of wants and wishes are at odds.

David Parker and Sean Lyons are two restaurant house owners engaged on this balancing act, becoming a member of the likes of Bret Tuck, who purchased Brown’s Diner, and Will Spiva, who has taken the reins at Caffé Nonna. Initially of the yr, Parker and his spouse Sally purchased Calypso Cafe from its founders, Allison and Phil Brooks. Lyons joined Up Hospitality Companions in 2019 — the corporate had bought Germantown Café (a favourite restaurant of Lyons) in 2016, after which Up Hospitality acquired Sylvan Park’s Park Cafe on the finish of 2023.

Parker is Calypso founder Allison Brooks’ cousin, so Parker grew up consuming at Calypso Cafe and rattles off favourite dishes for various intervals of his life — from favoring the Lucayan salad when consuming a high-protein weight loss program whereas figuring out as a teen to ordering beans-and-three throughout a interval when he eschewed meat. “After I was in highschool, I most likely ate there two to 3 occasions per week,” Parker says. Whereas he didn’t have expertise working within the restaurant business, he knew the enterprise from watching his cousins, and he knew gross sales from his earlier profession in software program, so he felt prepared for the problem when the chance introduced itself.

Since shopping for the place, Parker has heard from loads of clients. The overwhelming variety of feedback fall into the class “We wish extra Calypso.” People need the Charlotte Avenue location — which at the moment is Calypso’s foremost catering kitchen, however not open to the general public — to reopen as a restaurant. People need longer hours in Berry Hill. And other people actually need the East Nashville and Belle Meade places to reopen. Parker is grateful that individuals love Calypso, think about him and wish extra. However he’s additionally cautious about increasing too quick or altering an excessive amount of too quickly. He desires Calypso to stay a wholesome, reasonably priced lunch choice (and dinner quickly, he guarantees) that may ship on the identical time-honored recipes the Brookses have been making since 1989. And he desires to have the ability to get meals to diners quick, as a result of that’s one thing individuals have come to count on from Calypso — notably at lunch, when persons are watching the clock.

Up Hospitality’s Lyons additionally is aware of what it’s like to listen to from loyal clients. Germantown Café was based in 2003 by Jay Luther and Chris Lowry. Jeffrey Martin, Up Hospitality Companions’ govt chef, labored at Germantown Café and was educated by Luther and Lowry. Many Nashvillians really feel nostalgic about Germantown Café. They really feel nostalgic about Luther and Lowry, who’ve each handed away (Luther in 2012 and Lowry in 2024). They really feel nostalgia about when the restaurant was an outlier in Germantown, as one of many first higher-end sitdown eating places within the neighborhood, with one thing that appears not possible right this moment — a transparent, open view of the downtown skyline from an image window.

Lyons and the Up Hospitality Companions group recognize that. They had been followers too. They work to coach their workers about these bonds, together with hanging photographs of Luther and Lowry — pictured not simply at Germantown Café, however within the firm’s different eating places. And other people really feel nostalgic in regards to the meals. Specifically, three dishes: the plum pork, the French onion soup and the coconut curry salmon. Lyons says that once they evaluated the menu, they deliberately stored probably the most steadily ordered dishes whereas eradicating others. However as a result of they left these bestsellers, the notion is that they didn’t change the menu in any respect, regardless that greater than 40 % is completely different. (In distinction, the menu at Park Cafe is actually unchanged, however public notion, the house owners say, is that it has been overhauled.) Lyons believes the truth that Germantown Café was closed for greater than two years through the pandemic has contributed to the assist from present clients. They needed the restaurant to reopen, even when that meant there could be a couple of modifications.

Whereas appreciative of all that goodwill, Lyons and Up Hospitality Companions don’t wish to be within the enterprise of nostalgia. They need a restaurant that may develop, and so they wish to construct a restaurant firm that provides alternatives for profession enlargement for workers. An unbiased, one-location restaurant doesn’t supply somebody working within the kitchen many alternatives, Lyons says, and will contribute to a number of the hospitality business’s staffing challenges. One other acquisition appeared like a technique to try this.

Then they realized that Willy Thomas was trying to retire from Park Cafe. “It was a match made in heaven,” Lyons says. Germantown Café and Park Cafe had been comparable kinds of eating places with comparable menus and comparable neighborhood vibes. And Thomas had a Nashville following, having labored within the kitchens on the Hermitage Resort and at Pomodoro East. Within the meantime, that they had already began to open Karrington Rowe in Brentwood, a restaurant in the identical vein. Karrington Rowe options one of the best of each eating places’ bestsellers, with some tweaks. For instance, each eating places have a great salmon vendor, so at Karrington Rowe the salmon dish is a crispy salmon, and the Germantown Café-inspired dish has change into a coconut curry shrimp. 

Neither the Germantown Café identify nor the Park Cafe identify was eligible for trademarking. (And moreover, it might be complicated to have Germantown Cafés in different neighborhoods. It’s already complicated sufficient that individuals assume they serve German meals, Lyons says.) So future eating places will likely be beneath the Karrington Rowe moniker. The corporate additionally operates Fancy Sandy’s, a to-go breakfast sandwich store operated from a window subsequent to Germantown Café. Germantown Café’s lengthy historical past as a brunch spot made it a pure for providing breakfast to go, Lyons says. He can see the opportunity of opening Fancy Sandy’s sandwich spots elsewhere.

Parker is circumspect in regards to the actual timeline for his Calypso Cafe enlargement. However he says Berry Hill will broaden hours to incorporate dinner, after which he’ll flip his consideration to reopening Charlotte “as quick as potential in an affordable method.” (The web site lists it as “quickly closed.”) His plans for each places embrace higher use of out of doors house, together with creating family-friendly areas to hang around with the children, and having beer on draft. (Beer is at the moment in bottles.) If the fitting location popped up in East Nashville, he’d think about it — the Brookses nonetheless personal the previous East Nashville Calypso location, which is at the moment leased to Velvet Taco.

For each Parker and Lyons, the trick is — as it’s for therefore many on the town — balancing the wants of Outdated Nashville and New Nashville.

“We definitely wish to preserve all these individuals completely satisfied who’re used to consuming Calypso and are nostalgic for Calypso,” Parker says. “However there are loads of new individuals in Nashville too, and I’m hoping to get the phrase out and ensure these individuals reap the benefits of it and like it as a lot as the remainder of us at all times have.”