A real estate developer has turned operator, and the back-of-house spec at Lupo Notte is worth a close look. Southern Land Company opened its first full-service restaurant on September 16 inside its Vertis Green Hills mixed-use development at 2035 Richard Jones Road in Nashville, Tennessee — a 3,100-square-foot Italian concept seating approximately 110 guests indoors and 20 more across two outdoor patios.

Kitchen Anchor

The production centerpiece is a state-of-the-art three-deck oven engineered to hold consistent temperature across multiple simultaneous loads — a critical spec for a menu built around 12-inch Neapolitan-style pizzas made with 48-hour fermented dough. Multiple deck zones allow the kitchen team to manage throughput across a 130-cover room without sacrificing crust integrity on pies that range from classic Margherita to Soppressata with Calabrian honey. The open-kitchen layout, anchored by a Chef's Counter with eight seats, puts the equipment line on display — a design choice that raises the stakes for a clean, well-organized mise en place and underscores why operators in upscale-casual cooking equipment builds increasingly specify pass-through visibility as a service differentiator.

Executive Chef Owen Lane leads the kitchen. A Tennessee native with nearly 30 years of industry experience — including stints at Pastis, Audrey, and June in Nashville — Lane is supported by a culinary team that also drew on the expertise of Manlio Melloni, Executive Chef and Food and Beverage Director at Westhaven Golf Club, another Southern Land-operated facility in Franklin, Tennessee. The operator's existing F&B infrastructure there appears to have served as a test bed for the culinary program at Lupo Notte.

Layout and Flow

The floorplan, designed by Southern Land's in-house team in collaboration with Nashville-based HASTINGS Architecture, moves guests through a glass-walled conservatory bar — topped with a quartz bar surface — into the Chef's Counter, then into a main dining room that opens onto patio seating. The glass-walled bar addition was engineered to maximize natural light, a design directive that also carries operational implications: the space functions as a high-visibility bar program zone capable of handling a curated Italian-varietal wine list and craft cocktail service simultaneously with dinner covers.

For kitchen design and buildout consultants working on similar mixed-use hospitality projects, the Lupo Notte buildout illustrates a growing trend: developer-operators who control the real estate are increasingly investing in premium equipment specifications and architecturally integrated open kitchens as a placemaking tool, rather than treating the back-of-house as a cost center. Southern Land's decision to spec a multi-deck commercial oven and open the cook line to guest view reflects operator confidence in both the equipment and the culinary team running it.

Lupo Notte is open daily for dinner, Sunday through Thursday 5 p.m. to 10 p.m. and Friday through Saturday 5 p.m. to 11 p.m., with lunch service and online ordering slated to launch later this fall.

Written by Michael Politz, Author of Guide to Restaurant Success: The Proven Process for Starting Any Restaurant Business From Scratch to Success (ISBN: 978-1-119-66896-1), Founder of Food & Beverage Magazine, the leading online magazine and resource in the industry. Designer of the Bluetooth logo and recognized in Entrepreneur Magazine's "Top 40 Under 40" for founding American Wholesale Floral, Politz is also the Co-founder of the Proof Awards and the CPG Awards and a partner in numerous consumer brands across the food and beverage sector.