Drive down West Main Street on a Friday night and you'll idle behind a line of cars waiting for the drive-thru at Lebanon's brand-new In-N-Out Burger, the first one in Tennessee. Cut over three minutes later to the square, park near the courthouse, and you're suddenly somewhere else entirely: string lights, a hostess stand at Olivia Cocktail & Oyster Bar, a couple splitting oysters at a table for two. Same city, same night, two completely different rhythms of growth. One side of town is filling in restaurant by restaurant, slowly, almost stubbornly. The other side is sprouting new signage every few months like it's on a schedule.
That difference isn't atmosphere. It's a structural fact about how each part of Lebanon gets built, and once you see it, you understand why the square still has an empty storefront waiting on a restaurant that was announced back in 2022, while a stretch of Hartmann Drive and Lebanon Road went from vacant acreage to a hotel construction site in about a year.
The square is filling in one lease at a time
Nick and Audra Guidry opened Slow Hand Coffee + Bakehouse on South Greenwood Street first, then followed it with Olivia Cocktail & Oyster Bar at 112 E. Main Street, which opened its doors on November 23, 2024. Olivia pours beer from Cedar City Brewing Company, which also sits on the historic square, and serves raw oysters and small plates in a room the Guidrys carved out of two older storefronts by tearing down the dividing wall and running a steel beam down the middle to hold up the second floor.
A few doors down, Lebanon Public House opened at 107 W. Main Street in October 2024, pouring wine, cocktails, and beer from several Middle Tennessee breweries in a small, intentionally casual room.
Then there's Juniper, the Guidrys' third Lebanon concept and the one that's been the hardest to pull off. It was announced back in October 2022 with an early-2023 opening target. Once the crew got into the two-story building, they found a roof that needed full replacement and structural issues serious enough to require engineers before anyone could touch drywall. As of the most recent reporting on the project, Juniper still hadn't opened, nearly four years after it was first announced.
That's the pattern downtown. Every new restaurant on the square is squeezed into a building that was built for something else a century ago, and every one of them runs into some version of what happened to Juniper: old roofs, hidden structural problems, permitting that takes as long as it takes. The supply of storefronts is fixed. Growth on the square happens at the speed of renovation, not the speed of demand.
The corridor is filling in by the acre
A few miles away, growth works on a completely different clock, because it isn't bound by old buildings at all. It's bound by how fast the city can run utilities to raw land, and once that happens, national chains move in fast.
In-N-Out Burger opened its first Tennessee location at 915 S. Hartmann Drive, part of a $125.5 million investment the company is making across Middle Tennessee that also includes an eastern regional headquarters expected to open in October 2026. The Lebanon store employs about 75 people at a $17.50 starting wage and had lines out the door on opening day.
Aubrey's opened at 1648 W. Main Street on April 28, 2025, and the detail that matters here isn't the fried chicken and gumbo on the menu. It's that Aubrey's is the first full-service, newly constructed sit-down restaurant Lebanon has seen since 2012. The company put $8.9 million into the 7,636-square-foot building, and the city backed the project with a $1.5 million incentive package paid out in three installments tied to permitting, opening, and the one-year anniversary. Mayor Rick Bell had been trying to land a restaurant like this since he first ran for office, telling the crowd at the ribbon cutting that people had been asking him for more places to eat for five years running.
Starbucks' third Lebanon location was slated to open on West Main, wedged between Dairy Queen and Dollar Tree, the kind of pad-site infill that simply isn't available downtown because there's no downtown equivalent of a Dollar Tree parking lot.
None of that speed is an accident. Lebanon's Barton Village, a 350-acre development projected to add close to 2,000 homes and 350,000 square feet of retail, commercial, and office space, needed a new sewer line before any of it could get built. Half of that sewer project was paid for by developers and half by the city, using American Rescue Plan Act funds along with $2.5 million in city utility money. Once that infrastructure went in, Del Webb broke ground on a 240-acre active-adult community inside Barton Village and opened it to the public in April 2025, and Jonathan's Grille was announced as one of the first dining tenants planned for the northwest corner of Hartmann Drive and Barton Village Boulevard.
A similar dynamic is playing out at The Plaza at Five Oaks, a $100 million-plus project on 16.5 acres at Five Oaks Boulevard and Lebanon Road. Its first phase, a Cobblestone hotel, broke ground in 2025, and the plan calls for more than 55,000 square feet of retail and restaurant space across nine buildings, including up to 5,700 square feet set aside specifically for sit-down and fast-casual restaurants.
What's actually open right now versus what's still a sign in the ground
| Where | Business | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Historic square | Olivia Cocktail & Oyster Bar | Open since November 2024 |
| Historic square | Lebanon Public House | Open since October 2024 |
| Historic square | Slow Hand Coffee + Bakehouse | Open, the concept that started it all |
| Historic square | Juniper | Still not open as of the most recent reporting, announced in 2022 |
| S. Hartmann Drive | In-N-Out Burger | Open, Tennessee's first location |
| West Main corridor | Aubrey's | Open since April 2025 |
| West Main corridor | Starbucks (third location) | Slated to open in early 2025 |
| Highway 109 | East Nashville Beer Works (second location) | Open |
| Barton Village | Jonathan's Grille | Announced, not yet open as of the most recent update |
| Highway 109 | Chipotle | Announced, not yet open as of the most recent update |
| Franklin Road | Tim Horton's | Announced, not yet open as of the most recent update |
| Franklin Road | The Goat | Announced, not yet open as of the most recent update |
| Five Oaks Plaza | Restaurant space, up to 5,700 sq ft | First-phase hotel broke ground in 2025 |
Look at that list and the pattern is obvious. Everything that's actually open on the square opened within the last two years using existing buildings. Everything that's still just an announcement is tied to a development that's still pouring concrete.
Two clocks, one town
None of this makes one side of Lebanon better than the other. It explains why the experience of eating out here depends entirely on which direction you're driving. If you want the kind of restaurant that fights its way through a hundred-year-old building for years before the doors finally open, that's the square, and places like Olivia prove it's worth the wait. If you want to watch a brand-new building go from dirt to drive-thru in under a year, that's Hartmann Drive and the acreage around Barton Village and Five Oaks, and that pace isn't slowing down anytime soon given how much of that land is still unbuilt.
Either way, Lebanon isn't one food scene pretending to be two. It's two separate growth stories that happen to share a zip code, running on two different clocks, and knowing which clock you're watching makes the whole town easier to read.
We spend a lot of time in Wilson County restaurants, at ribbon cuttings, and on the square, because that's what it means to actually live here instead of just covering it from a distance. If you're curious about a specific pocket of Lebanon, whether that's what's happening near Barton Village, the square, or anywhere in between, the Eddie Poole Team would love to talk through it with you. Schedule a free consultation whenever you're ready.
