"We're just in shock at how insane it's been," Sean Wen, one of the owners behind Curry Boys BBQ, told Nashville Scene not long after the restaurant opened in the building at the corner of Riverside Drive and McGavock Pike. Lines ran down the block. That was over a year ago now, and the shock has worn into routine. What hasn't changed is the shape of the thing that opened.
Riverside Village, the food-dense pocket of East Nashville that some maps file under South Inglewood, added four new stops within about seven months in 2025: Curry Boys BBQ in March, Sho Pizza Bar in April, Golden Prawn #3 by summer, and Hattie Jane's Creamery that fall. Every one of them is small. None of them was built to be a destination on its own. That's the part worth understanding now that the opening headlines are old news and the corner has settled into whatever it's going to be.
Nobody Built Big Here
Golden Prawn #3 took over the old Castrillo's Pizza space at 1404 McGavock Pike and kept it lean on purpose. The Tennessean reported that the Chinese American takeout concept, run by chefs Gracie Nguyen and Chad Newton, would be open daily for lunch and dinner for takeout or delivery only. No dining room. No seats to fill.
Sho Pizza Bar, a few doors down on the north side of McGavock Pike, went the opposite direction on ambition without going bigger on square footage. Chef Sean Brock's dough gets a three-day fermentation, and the personal-sized pies come out of a wood-fired oven that can back up service by up to 40 minutes when the small dining room hits capacity, according to a guide from The Infatuation. A travel writer covering the block for Peter's Big Adventure noted that some of these spots don't have a place to dine in at all and instead share patio seating with the eatery next door when the weather cooperates.
That's the mechanical detail that explains the rest of this corner. When a restaurant is too small to hold a night's worth of customers by itself, the businesses around it stop being competitors and start being infrastructure. Curry Boys doesn't need its own overflow seating if Village Pub and Beer Garden is fifty feet away. Golden Prawn doesn't need a waiting area if the point is to walk the box home.
What Was There Before
The building Curry Boys moved into had already turned over more than once. Nashville Scene's coverage lists the space as Perk & Cork earlier, then Fort Louise, then Lou, a farm-to-table restaurant known for a Sunday roast, before Curry Boys took it in March 2025. The Curry Boys team itself wasn't new to acclaim. Nashville Scene noted the three founding partners made the James Beard Award semifinalist list for Best Chef: Texas in both 2023 and 2024, and they teamed up with Nashville's Adam Lathan, an owner of The Gumbo Bros in the Gulch, to open the Riverside Village location.
Here's the timeline as it actually happened on the ground:
| What's there now | What it replaced | When it opened |
|---|---|---|
| Curry Boys BBQ | Lou (previously Fort Louise, previously Perk & Cork) | March 2025 |
| Sho Pizza Bar | existing storefront, prior tenant not documented in local coverage | April 2025 |
| Golden Prawn #3 | Castrillo's Pizza | Summer 2025 |
| Hattie Jane's Creamery | new build-out sharing the building with Sho Pizza Bar and Ladybird Taco | Fall 2025 |
Four openings, one building's worth of history behind at least one of them, and none of it happened at a scale that could support a parking lot or a dining room built for a crowd.
The Anchors That Didn't Move
Mitchell Delicatessen, Sabell's, Village Pub and Beer Garden, and Dose Coffee were already fixtures on this corner before any of the 2025 openings. What's specific to Riverside Village, and not something you'd find written up anywhere else, is how directly the new operators plugged into them. Nashville Scene reported that the Curry Boys team has regular orders at Mitchell Deli next door and at Sabell's across the street, and that the staff's post-shift hangout is Village Pub and Beer Garden.
That's not neighborly color. It's the supply chain. A restaurant with no dining room and a kitchen the size of a single storefront doesn't have room to also be its own break room or its own overflow bar. It borrows those functions from whoever's already standing there. The corner works because the new places didn't try to replace what Mitchell Deli or Village Pub already did well. They built around it.
Ladybird Taco is a case of the same pattern from the other direction. Founder Gabe Scott, a session musician married to a Texan who missed the breakfast tacos she grew up with, first planned to open in 12 South back in 2020. The pandemic pushed the concept to takeout-only, and Ladybird grew from there, eventually adding co-owner and CEO Brooks Veazey in 2021 and a Birmingham location before finally landing a second Nashville spot at 2300-2310 Riverside Drive, the same building that would later add Hattie Jane's Creamery. The all-day breakfast tacos and the coffee sourced from local roaster Crema gave the block another all-hours anchor rather than a dinner-only draw.
Where the Sweet Stuff Landed
Hattie Jane's Creamery, a small-batch ice cream maker based in Columbia, Tennessee and run by founder Claire Crowell, chose Riverside Village for its scoop shop specifically because, in Crowell's words to Nashville Scene, "East Nashville is underserved in ice cream." The shop moved into the same building as Sho Pizza Bar and Ladybird Taco rather than staking out its own address, which meant it inherited foot traffic from two restaurants that already had lines instead of building its own from scratch.
The Tennessee Cobbler Co. runs its fruit cobbler operation from a food truck parked on the corner rather than a storefront at all, which is maybe the cleanest example on the whole block of matching the format to the footprint. You don't need four walls to serve cobbler à la mode if the corner already has enough foot traffic walking past.
What This Actually Means If You're On This Corner
None of this changes what's on the menu. Bite-a-Bit still does Thai and sushi. Sabell's still runs the same kitchen it always has. But understanding why the corner grew the way it did, four small businesses leaning on four older ones rather than four big builds trying to out-anchor each other, changes what you expect the next opening to look like. If something else lands here, it will probably be small, it will probably share a wall or a patio with something already there, and it probably won't try to be the reason you drive to this corner by itself. The reason people keep ending up here in the first place is that no single stop has ever had to carry that weight alone.
If you're weighing a move to this stretch of East Nashville, or you already live nearby and want a straight read on how a block like this tends to hold up over time, reach out to Urquhart Realty Company and we'll talk through what it's actually like to live a five-minute walk from all of it.
