The Charlotte Avenue building that spent six years housing the acclaimed restaurant Hathorne will reopen this fall as Starry Night Lounge, a restaurant and live music venue. The property at 4708 Charlotte Ave. sits directly across from Richland Park in West Nashville, a stretch of the city that has quietly become one of its more talked-about dining corridors.
According to Nashville Post, the West Nashville property changed hands, with Metro records showing that chef John Stephenson purchased the site in 2017. The new concept will model its entertainment format after Scott Bradlee's Postmodern Jukebox. That collective, created in 2011, reimagines contemporary pop hits in vintage genres like 1920s jazz, swing, and Motown, and it has racked up more than 2.2 billion YouTube views doing so, per Wikipedia.
A House Band Built Around a Genre-Bending Format
Starry Night Lounge will feature its own in-house group, the Starry Night Players, performing ticketed live sets as part of the dinner experience. Stephenson had served as Hathorne's primary owner and chef before ceasing operations there in September 2024, ending a run that lasted roughly six years at the address. The building's next chapter leans heavily on live entertainment as a draw, a departure from the chef-driven restaurant format Hathorne was known for.
Just next door, the adjacent property houses Clementine Hall, according to the same Nashville Post report. The two buildings share a deeper history than their current separate ownership suggests.
A Church Hall's Long Road to the Restaurant Business
A Church Hall's Long Road to the Restaurant Business Long before it served pasta or hosted a house band, 4708 Charlotte Ave. was a church fellowship hall, according to FranklinIs.
When Hathorne first opened in the space in December 2018, it leaned into that religious architectural heritage rather than hiding it. The adaptive reuse project later earned a Metropolitan Historical Commission Preservation Award in 2021 for the rehabilitation work done by Steelhead Building Group and Dryden Architecture + Design, with the renovation preserving the building's original exterior brick, according to Main Street Media of Tennessee.
A Launchpad for Local Chefs, and a Tough Market for Independents
During its run, Hathorne also functioned as something of an incubator for Nashville hospitality talent. It hosted pop-up residencies, including chef Michael Hanna's St. Vito Focacciaria in 2021, per the Nashville Scene. That kind of shared-kitchen model had allowed emerging chefs to build a following without the overhead of opening their own space outright.
Hathorne's eventual closure came amid increased food costs and a 30 percent year-to-date decline in sales during 2024, the Nashville Scene reported. It was one of several independent restaurant closures across the Nashville area that year, amid the pressures documented at Hathorne. Hathorne's compressed profit margins made ambitious relaunches like Starry Night Lounge something of a bet against recent trends.
West Nashville's Ongoing Dining Boom
The venue's arrival will add a restaurant and live music venue to Charlotte Avenue. The area includes the repurposed church building. Richland Park, directly across from the venue, adds a nearby public space.
With its fall opening date approaching, Starry Night Lounge will test whether a Postmodern Jukebox-inspired dinner-and-show format can succeed where a celebrated tasting-menu restaurant ultimately could not, inside a building that has already reinvented itself once from sacred space to fine dining destination.
