Butcher & Bee Team Announces Details About Fancypants

In May of last year, we saw the announcement that the former Piggly Wiggly on Dickerson Pike was slated to be the home of three new restaurant and bar projects from the teams behind Nashville favorites Butcher & Bee, Rolf and Daughters and Old Glory. Ever since, drinkers and diners have been wondering exactly what Bryan Lee Weaver, Philip Krajeck and Alexis Soler had in store (heh) for the remodeled supermarket. We now have the answer to at least one of those questions.

Honest to Goodness Hospitality is the restaurant group that has opened Butcher & Bee, The Rose Room and Redheaded Stranger in Nashville, along with The Daily in Charleston and Atlanta. The group previously ran the original outpost of Butcher & Bee in Charleston but has recently converted that space to another location of The Daily, their popular neighborhood marketplace and coffeehouse. 

With that adjustment behind them, Honest to Goodness Hospitality principals Michael Shemtov, Bryan Lee Weaver and Jake Mogelson are now free to turn their focus on their next big project at “The Pig” — a reimagining of fine dining they’re calling Fancypants. Operating with an anticipated early 2024 opening date, Fancypants looks like it will be a cheeky and fun addition to the Nashville dining scene with an attitude firmly aimed at knocking a little air out of the altitude and attitude of ultra-fine-dining restaurants like the one satirized in the 2022 film The Menu.

Shemtov is the founder of the restaurant group, Weaver runs the culinary program, and Mogelson serves as creative director. Mogelson’s title might seem unusual for a hospitality group, but he explained it to me during a recent Zoom interview. “My mother was an artist, and I majored in graphic design in college, so I’ve always been in an artistic environment,” Mogelson says. “I got my first restaurant job after college and moved from bussing tables to serving to redesigning the business cards and collateral for the restaurant. I moved on to jobs in management and as a beverage manager, so I’ve always worked on the creative side of restaurants. Now I’m responsible for site selection, new concepts, branding and collateral design for all of our restaurants, and I bridge the gap with the back-of-house and oversee the details of the business. The three of us have a full-triangle partnership.”

When he first began to imagine Fancypants, Weaver appreciated having partners to bounce ideas off of. He recalls: “I had the idea for the food, but not much beyond that. Jake and I worked on fleshing all of that out.”

After his success at the Bee and Redheaded Stranger, Weaver was looking for a new way to challenge himself. “Stranger was definitely a passion project, but it has a more static menu — sometimes it’s good to put guardrails on me,” he says with a chuckle. “I wanted a chance to get back in the kitchen and flex food-wise. The Bee wasn’t my concept, and everybody wants ownership of something. When I got to Nashville, I was blown away by the produce and the farms here. After working in California, I wasn’t expecting to be impressed.”

Weaver continues: “I wanted the vegetables to be the star, as opposed to Stranger, which is all pork and brisket. I joke that we’re basically a barbecue shop that stuffs everything into tacos. The Bee made vegetables important, and I wanted to keep that attitude at the new spot and have fun with them.”

The result of their collaboration will be Fancypants, a 2,200-square-foot restaurant that will occupy the sidewalk-facing portion of the old Piggly Wiggly at 917 Dickerson Pike. In addition to lots of glass-window frontage and an outdoor patio, Fancypants will feature an open kitchen with two bars serving drinks and acting as a chef's counter. Plans include a long row of banquettes and two center booths that can seat up to six patrons, but the ideal party size will be two to four diners with the option to push a couple of tables together for a party of eight.

The dining experience will revolve around a grid of nine dishes. (“I literally put myself in a box,” jokes Weaver.) It will feature less of an intentionally shareable menu than at the Bee, and diners should be able to build a meal out of three choices that will be served along with fun supplemental surprises from the kitchen.

“Why does a meal always have to go from appetizer to main to dessert?” asks Mogelson. “Why can’t the guests choose what they want and when they want it? We’ll add in bonus elements to fill out the meal, and we think we’ll be able to keep the whole experience around $75 to $90 a person.”

“If you want to blow it out, you can, but you can still stop by on a Tuesday for a meal on the way home from work,” promises Weaver.

I ask the dynamic duo about the inevitable comparison to other high-end small-plate Nashville favorites like Bastion and Locust. Weaver responds: “I do admire what they’re doing and look up to them, but we’re not necessarily modeling what they are doing. The grid menu won’t be a replica of that, and how we’ll be presenting the food, we’re going to be pretty playful with that. We’re toying with the idea of serving a dish on a TV dinner tray. It’s the antithesis of fine dining. We won’t be overly serious, I mean, we’re in a Piggly Wiggly! Since we’ll be so vegetable-forward, we’re thinking about offering a secret off-menu meat dish since there won’t be a steak on the menu.”

That doesn’t mean Fancypants won’t pay attention to the details of what they present. Mogelson says: “As a creative type, plateware is very important to me. We’ll develop a dish and a matching plate at the same time, and every detail is critical to me. We’ve been thinking about this for a long time, and we’ll obsess over every detail.”

Does that mean that the food might get a little fancy-pants at Fancypants? On the contrary, promises Weaver. “Tweezers won’t be the star of the show. Plating will be important, but it won’t be too precious. Sure, we’ll probably use tweezers on some dishes, but we won’t be checking the gap between elements to within an eighth of an inch!”

While the menu might sound limited within those nine boxes on the grid, Weaver and Mogelson don’t see it that way. Mogelson explains: “Bryan will constantly be editing dishes seasonally so that guests can enjoy it multiple times and find something new and unique. We’ll have a prep table in the middle of the counters where they can see what the chefs are doing and what ingredients they are using.”

“The kitchen will play less of a role in the service than at some other restaurants, but they will interact with guests, especially with the additional bonus elements," says Weaver. "I might not even want to be in the kitchen all the time anymore. I look at the kitchen like a band, as a collaboration. Everybody on the line has input. Maybe I’m more like Rick Rubin at this point in my career.”

Mogelson continues: “It’s going to be 100 percent about the guests, not about us. We’re focusing on the notions of value and approachability and looking for opportunities for added value within the experience. We hope those additional bonus elements will surprise and delight our guests!”

Fancypants will also emphasize creativity and value in the beverage program. The bar menu will include a thoughtful list of classic cocktails alongside some new specialty drinks plus a locally focused beer list and a West Coast-centric wine list informed by Weaver’s and Mogelson’s California culinary experiences.

In the official announcement of the concept, Honest to Goodness Hospitality founder Shemtov shares the brand promise, saying: “Nashville is filled with amazing dining options, and we knew if we were going to open a new concept it needed to be something that was truly different. Fancypants will be unlike any of our other restaurants, and I think it’ll push people out of their comfort zones, in a good way.”

Although the group looked at other potential locations around Nashville for their next venture, Weaver insisted on keeping it close to home. “It was important to keep stuff on the East Side,” he says. “I love this part of town!”

Mogelson promises that all of the permits have already been acquired, but knowing the pace of construction in this town, it will probably be late spring or early summer before we’ll all get the chance to experience Fancypants. That should give us time to buy a new pair of stretchy eatin’ pants!