New Owners Walk a Line When Buying Beloved Restaurants

Opening an independent restaurant is challenging. Buying a popular, beloved restaurant and keeping it going? That’s another challenge entirely. 

Restaurateurs who do so learn quickly that it’s a balancing act. There’s the need and desire to update and improve an acquired business, and there are the needs and desires of devoted customers who feel some ownership of the restaurants they have been frequenting for decades. Sometimes, those sets of needs and desires are at odds.

David Parker and Sean Lyons are two restaurant owners engaged in this balancing act, joining the likes of Bret Tuck, who bought Brown’s Diner, and Will Spiva, who has taken the reins at Caffé Nonna. At the beginning of the year, Parker and his wife Sally bought Calypso Cafe from its founders, Allison and Phil Brooks. Lyons joined Up Hospitality Partners in 2019 — the company had purchased Germantown Café (a favorite restaurant of Lyons) in 2016, and then Up Hospitality acquired Sylvan Park’s Park Cafe at the end of 2023.

Parker is Calypso founder Allison Brooks’ cousin, so Parker grew up eating at Calypso Cafe and rattles off favorite dishes for different periods of his life — from favoring the Lucayan salad when eating a high-protein diet while working out as a teen to ordering beans-and-three during a period when he eschewed meat. “When I was in high school, I probably ate there two to three times per week,” Parker says. While he didn’t have experience working in the restaurant industry, he knew the business from watching his cousins, and he knew sales from his previous career in software, so he felt ready for the challenge when the opportunity presented itself.

Since buying the place, Parker has heard from a lot of customers. The overwhelming number of comments fall into the category “We want more Calypso.” Folks want the Charlotte Avenue location — which currently is Calypso’s main catering kitchen, but not open to the public — to reopen as a restaurant. Folks want longer hours in Berry Hill. And people really want the East Nashville and Belle Meade locations to reopen. Parker is grateful that people love Calypso, have faith in him and want more. But he’s also cautious about expanding too fast or changing too much too soon. He wants Calypso to remain a healthy, affordable lunch option (and dinner soon, he promises) that can deliver on the same time-honored recipes the Brookses have been making since 1989. And he wants to be able to get meals to diners fast, because that’s something people have come to expect from Calypso — particularly at lunch, when people are watching the clock.

Up Hospitality’s Lyons also knows what it’s like to hear from loyal customers. Germantown Café was founded in 2003 by Jay Luther and Chris Lowry. Jeffrey Martin, Up Hospitality Partners’ executive chef, worked at Germantown Café and was trained by Luther and Lowry. Many Nashvillians feel nostalgic about Germantown Café. They feel nostalgic about Luther and Lowry, who have both passed away (Luther in 2012 and Lowry in 2024). They feel nostalgia about when the restaurant was an outlier in Germantown, as one of the first higher-end sitdown restaurants in the neighborhood, with something that seems impossible today — a clear, open view of the downtown skyline from a picture window.

Lyons and the Up Hospitality Partners team appreciate that. They were fans too. They work to educate their staff about those bonds, including hanging photos of Luther and Lowry — pictured not just at Germantown Café, but in the company’s other restaurants. And people feel nostalgic about the food. In particular, three dishes: the plum pork, the French onion soup and the coconut curry salmon. Lyons says that when they evaluated the menu, they intentionally kept the most frequently ordered dishes while removing others. But because they left those bestsellers, the perception is that they didn’t change the menu at all, even though more than 40 percent is different. (In contrast, the menu at Park Cafe is essentially unchanged, but public perception, the owners say, is that it has been overhauled.) Lyons believes the fact that Germantown Café was closed for more than two years during the pandemic has contributed to the support from existing customers. They wanted the restaurant to reopen, even if that meant there would be a few changes.

While appreciative of all that goodwill, Lyons and Up Hospitality Partners don’t want to be in the business of nostalgia. They want a restaurant that can grow, and they want to build a restaurant company that offers opportunities for career expansion for staff. An independent, one-location restaurant doesn’t offer someone working in the kitchen many opportunities, Lyons says, and may contribute to some of the hospitality industry’s staffing challenges. Another acquisition seemed like one way to do that.

Then they learned that Willy Thomas was looking to retire from Park Cafe. “It was a match made in heaven,” Lyons says. Germantown Café and Park Cafe were similar types of restaurants with similar menus and similar neighborhood vibes. And Thomas had a Nashville following, having worked in the kitchens at the Hermitage Hotel and at Pomodoro East. In the meantime, they had already started to open Karrington Rowe in Brentwood, a restaurant in the same vein. Karrington Rowe features the best of both restaurants’ bestsellers, with some tweaks. For example, both restaurants have a good salmon seller, so at Karrington Rowe the salmon dish is a crispy salmon, and the Germantown Café-inspired dish has become a coconut curry shrimp. 

Neither the Germantown Café name nor the Park Cafe name was eligible for trademarking. (And besides, it would be confusing to have Germantown Cafés in other neighborhoods. It’s already confusing enough that people think they serve German food, Lyons says.) So future restaurants will be under the Karrington Rowe moniker. The company also operates Fancy Sandy’s, a to-go breakfast sandwich shop operated from a window next to Germantown Café. Germantown Café’s long history as a brunch spot made it a natural for offering breakfast to go, Lyons says. He can see the possibility of opening Fancy Sandy’s sandwich spots elsewhere.

Parker is circumspect about the exact timeline for his Calypso Cafe expansion. But he says Berry Hill will expand hours to include dinner, and then he’ll turn his attention to reopening Charlotte “as fast as possible in a reasonable manner.” (The website lists it as “temporarily closed.”) His plans for both locations include better use of outdoor space, including creating family-friendly spaces to hang out with the kids, and having beer on draft. (Beer is currently in bottles.) If the right location popped up in East Nashville, he’d consider it — the Brookses still own the old East Nashville Calypso location, which is currently leased to Velvet Taco.

For both Parker and Lyons, the trick is — as it is for so many in town — balancing the needs of Old Nashville and New Nashville.

“We certainly want to keep all those people happy who are used to eating Calypso and are nostalgic for Calypso,” Parker says. “But there are a lot of new people in Nashville too, and I’m hoping to get the word out and make sure those people take advantage of it and love it as much as the rest of us always have.”