The West End of Poplar Is Suddenly the Most Interesting Address in Germantown

For most of the last decade, the stretch of Poplar Avenue between Kirby Parkway and Farmington sat in a kind of holding pattern. The Carrefour at Kirby Woods shopping center emptied out. Signage faded. Traffic passed through it on the way to somewhere else. If you had asked a Germantown resident in 2022 where the next great restaurant opening would land, almost no one would have pointed to that intersection.

That answer changed over Memorial Day weekend.

What actually opened at 6695 Poplar

The building at 6695 Poplar Avenue is a new two-story outparcel inside The Standard Germantown, the mixed-use redevelopment replacing the old Carrefour center at the southwest corner of Poplar and Kirby Parkway. Chefs Andy Ticer and Michael Hudman, the team behind Andrew Michael Italian Kitchen, Hog & Hominy, and Catherine & Mary's, took the whole building and put two different restaurants inside it. Downstairs is Josephine Estelle, a sit-down Italian-American dinner concept named after Ticer's and Hudman's daughters. Upstairs is Rosie's Tavern, a cocktail-forward bar named after the daughter of partner Benjamin Orgel.

The two-in-one setup is deliberate. Guests can start with a drink upstairs, move down for dinner, or come back up for late service without leaving the building.

Weekend brunch service at Josephine Estelle is planned to launch in the weeks after opening, and the house bread — a hybrid of focaccia and Parker House garlic bread — has already become the thing people mention when they get home.

Why this opening reads differently

Germantown has absorbed plenty of restaurant openings over the years. This one is a different signal.

Josephine Estelle and Rosie's Tavern are the first new restaurants Ticer and Hudman have opened in over six years. Hudman has said publicly that the team looked at Birmingham, Nashville, and Little Rock before settling on Germantown, and that the pair felt something specific was missing here that they could fill. That's a market read from a group with James Beard and MICHELIN Guide recognition, choosing 38138 over three larger metros. Executive chef Walt Stallings and Rosie's chef de cuisine Jaik Hunt both relocated from Chicago for the project.

The location choice matters as much as the chef choice. The Standard is a $300–$500 million redevelopment planned across six phases, ultimately including 320 residential lofts, a 40-unit luxury condo building, a 150-room boutique hotel, and roughly 27,000 square feet of ground-floor retail and restaurant space on a 10-acre site. Phase one, the piece that houses Josephine Estelle and Rosie's Tavern, is complete. Phase two, a $35.5 million package of additional retail, residential, office, and hospitality space, is under city review, with a $14.5 million tax increment financing application backing the next stage. For a resident, the practical translation is that this corner is going to keep changing for the next five to seven years. What opened this spring is the first floor of a much taller building.

The Bain Barbecue counter-move

While the Poplar and Kirby corner was getting the attention, a quieter opening happened a mile south. Bain Barbecue opened its second location at 2016 South Germantown Road, just north of Poplar, in late May. The new location added a drive-thru option for the Texas-style brisket, ribs, and sausage program that made the original a weekend line.

Two things about that:

• A drive-thru at a serious barbecue counter is unusual. Most pitmasters won't do it because holding times and packaging kill the product. Bain is betting they can.
• The South Germantown Road placement fills a gap. It sits between the Poplar corridor and the neighborhoods east of Riverdale, which is a lunch draw radius Germantown didn't really have covered at that price point.

If you were mapping where the food story is happening this summer, Poplar and Kirby is the destination-dinner axis and South Germantown Road is the weekday lunch axis. Those are two different problems solved in the same three-month window.

The weekly rhythms holding up around it

New openings get the press. The reason they land is that the surrounding weekly infrastructure has been getting quietly stronger.

• Farm Park Fridays run as a summer market series at Bobby Lanier Farm Park, starting at 9 a.m. It's the closest thing Germantown has to a producer-focused market inside city limits, and it's set up for a morning walk-through rather than a full outing.
• The Grove at the Germantown Performing Arts Center continues to program live music on weeknight evenings through the summer, with acts like Alexis Jade and the Gemstones on the schedule. The Grove sits behind the main GPAC building and reads more like a lawn than a venue, which is the point.
• Neil's Music Room on the east side of the city keeps its Sunday afternoon live music slot with local acts.

None of these are new. What's new is that a Friday morning at Bobby Lanier, a Wednesday evening at The Grove, and a Saturday dinner at Josephine Estelle now string together into a full week of things a resident can do without leaving the 38138 and 38139 ZIPs. That wasn't true in 2022.

Two dates already on the calendar

Two events are worth marking now because both will affect traffic patterns and reservations.

The FedEx St. Jude Championship returns to TPC at Southwind, with tournament play running August 12 through 15. If you're planning dinner at Josephine Estelle or Rosie's Tavern during tournament week, book Resy early. The Standard sits directly in the arrival corridor for anyone driving in from the east side, and reservation supply has been tightening even in normal weeks.

The 53rd Annual Germantown Festival runs September 12 and 13 at the Germantown Civic Club Complex, 7745 Poplar Pike. Free admission, free shuttle service from two remote lots, and the Running of the Weenies dachshund race at 11:30 a.m. Saturday sponsored by the Germantown Animal Shelter. It's one of the longest continuously running festivals in the area, and the shuttle system exists because parking on-site fills before 10 a.m. on Saturday.

What this actually means if you already live here

The shorthand version: the center of gravity in Germantown dining has moved west. For years, the reflex answer for a nice dinner in town was Saddle Creek adjacent or a drive into East Memphis. The Poplar and Kirby corner is now a legitimate third option, with a chef team that has chosen this ZIP code as their next chapter and a development pipeline that will keep adding to it.

That reshapes ordinary decisions. A Thursday night without plans has a new default. A visiting family member who wants "somewhere in the neighborhood but not chain" now has an answer that doesn't require a highway. And the school-year rhythm of drop-offs, practices, and grocery runs starts to overlap with a new set of destinations along a road you already drive.

You don't need to change anything about how you live here to benefit from that. You just have to know it happened.

If you're thinking about a move within Germantown, or watching how new mixed-use development is reshaping value across specific corners of the city, I'm happy to talk through what I'm seeing on the ground. Lauren Haynes — let's connect.