In May, Matt Frauenshuh told Williamson Source, "This has been 10 years in the making for our family," while standing in front of a dining room that had been a vacant credit union building a year earlier. He was talking about Truce, the restaurant he opened at 1809 Mallory Lane after two decades running Dairy Queen franchises. He wasn't talking about Cool Springs becoming a place people choose to eat. But that's what happened anyway, in the space of about three months this spring, on a stretch of road most people associate with errands, not evenings.
If you drive Mallory Lane or Galleria Boulevard on a regular basis, you already know this corridor by its old job description: the mall, the credit union, the chain drive-thrus, the places you pass on the way to somewhere else. Three sit-down restaurants opened here between February and May of this year, and none of them are national chains testing a new market. They're built by people who already had roots in Williamson County, and each one took over a space that had been sitting empty.
What Was There Before
The lot at 1809 Mallory Lane had been the site of The Tennessee Credit Union before Truce broke ground. A few blocks over, the space at 1914 Galleria Boulevard had been sitting vacant since Party Fowl closed there in August 2024. Neither location was a hard sell to a developer looking to fill retail square footage. They were the kind of spots that stay dark for a year or two while everyone waits to see what goes in next.
What went in was a small-plates Italian concept from a Brooklyn family, an organic fast-casual restaurant from a local Dairy Queen executive, and a bakery-turned-storefront from a woman who started selling sourdough out of her house during the pandemic. None of it reads like a corporate real estate play. It reads like people who live here deciding to build something here.
Truce Is Built by Someone Who Already Lives Here
Matt Frauenshuh has been CEO of Fourteen Foods, the largest Dairy Queen franchise operator in the country, since 2006. Truce is his first original restaurant concept, and he built it as a Williamson County resident rather than an outside operator scouting the market. The restaurant officially opened on May 20 at 1809 Mallory Lane, a 4,530-square-foot space with a dining room, a community-centered patio, and plans for a drive-thru and dedicated pickup app still rolling out.
The menu runs breakfast through dinner, with signature items like the Truce Toast, the Orchard Superfood Salad, and a Salmon Smash Burger, and a stated sourcing list that reads like a map of the region: eggs from Sequatchie Cove Farms, bacon from Benton's in East Tennessee, chicken from Springer Mountain Farms, bread from Charpier's Bakery in Nashville, tortillas from Tortillas La Silla in Nolensville. The restaurant says it created 100 new jobs in the Cool Springs area at opening. Hours are 7:30 a.m. to 9 p.m. daily, with brunch service until 2 p.m. on Saturdays and Sundays.
Pelato Took the Space Party Fowl Left Behind
Pelato is the Brooklyn-style Italian concept from the Scotto family, who opened their first Nashville location in Germantown in 2023 before deciding to expand south. The Franklin location sits at 1914 Galleria Boulevard, in the roughly 9,000-square-foot space Party Fowl vacated in August 2024, and it went before Williamson County's Beer Board in mid-January to secure its alcohol permit ahead of opening. The restaurant now shows active hours on its listings through this month, with a 2,000-square-foot enclosed patio built for year-round seating and a 280-seat dining room designed as much for family gatherings and private events as for a quick weeknight dinner.
The menu leans on family recipes rather than trend-chasing plates: scratch-made pastas, a Radiatori Vodka dish built on tomato, cream, and Calabrian chili, and a traditional Sunday Supper service. It's the kind of restaurant that took a space nobody had found a use for in over a year and turned it into a 280-seat room with a waitlist on weekends.
The Best Lunch in Cool Springs Is Inside an Office Building
SOS Counter is the least visible of the three, and that's by design as much as by accident. According to Williamson Source, Michaella Zetts started Sourdoughs of Somerset as a Facebook page during the early pandemic, selling bread for pickup out of her home when most restaurants were closed. Her husband Ryder had been executive chef at The Optimist in Germantown before COVID shut that path down. Together with business partner Jessica Chow, they opened SOS Counter on the first floor of the Highwoods Park West office building at 701 Cool Springs Boulevard, with the restaurant confirmed open by early March.
"Our focus is quality, not quantity," Zetts said of the approach in the same report.
The café serves seasonal salads, soups, and sandwiches alongside daily sourdough and laminated pastries, with weekday hours from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. It's tucked inside an office lobby, reachable through the building's parking garage, easy to drive past if you don't already know it's there. One local food column flagged a detail worth knowing if you're a fan of good seafood on a budget: SOS Counter runs a Maine lobster roll special on Thursdays and Fridays for $25, at a moment when the average lobster roll in Maine itself is running about $36.
For a quick reference, here's what's actually open right now along this stretch:
- Truce — 1809 Mallory Lane. Open daily, 7:30 a.m. to 9 p.m., brunch until 2 p.m. on weekends.
- Pelato — 1914 Galleria Boulevard. Dinner service most nights, with weekend brunch hours.
- SOS Counter — 701 Cool Springs Boulevard, inside Highwoods Park West. Weekdays, 9 a.m. to 4 p.m.
The Mall Around Them Is Also Mid-Change
CoolSprings Galleria itself isn't standing still while this happens around it. The mall's JCPenney is set to close this fall once its lease expires, with CBL Properties announcing Dick's House of Sport as the replacement tenant, though that opening isn't expected until early 2028. L.L. Bean signage was spotted inside the mall near the former Forever 21 space earlier this year, aimed at becoming the brand's first Tennessee store, though as of this spring it hadn't yet shown up on the mall's own tenant directory or L.L. Bean's store locator. A second Williamson County Whataburger opened nearby on Mallory Lane as well, adding a fourth new name to a corridor that spent years being defined by what it used to be rather than what it was becoming.
None of this reads like a single coordinated plan. It reads like several separate decisions, made by people with different reasons for making them, that happened to land in the same six-month window on the same few blocks.
What This Means If You're Already Driving This Road
If you live near Cool Springs and haven't been paying close attention to Mallory Lane, the corridor changed under you this year. The gap between "there's nothing to eat around here besides the usual" and "there are three places worth a special trip" closed faster than most people noticed, because it happened in spaces that used to sit empty rather than in a new development announced with fanfare. The credit union building is a restaurant with a 10-year backstory behind it. The Party Fowl space is a 280-seat Italian dining room. The office lobby most people walk past has a lobster roll cheaper than the ones in Maine.
None of it required you to drive further. It just required these three to open in the same stretch of road you were already using to get somewhere else.
If you're weighing what any of this shift is worth to your own property along the Mallory Lane or Galleria Boulevard corridor, that's the kind of ground-level read Donna Walsh keeps close watch on for clients across Franklin. Let's Connect.
