Walk Cooper Street this week and you will pass at least four storefronts that did not exist, in their current form, two years ago. The easy story is that Cooper-Young is having a moment. The more accurate story is that two people are having it.
Paul Gilliam and Mary Oglesby opened Cameo on Union Avenue in the spring of 2022, a cocktail bar built for the after-midnight crowd that fine dining kitchens send home with nowhere to go. Oglesby has said the opening night felt like a neighborhood bar where everybody already knew each other, the kind of night that made her think of Cheers. It worked well enough that the pair opened a second bar, Mary's B.O.T.E., a tiki spot a few blocks over on Cooper Street built around the same late-night crowd. Then, by their own account, something they said they would never do happened anyway. They opened a restaurant.
One kitchen, two former neighbors
Fawn sits at 937 Cooper St, in a room that spent years as Sweetgrass and then as The Public Bistro before Gilliam and Oglesby took it over in the spring of 2025. Chef Theresa Schuenke runs the kitchen, an ingredient-driven menu built around dishes like sweet potato gnocchi and a house-made lentil cake. Oglesby and Schuenke go back further than the restaurant does. The two worked together in Milwaukee fifteen years earlier and stayed in touch until Oglesby called with the offer. The space next door tells a related story. No Comment, a wine bar with an 80s retro streak, moved into what had been Knifebird, another spot that belonged to Kate Ashby and Kyle Bankston, the same duo behind The Public Bistro. When Gilliam and Oglesby took over both rooms, one of them told a reporter the goal was to honor what Ashby and Bankston had built, not replace it.
That is the part the drive-by version of this story misses. Cooper-Young's newest restaurants did not arrive from outside. They moved sideways, from one set of friends in the neighborhood's bar scene to another, in buildings that never sat empty long enough to qualify as vacancies. Oglesby put it plainly to a local TV reporter earlier this year: the idea that Cooper-Young is losing its restaurants is simply not true. What is true is that the same handful of legacy names, the Beauty Shop, Alchemy, Tsunami, the deli, kept running while a second generation of owners quietly filled in around them.
Cooper's picked up where Café Ole left off at the corner of Cooper and Young, a building that had served Mexican food and margaritas there for decades before owner Kendall Robertson reopened it under a new name at the end of April 2025. The name honors a family pet, an emu named Cooper, which tells you something about the tone Robertson is going for at a corner that Cooper-Young regulars have driven past for years without a second thought. A few blocks down, Nagoya House brought hibachi and ramen to the 2100 block of Young Avenue. None of it required a single new building. Every one of these places is a turnover, not new construction, and turnover inside a neighborhood is a different thing than growth from outside it.
The one that actually came from outside
Which is what makes Big Bad Breakfast worth watching separately from everything else on this list. James Beard Award winning chef John Currence opened his first Memphis location on Poplar Avenue in East Memphis back in 2021. The Cooper-Young location will be his 29th storefront across the South, and it is landing in a building nobody chose to give up. Mulan Asian Bistro occupied 2149 Young Avenue until a kitchen fire in September 2025 closed it for good, according to the Memphis Fire Department. Permits for the roughly 5,000 square foot renovation were filed with the Shelby County Division of Planning and Development the following April, and construction crews have been documenting the buildout on social media since.
Currence told the Daily Memphian he was aiming for a customer-ready opening in the final week of August, timed deliberately to land before the University of Memphis Tigers' Sept. 5 home opener against Arkansas State, the first game inside a newly renovated Simmons Bank Liberty Stadium. That is not a coincidence of scheduling. It is a bet that a scratch-made Southern breakfast spot can catch gameday crowds the way the East Memphis location already does on football Saturdays. If the timeline held, Cooper-Young picked up its first true outside chain in years just a couple of weeks before its longtime residents turned their attention to a very different kind of Saturday crowd.
The Saturday everyone already has circled
That crowd shows up on Sept. 19, when the Cooper-Young Festival returns for its 38th year. The Cooper-Young Business Association expects more than 130,000 people to move through the neighborhood between 9 a.m. and 7 p.m., browsing booths from more than 425 artists and craftspeople along Cooper Street and Young Avenue. Two stages run music through the day. A Children's Area organized by the nonprofit Pearls of Grace gives families somewhere to plant themselves, and an International Bazaar adds imported goods to the usual mix of local makers. Admission is free, which is why it draws a bigger single-day crowd than any other neighborhood event on the Memphis fall calendar.
For anyone who has done this before, the practical math has not changed. Street parking within a few blocks of the festival footprint disappears early, and the walk from wherever you do park is part of the day, not an inconvenience to plan around. What has changed is what sits along that walk. A festival crowd moving down Cooper Street this year passes Fawn, No Comment, and Cooper's, three storefronts that did not exist under those names the last time the festival happened. If Big Bad Breakfast opened on schedule, it also passes a fourth, sitting on the corner where a fire closed a restaurant a year ago almost to the week.
What this actually tells a resident
None of this required a developer, a rezoning fight, or a single new parking lot. Cooper-Young absorbed four restaurant transitions in roughly eighteen months without losing a single legacy business in the process, and the neighborhood's biggest annual draw is about to run straight through the middle of that turnover. That is a different story than "Cooper-Young got some new restaurants," which is the version you have probably already read somewhere else this month. The actual mechanism is succession. People who already had a stake in these blocks, as bartenders, as regulars, as friends of the previous owners, are the ones filling the spaces that come open, which is part of why none of it has felt disruptive to the people who live here.
If you are weighing where to eat before or after the festival, that context matters more than a list of names. Fawn and No Comment share an ownership team that has now run four concepts in the same few blocks since 2022, which means the kitchen and the wine list answer to people who already know what this neighborhood expects. Cooper's is brand new under that name but occupies a corner that has anchored the intersection for decades. Big Bad Breakfast, if it opened on time, is the newcomer in the literal sense, a Mississippi-born chain making its second Memphis bet in a building it did not choose to inherit so much as claim after a fire.
The first Thursday of next month brings CY Night Out, the monthly evening when Cooper-Young's shops and restaurants run sidewalk sales and two-for-one deals from 5 to 8 p.m., with live music scattered across the businesses that host it. It is a smaller, quieter version of the same idea the festival runs at full volume: a neighborhood that keeps finding reasons to fill its own storefronts rather than wait for someone else to do it.
If you already live in Cooper-Young, you probably do not need a stranger to tell you where to eat this weekend. But the pattern behind the new addresses is worth knowing, because it says something true about how this particular corner of Midtown works. It grows from the inside.
For more on what daily life looks like across Memphis neighborhoods, including nearby Midtown, Amy D. Woods and the Amy Woods team keep a running eye on the corners that are changing and the ones holding steady. If you are curious what any of it means for home values on your own block, reach out any time.
