Drive Sevier Avenue on a Friday night this August and you will pass two of South Knoxville's newest kitchens without ever leaving your car. That is not a complaint about traffic. It is the actual state of the neighborhood right now: the restaurants have arrived faster than the path meant to connect them.
If you have tried to walk or bike between the South Waterfront and Kern's Food Hall lately, you already know what I mean. The rail corridor that is supposed to string this whole stretch of South Knoxville together is still fenced off, mid-construction, and tangled in a lawsuit that has nothing to do with food and everything to do with whose backyard the old tracks used to run through.
The Waterfront Got Its Restaurant First
Earl's opened in January 2026 at 610 Waterfront Drive, the ground-floor retail space inside the South Banks development that sat empty for years while residents moved into the apartments above it. It is a partnership between Dominion, the residential developer behind the building, and Gemini Restaurant Group, the team that already runs Raven Steakhouse and Bella in Maryville. The menu covers breakfast through dinner with to-go and delivery built in from day one, and the sourcing reads like a map of the region: draft beer from Xül and Yee-Haw, coffee from Vienna Coffee Roasters, buns from Quality Bakers. Interior designer Bridgette Cassell of Haute Home handled the space, and artist Jessica Ramsey painted the walls with lines that echo the river just outside the windows.
The name is personal. Earl's is named for the father of Dominion co-founder Mark Taylor, with a cowboy-style portrait of Earl on the wall to prove it.
What matters for anyone living nearby is less the menu than the location. Earl's sits a short walk from Suttree Landing Park, the 8.3-acre riverfront park with its own paved path, kayak launch, and festival lawn that has hosted events like the Second Bell Music Festival and the annual Cattywampus Parade. That park has been open and usable for years. It is the connective tissue further inland, toward Sevier Avenue and beyond, that is still catching up.
A Mile and a Half Away, Kern's Food Hall Keeps Adding Names
Head the other direction, toward Chapman Highway, and the historic Kern's Bakery building has spent 2026 adding vendors at a pace that outstrips almost anything else in the neighborhood. Wokxville opened July 2, 2026, a gluten-free Asian concept from chef Dustin Cochran, the same chef behind Disco Chicken and Donuts, which was recently ranked number one in America and third in the world on the Find Me Gluten Free app. Mr. Rico's tacos landed earlier in the year. Zukku Sushi and T. Ralph's Burgers are both listed as coming soon on Kern's own vendor page, joining a roster that already includes Monday Night Brewing's Knoxville taproom, Kandilige Ghanaian Cuisine, and Ooh Lala Indian Kitchen inside the restored 1931 bakery building.
This is not a slow trickle of openings. It is a food hall that keeps finding room for one more concept, in a building that sat vacant for over a decade before Johnson Architecture's restoration brought it back using state and federal historic tax credits.
The Trail That's Supposed to Connect Them Is Still a Construction Site
Here is the part that a lot of the coverage on South Knoxville's food scene leaves out: the connective infrastructure everyone assumed would tie these destinations together is running well behind the restaurants themselves.
The SoKno Rail Trail and Art Walk is a 3.8-mile rail-to-trail conversion led by Legacy Parks Foundation, Gulf & Ohio Railways, and the City of Knoxville, turning a former rail line into a soft-surface path from Chapman Highway to Ijams Nature Center. Legacy Parks Executive Director Carol Evans has described the vision plainly: a trail that runs alongside the restaurants and breweries of Sevier Avenue before continuing into the wooded stretch toward Ijams.
Rail removal began in February 2026, and the first public art piece went up not long after: a mural by artist Emmanuel Jarus wrapped around a caboose once owned by B. Ray Thompson, the coal magnate whose name is on Thompson-Boling Arena, installed behind Kern's Food Hall. The project's first 1.5-mile segment, an art walk stretching from Chapman Highway to Island Home Avenue, is funded in part by a $1 million gift from the Lawson Family Foundation and is expected to feature more than 12,000 square feet of murals, sculptures, and youth-created work across the corridor, with individual mural stipends budgeted at more than $11,000 each.
That first segment is targeted to open in fall 2026. The rest of the trail, all the way to Ijams, does not have a firm date.
Why the Path Is Behind the Restaurants
Part of the delay is ordinary construction timing. But part of it is a genuine dispute. Neighbors along the old rail corridor near Chapman Highway and Ijams have raised concerns about privacy, noise, and foot traffic close to their property, and a federal lawsuit tied to the rail line's abandonment has left the project's exact schedule uncertain even as crews keep clearing the right of way. The pace from here depends as much on court filings and Surface Transportation Board approvals as it does on shovels in the ground.
South Knoxville resident James Harnois, speaking to WVLT during the February groundbreaking, put the appeal of the finished trail simply: "You don't need to get in the car to get around in South Knoxville." That is the promise. It is just not the current reality for the stretch between Chapman Highway and the rest of the corridor.
Here is where things stand as of this writing:
| Piece of the corridor | Status | Expected timing |
|---|---|---|
| Suttree Landing Park and riverwalk | Open, fully built | Available now |
| Earl's at South Banks | Open | Opened January 2026 |
| Kern's Food Hall (Wokxville, Mr. Rico, and other 2026 additions) | Open | Rolling openings through 2026 |
| SoKno Rail Trail, Chapman Highway to Island Home Avenue (Art Walk) | Under construction | Targeted fall 2026 |
| SoKno Rail Trail, remainder to Ijams Nature Center | Design and legal proceedings ongoing | No firm date |
What This Means If You Live Here Right Now
If you already call South Knoxville home, the practical takeaway is simple. The neighborhood's dining scene is not waiting for its infrastructure to catch up, and you shouldn't either. Suttree Landing Park's own paved path is a genuinely finished, walkable stretch of riverfront right now, kayak launch and all. Kern's Food Hall is worth the drive on any given week just to see who has opened a stall since your last visit. Earl's is worth the trip for the river view alone.
What you should not expect, at least not yet, is a continuous walk or bike ride linking Sevier Avenue's restaurant row to the Chapman Highway corridor on the old rail bed. That connection is coming, and the caboose mural behind Kern's is proof the work has actually started rather than just been announced. But between an active federal lawsuit and a construction schedule that still depends on it, fall 2026 is the earliest any of it opens, and that is only the first mile and a half.
South Knoxville's restaurants stopped waiting a long time ago. The trail is still catching up.
If you're watching this corridor for reasons beyond dinner plans, whether that's a move into South Knoxville or a sale timed around what's opening next, The Cook Team tracks these neighborhood-level shifts as part of how we advise buyers and sellers across Knoxville. Book a buyer consultation and we'll walk you through what's actually changing on the ground here, not just what's on the map.
