St. Elmo's Restaurant Shuffle Isn't One Story. It's Two, and Only One of Them Is About the Incline.

Walk down St. Elmo Avenue this September and the block at the foot of the Incline Railway looks almost nothing like it did a year ago. The red and white Clumpies sign is gone. A Jeni's Splendid Ice Creams now sits in that exact storefront. Up at the mountain's summit, a wood-fired pizza spot with a full bar has replaced whatever used to be up there for a quick bite between train rides. And a few blocks over on Tennessee Avenue, the parking lot outside 1885 Grill has sat empty since spring.

If you've been piecing this together from Nextdoor comments and a half-remembered headline, you've probably concluded that St. Elmo's whole food scene got shaken up at once. That's close, but it flattens two separate stories into one. The Incline turnover and the 1885 Grill closure happened in the same few months for entirely different reasons, and knowing which is which tells you a lot more about how this neighborhood actually works.

One Contract Change Explains Two New Businesses

Start with the Incline, because that's where the real mechanism is. For years, Clumpies Ice Cream Co., owned by Rock City Enterprises, held the concessions and ticketing contract for the Lookout Mountain Incline Railway, which the Chattanooga Area Regional Transportation Authority operates. That partnership ended late last year. Rock City has since moved to develop a competing gondola lift up the mountain from Flintstone, Georgia, a project that has already cleared rezoning approval from Walker County. CARTA, left without its longtime concessions partner, signed a new contract with the Reinert Group to run ticketing and the businesses clustered at both ends of the railway.

That single contract swap is the reason two unrelated-looking storefronts changed hands within months of each other. The Reinert Group didn't just replace Clumpies. It went looking for tenants at both the lower station in St. Elmo and the upper station on Lookout Mountain, landing Jeni's first-ever Chattanooga location at the bottom and a brand-new pizza-and-bar concept at the top.

Dillon May, the Reinert Group's director of operations, put the intent plainly when the new contract was announced: the goal is a destination that works for both visitors and locals, somewhere tourists come for the view but residents come back for the food. That's a different pitch than "another ice cream shop opened," and it's worth taking at face value given what actually moved in.

What Landed at Each Station, and When

The timeline is worth laying out because the public announcements didn't match the actual opening dates, and if you were watching for this you might have given up looking too early.

SoHi actually beat Jeni's to the punch by more than three months, which is the opposite of what you'd expect given the lower station got the earlier press attention. The pizza and bar concept at the summit has been drawing a mix of hikers and regulars since late March, serving wood-fired pies with names like the Hot Girl Margherita alongside cocktails on a deck with a panoramic view of the valley below.

Jeni's, meanwhile, went through several rounds of "opening soon" before it actually opened. Early coverage in March pointed to an April launch. By May, the timeline had slid to June with a celebration planned for July. The grand opening finally landed on July 9, with the chain's Chattanooga franchise partners running a giveaway for a year of free scoops, one per week, to mark the occasion. If you'd been checking that storefront every few weeks expecting a spring opening, the actual wait ran closer to five months past the first announcement.

Both businesses now operate under the same Reinert Group management that CARTA brought in to replace Clumpies, which means the character of the Incline's food offerings, at least at the two stations themselves, is being shaped by one operator's choices rather than by whichever independent restaurateur wanted the space next.

The Closure That Has Nothing to Do With the Incline

Here's where the two stories get conflated. In early March, 1885 Grill announced it was closing its St. Elmo flagship. Owners Miguel and Leslie Morales cited ongoing building maintenance needs, the lack of a city and state mandated in-ground grease trap, and rising parking costs controlled by the property's landlords. Ownership had offered to buy the building outright to fund the necessary upgrades. That offer was declined. A second proposal to personally fund the improvements was also turned down. The Moraleses are opening a new location in Chickamauga, Georgia, and keeping their existing Ooltewah restaurant running.

None of that involves CARTA, the Reinert Group, or the Incline Railway. It's a straightforward landlord dispute over code compliance and parking, playing out at a completely different address on Tennessee Avenue. The timing overlap with the Jeni's and SoHi openings is coincidental, not connected, and it's the reason a neighborhood that actually saw one operator consolidate two storefronts can feel like it lost three restaurants at once.

What's Still Holding Down Tennessee Avenue

Strip out the Incline turnover and the 1885 Grill closure, and the rest of St. Elmo's dining scene hasn't moved much, which is its own kind of news. Little Coyote, the Southwestern smokehouse Erik and Amanda Niel opened in 2023, earned a MICHELIN Bib Gourmand distinction in November 2025, one of only four Chattanooga restaurants named in the inaugural MICHELIN Guide American South selection. Niel, a two-time James Beard nominee for Best Chef Southeast, also runs Easy Bistro & Bar and Main Street Meats, but Little Coyote is the one built specifically for this block, with a sprawling patio and an open-flame kitchen turning out smoked brisket tacos and house-pressed tortillas.

Purple Daisy Picnic Cafe is still doing what it's always done, serving barbecue and bread pudding to a crowd that treats it as a neighborhood fixture rather than a destination. Mr. T's Pizza & Ice Cream, the classic slice-and-scoop counter that's been a favorite with families for years, is widely considered the highest-rated restaurant in the neighborhood on Google. Goodman Coffee Roasters is still the place people go for a slow morning before a hike up the Guild Trailhead or a ride on the Incline. None of these four went anywhere, and none of them are tied to the CARTA contract that reshaped the two stations.

Reading the Turnover Correctly

The version of this story that spreads fastest is the simplest one: St. Elmo's food scene is in flux, old favorites are disappearing, who knows what's next. The version that's actually true is more specific and, honestly, more useful if you live here. One transit authority contract changed hands, and it changed the tenants at exactly two addresses, both controlled by the same new operator with an explicit stated goal of building something locals want to return to, not just a tourist stop between train rides. A separate, unrelated dispute over building code and parking costs closed a third address half a mile away. The four restaurants that have defined this stretch of Tennessee Avenue for years, including the only Michelin-recognized kitchen in the neighborhood, didn't change at all.

That distinction matters if you're trying to figure out what's actually different about walking St. Elmo Avenue this fall versus last year. It's not that the neighborhood turned over. It's that the two ends of one landmark got new management, and everything else held.

If you're the kind of person who tracks this stuff because you live here and you'd rather understand what changed than guess at it, that instinct is exactly the one we bring to the rest of the Tennessee Valley. Don Ledford Group pays attention to blocks like this one because we live on them too, and when the conversation eventually turns to buying, selling, or just understanding what a neighborhood is worth, we'd rather already know the difference between a contract change and a closure than have to look it up.