A 1958 Steakhouse on Old Hickory Lake Is Coming Back — Same Dock, New Owners, No Date Yet
If you have lived in Wilson County for any stretch of time, you know the drive: off Highway 109, down Cherokee Dock Road, past the campground, until the pavement runs out at the water and there is nowhere left to go but a dining room with a view of Old Hickory Lake. That is Cherokee Steakhouse, and it has been sitting at the end of that road since 1958.
It went dark earlier this year. For a place that has spent sixty-eight years functioning less as a restaurant than as a landmark — the spot for anniversaries, for graduations, for the dinner after the boat came out of the water — that closure landed harder than a restaurant closing usually does.
It is coming back.
Who is taking it on
A new ownership group is reopening the steakhouse at the same address: 450 Cherokee Dock Road, at Cherokee Marina & Campground. Emily and Joe Akers are leading it, with partners Levi Davidshofer and Kyle Margison.
The Akerses are not restaurant tourists. They own J Bruner's in Clarinda, Iowa — a steak-and-burger house with genuine Midwest beef roots, which is roughly the correct pedigree for a place whose whole identity is what comes off the grill. Bringing that sensibility to a lake in Middle Tennessee is a more natural fit than it might sound.
What they are planning
The menu is still being built, but the outline is clear enough: steaks, seafood and chops as the spine, with bar snacks and pizzas to feed the dockside bar. Brunch is under consideration — which would be new territory for the place, and a smart read of a lake crowd that arrives on Sunday mornings by boat.
The room itself is being set up to hold around 80 inside, with a U-shaped bar seating roughly 40 and a patio that can take about 150. That patio number is the one that matters. On a warm evening in September, with the water flat and the light going amber, 150 seats facing Old Hickory is the entire proposition.
And in a decision that will please anyone who remembers the original: no reservations, at least to start. You drive out, you put your name in, you wait on the deck with a drink. That is how it always worked.
The part we cannot tell you yet
There is no opening date. The original target was early summer, and summer is nearly gone; the group has been working through hiring, which is the honest bottleneck for a restaurant of this size in a county competing for the same staff as every kitchen between here and Nashville.
So treat this as a heads-up rather than a countdown. The number for the marina is (615) 444-2783 if you want to ask directly, and it is worth asking rather than driving out on spec.
Why it matters out here
Wilson County has not been short on new restaurants lately — growth has brought plenty, most of them in shopping centers off the interstate, most of them with a sibling in six other states. What it has been short on is the other kind: the place that was already here, that your family has a history with, that cannot be replicated by a corporate real-estate team because the thing that makes it work is a specific dock on a specific lake.
Losing one of those is not the same as losing a franchise location. Getting one back is not the same either.
While you wait, our local's guide to eating well in Wilson County covers the rest of the field, and if the lake itself is the draw, our guide to Old Hickory and Percy Priest has the ramps, marinas and access points.
