Kevin Boehm returns to Nashville with three concept openings

Three concepts opened in Nashville this summer, returning Boka Restaurant Group cofounder Kevin Boehm to the city where he opened 6 Degrees in 1999. The earlier restaurant closed soon afterward, and the experience “knocked me into a tailspin,” Boehm said.

The 2026 openings mark a literal full-circle moment for the operator. Boehm’s award-winning restaurant work includes the Michelin-starred Boka and Girl & The Goat with Chef Stephanie Izard, according to his Nov. 9, 2026 Nation’s Restaurant News profile.

What changed in Nashville?

Boka Restaurant Group opened three concepts in Nashville in summer 2026. Boehm described the reunion with earlier guests as “especially lovely because so many people came in that came to my restaurant 27 years before.” The timeline is precise: the return came 27 years after the 1999 opening of 6 Degrees.

The interview does not name the three concepts or disclose their sales, opening costs, check averages, margins or labor levels. It also does not say whether the Nashville units are company-operated or franchised. For operators, the reported scale of the expansion is therefore three openings; no segment-level financial effect can be calculated from the interview.

What did the first restaurant teach?

Boehm’s career includes both achievement and severe personal difficulty. He fought addiction and mental health issues and eventually hit rock bottom. He details those experiences in “The Bottomless Cup: A Memoir of Secrets, Restaurants, and Forgiveness,” a book that places his personal history inside the restaurant business.

He has also watched the industry make “huge changes” in how it treats addiction, mental health and balance. Boehm said he had a front-row seat to those shifts as his own outlook evolved.

What is he rejecting about restaurant work?

In the interview, Boehm rejected the idea that commitment requires constant overwork and self-erasure. “It doesn’t have to be impossible all the time,” he told NRN. “I think generationally, that’s the way we used to think that if you’re not working ninety hours and selling your soul and have, you know, burn scars all the way up your arm, that you’re not doing enough.”

Boehm rejected that standard directly: “I don’t buy into that.”

His position links restaurant culture with the treatment of workers’ well-being rather than confining the subject to personal recovery. The source provides no retention or productivity figures, so his argument remains a management philosophy rather than a quantified operating result.

Why publish the memoir now?

On NRN’s Extra Serving podcast, Boehm discussed the industry’s highs and lows, what the dining public still does not understand about the restaurant business, and why he believed the moment was right for his memoir. The conversation tied his own record to the industry’s evolving treatment of addiction, mental health and balance.

The profile appears alongside an NRN Content Spotlight on Technomic’s Top 500. That separate report says sales at the Top 500 chain restaurants slowed again in 2025 as consumers cut back on dining, while coffee, beverages, snacks and chicken thrived. It supplies the only sector context around Boehm’s interview, which offers no sales, margin, check-average or labor-percentage data for Boka Restaurant Group.

What does this change for operators?

For operators, Boehm’s account does not offer a new labor-cost benchmark or a pricing and menu-engineering formula. It asks a more practical question: should restaurant culture define commitment through impossible schedules and visible harm, or should it recognize balance as part of sustainable work? Boehm rejects the first standard and points to changes he says have already begun in the industry.

The Nashville openings supply a second measure grounded in a date and a count: three concepts opened 27 years after 6 Degrees, and many former guests returned. That shows continuity in customer relationships, but it does not prove financial performance because the new concepts’ sales and costs remain undisclosed.

The next test is whether those three openings can convert a full-circle homecoming into lasting operating performance, a result Boehm’s interview does not quantify.