Guard and Grace, a Michelin-recommended steakhouse from Denver, opens on the tenth floor in South End on October 1

Guard and Grace opens on Thursday, October 1, on the tenth floor of the Vivian, the apartment tower at Queensbridge Collective in South End, according to a preview Axios Charlotte published on September 24. The steakhouse, chef Troy Guard’s third after Denver in 2014 and Houston in 2019, takes 10,224 square feet with a full bar, a raw bar, several private dining rooms and a 2,000-square-foot outdoor terrace facing the skyline, South Charlotte Weekly reported earlier this month.

It is not in our directory yet, because it is not open yet. Reservations are on OpenTable, Axios reported, and the restaurant’s address is 111 East Carson Boulevard, Suite 100, with the entrance and complimentary valet on the South Tryon Street side.

What it is

Guard and Grace is a modern steakhouse built around an oak-fired grill. The Denver original was recommended by the Michelin Guide and has appeared on FSR magazine’s list of the top 50 independent restaurants and Tasting Table’s top 20 steakhouses in America, according to South Charlotte Weekly. Troy Guard runs the kitchens; his wife Nikki Guard is the beverage director and co-owner.

Steaks are sold in 4- and 8-ounce portions and come with a roasted heirloom carrot, Axios reported, and they account for about 60 percent of sales at the existing restaurants. The Charlotte menu adds items the other two locations do not have: charbroiled North Carolina oysters, roasted Carolina Gold rice, North Carolina spotted sea trout, an oak-grilled North Carolina swordfish chop and a country ham tasting from regional farms.

What it costs

Axios published a handful of prices from the opening menu, which give a sense of the range:

• Oak-grilled shrimp cocktail, $6 per shrimp.
• Oak-fired octopus, $27.
• Toffee pudding, $14.
• The Uptown Cabaret margarita, made with a Texas Pete hot sauce agave syrup and a Pop Rocks rim, $19.
• The Cosmonaut, an elderflower and white cranberry cocktail with Icelandic vodka served over an ice sphere with an orchid, $26.

Triple chocolate chip cookies come free with the check and are also sold separately; the Denver and Houston restaurants move about 600 a day, Axios reported. The wine room holds 750 bottles.

Hours and how to get in

Opening hours are 4 to 10 p.m. Monday through Thursday and 4 to 11 p.m. Friday and Saturday, according to Axios, with lunch and brunch planned within the first year. Two dedicated elevators on South Tryon Street carry guests to the tenth floor. Valet is complimentary, which matters at Queensbridge, where street parking is scarce and the Carson Boulevard light rail station is a block away.

Private dining rooms can be booked for groups, and the terrace is built to run in the shoulder seasons. Chef Guard told Axios the team took a lot of what Charlotte was built on, which shows in the design as much as the menu.

The room

The design uses gold accents, pine and granite, with a portrait of Queen Charlotte at the entrance, Axios reported. The piece people will photograph is the textile work: artist Victor Lytvinenko used thousands of feet of cotton selvedge denim from the Cone Mills White Oak plant in Greensboro, which made denim for a century before closing, to weave tapestries and room dividers, South Charlotte Weekly reported. Axios also noted a disco ball in the women’s restroom.

The owners have run this playbook twice. Guard and Grace opened in Denver in 2014 and in Houston in 2019, FSR magazine reported when the Charlotte deal was announced, and each was a top-floor or high-profile room in a district of new towers. The Houston restaurant took a decade-old skyline space in the city’s central business district; Charlotte gets a tenth floor in a residential tower a mile from Uptown, which is a different bet on where the diners come from. The Charlotte-only menu items, all of them North Carolina seafood, rice and ham, are the tell that the group researched the market before building for it.

Why South End, and why now

Queensbridge Collective is the mixed-use project at the north end of South End, where Carson Boulevard meets South Tryon, a few hundred yards from the Uptown line. The Vivian is its residential tower. A tenth-floor steakhouse with a terrace is the kind of anchor a developer uses to make a building a destination, and for the restaurant it means a view no ground-floor South End dining room can offer.

The neighborhood has no shortage of restaurants, but it has few at this price and none from an out-of-town group with Michelin recognition. Charlotte’s high-end steak business has been dominated by chains in Uptown and SouthPark; Guard and Grace is betting that a walkable, apartment-heavy district will fill a $26-cocktail room six nights a week.

For the neighborhood’s other operators, the arrival is a marker. South End’s dining has grown up from breweries and fast-casual counters to full-service rooms in a decade, and a steakhouse with a wine room and valet is the top of that ladder. The nearest comparison is Uptown’s chains a mile north, and Guard and Grace is close enough to compete for the same expense accounts with a better view.

Why it matters

National restaurant groups have been choosing Charlotte for third and fourth locations at a steady clip, and the ones that arrive with awards raise the ceiling for everyone else. Guard and Grace is the most decorated steakhouse to open here in years, and it is opening in South End instead of Uptown, which says something about where the money and the diners now live.

It opens October 1. We will add the listing to the directory once the doors are open and confirm the hours then. Reservations are already live.

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