Main Street Got The Lady May. The East Side Got The Bean. Madison Is Building Two Different Restaurant Rows at Once.

An AOL report quoted developer Bridgforth Rutledge as saying, "The east side of the city has a real need for a coffee shop like this, particularly one that locally sources a lot of its ingredients and genuinely cares about the quality of its product and service." He was speaking about the corner of Highway 51 and Madison Avenue, where a second location of Fondren's coffeehouse The Bean has been rising as part of the Madison Marketplace development. A few minutes away, on the historic side of town, developer Nick Bradshaw was solving a completely different problem. An Online Madison report quoted him: "We want this to be a place where people can chill and hang out." He added, "This is something we don't really have in Madison right now." He was describing a backyard behind a shared building on Main Street, built around a large oak tree, where The Lady May and Station 1856 are going in together.

Two developers, two corners of Madison, two different ideas of what the city was missing. Both are probably right. But the two projects don't look alike, they aren't running on the same schedule, and they won't feel the same once the doors open. If you've watched a fence go up on one side of town and wondered why nothing's moving on the other, that's not a coincidence. Madison is building two restaurant rows at the same time, and each one is answering to a different part of the city.

What's Landing on the East Side

The Bean's second location sits at 961 Madison Avenue, inside the Madison Marketplace development, and it is not a copy of the original. Owner Kristy Buchanan opened the first Bean in Fondren in 2020, taking over a space that had operated as Sneaky Beans since 2008. She had been talking about a second location almost since the first one opened. An AOL report quoted Buchanan as saying, "We have been talking about opening a second location since about a year into opening the first."

The Madison build is bigger than the Fondren original and includes something the flagship location never had: a drive-thru. The kitchen alone is larger than the whole back-of-house at Fondren, and staffing plans call for roughly double the headcount.

The Bean isn't opening alone. The same stretch of development is filling in around it:

• Tuk Tuk Boom, a Thai restaurant from Will Puckett, moving in next door after several years running a restaurant in Jackson
• A second location of Pig and Pint, opening across the street
• The Foxtail, an Illinois-rooted concept taking the entire first building of the neighboring Magnolia District, roughly 10,000 square feet across two floors

None of these businesses share an owner or a developer with each other. What they share is proximity, timing, and a corner of Madison that, according to Rutledge, had been going without a coffee shop this deliberate about sourcing.

What's Landing on Main Street

The other project sits in the older part of the city, on Main Street, near the arch that marks the historic district. Developer Nick Bradshaw, with Iron and Oak Properties, is putting two restaurants into one shared 9,500-square-foot building.

The Lady May isn't a new concept. It already runs in Ocean Springs, built by restaurateurs Chris McDonald and Will Taylor around the idea of grandmother's cooking with an elevated feel, food served on china rather than the usual restaurant plate. The Madison location will carry over the general store at the entrance, where the original sells the sauces, jams, and pickled vegetables that show up on the menu, along with the tallow-based cooking oil and skincare line the brand has built a following around.

Station 1856 is the newer half of the pair, and it isn't a transplant from anywhere. The name refers to Madison's own founding, as a stop called Madison Station along the Illinois Central railroad in 1856. Where The Lady May is a sit-down room built around a menu, Station 1856 is aiming for something looser: open flame cooking, no reservations, the kind of place meant for regulars rather than special occasions.

Mayor Mary Hawkins-Butler has already weighed in publicly on both. The same Online Madison report quoted her: "We are excited to see these additions coming." The report said she made the comment when the drawings for the building were approved by Madison's aldermen.

Main Street's Restaurant Mix Is Changing

WLBT reported that Full Moon Bar-B-Que, a longtime fixture in the same part of town, had closed. Construction moved forward nearby, and The Lady May and Station 1856 are planned for a shared Main Street building.

Two Timelines, Not One

The two projects are also moving at different speeds, which changes what a Madison resident should actually expect to see first.

WLBT reported in March 2026 that Rutledge said The Bean was on pace to open that summer, with Tuk Tuk Boom and the second Pig and Pint filling in around the same window. The report also said Bradshaw expected construction on The Lady May and Station 1856 to begin within two to three months of that conversation, with an opening targeted for the following summer.

By August 2026, a WhatNow report described construction underway on Main Street, with signage up showing renderings of the finished building, and reported a 2027 opening for Station 1856. The east side's new additions were arriving first. Main Street's version was still mostly a fence, a sign, and a rendering.

That gap matters if you're trying to plan around either project. The coffee shop, the Thai restaurant, and the second Pig and Pint are the ones you'll actually be able to walk into this year. The Lady May's china and Station 1856's open flame are still a year out, tied to a construction schedule that's running on its own clock, on a corner that's rebuilding its restaurant lineup one building at a time.

Both corners are covered as they change on our Madison neighborhood guide, block by block, if you want to see what's already open before the next set of signs go up.

For more on what's changing across Madison and the rest of Madison County, Marketplace Real Estate keeps a running local watch on what opens, what closes, and what's still just a rendering on a construction fence.