Best New Restaurants
Want to know more about Atlanta’s standout newcomers? Here are the eight we crowned the Best New Restaurants of 2017.
50 Best Restaurants in Atlanta
1. Staplehouse
Two years after we gave it four out of four stars, Staplehouse is still on top.
2. Miller Union
Few chefs celebrate the region like Steven Satterfield does. He loves Georgia and accepts—with glee—what its soil gives him.
3. Masterpiece
As long as Rui Liu's fermented long beans with “streaky pork” and fish braised in chili oil are on the menu, Masterpiece's crowds won’t wane.
4. Spring
Spring's dining room is intimate— just 14 tables—and Brian So’s cooking is technical, restrained, even reverent.
5. Tomo
The best way to see Osaka-born chef Tomohiro Naito work his magic is to make reservations for his omakase at this restaurant in Buckhead’s Ritz-Carlton Residences.
6. Atlas
In barely three years, Atlas has catapulted itself to the top of our fine dining pyramid.
7. Bacchanalia
The new Bacchanalia feels a little more relaxed, but the menu still offers those signature crab fritters with citrus and avocado as well as Anne Quatrano's impeccably sourced cheese course.
8. Restaurant Eugene
Linton and Gina Hopkins, the husband-and-wife team whose H&F brand continues to pop up across the city, give Southern food the white tablecloth treatment at their flagship restaurant.
9. Aria
The beauty of Gerry Klaskala’s food is that it’s fit for fine dining, but it’s not fussy.
10. Gunshow
Built upon the singular promise of eating well and without pretension, Kevin Gillespie’s Gunshow is still our city’s gutsiest restaurant.
11. Sushi Hayakawa
Atsushi “Art” Hayakawa is not out to dazzle you with decor. This restaurant is a temple to fish, and the chef is nothing if not a purist.
12. Kimball House
In four years, Kimball House has become a staging ground for a new kind of Southern cool.
13. BoccaLupo
At Bruce Logue’s pasta bungalow, Old World Italian staples get New World makeovers.
14. Ticonderoga Club
While this dark little room in the corner of Krog Street Market is where mixologists Greg Best and Paul Calvert ply their trade, the kitchen pushes out a quality menu.
15. The Federal
Much of this stretch of Midtown has become a bland, corporate landscape, but the Federal is a place to linger.
16. The General Muir
In its five years, the General Muir has become indispensable for its upscale New York–style Jewish deli–inspired menu.
17. Kyma
The ocean-blue Kyma, which means wave in Greek, is Buckhead Life Restaurant Group’s brightest star.
18. Bones
If corporate bigwigs want to blow $6,000 on wine, they do it at this landmark wood-paneled steakhouse.
19. Yet Tuh
For those of us without Korean grandmothers, Yet Tuh’s chefs are the city’s closest substitutes.
20. O4W Pizza
What brings us back to O4W are the game-changing pizzas: classic round pies, thick-crust Sicilian ones, rectangular Detroit thick-crust, and square Grandma pies.
21. Bread & Butterfly
Bread & Butterfly doesn’t just look like a proper Parisian bistro; it operates like one.
22. B’s Cracklin’
When he opened the original B’s in Savannah in October 2014, Bryan Furman was one of the first to bring heritage pork to the barbecue world.
23. Mamak
Mamak is an unapologetic reflection of real Malay cooking, which pulls from other South Asian traditions and blends them with a sure hand.
24. Taqueria del Sol
Eddie Hernandez and Mike Klank opened the first Taqueria del Sol on the Westside in 2000, cranking out crowd-pleasing $2 tacos.
25. Kaiser’s Chophouse
After more than 30 years in some of Atlanta’s finest kitchens, Liechtenstein-born chef Peter Kaiser finally gets to see his name above the door of a restaurant.
26. Chai Pani
Kudos to Meherwan Irani, who sticks to his spicy central and south Indian roots at Chai Pani restaurant in Decatur.
27. Nam Phuong
Both the Chamblee and Norcross locations of Nam Phuong are worthwhile starting points for discovering the joys of Vietnamese cuisine beyond pho and banh mi.
28. Heirloom Market BBQ
Together at Heirloom Market, Cody Taylor and Jiyeon Lee merge American and Korean barbecue traditions.
29. Noble Fin
Its dining room may look nondescript, but Noble Fin is one of our most assured, satisfying seafood restaurants.
30. No. 246
Ford Fry didn’t always launch behemoth restaurants with sky-high design budgets. In 2011, he opened this intimate Italian charmer in Decatur that remains his most sincere effort.
31. Cooks & Soldiers
You might not expect to find one of the city’s greatest steaks among Cooks & Soldiers' traditional Spanish pintxos.
32. Madras Mantra
To many fans’ surprise (and delight), Narendra Patel and Ram Nanjuda returned to Decatur’s Madras Saravana Bhavan, where they opened under a new name in a pristine, pastel-colored dining room.
33. Octopus Bar
When Nhan Le and the late Angus Brown opened Octopus Bar in 2011, they shook up Atlanta's dining scene, offering small plates rife with primo ingredients like oysters and uni but served in a loud, dark room.
34. Seed Kitchen & Bar
Doug Turbush brings a bright-white New Nordic aesthetic to an East Cobb strip mall, an unexpected location for an idiosyncratic restaurant.
35. Porch Light Latin Kitchen
Chef Andre Gomez draws on his Puerto Rican heritage at Porch Light, where he serves a beer-can chicken burrito and sofrito mac and cheese with pork rind crumbs.
36. Vingenzo’s
Some of the best Neapolitan pies can be found in Woodstock, where chef and owner Michael Bologna cooks them in a wood-fired oven.
37. The Optimist
What with the mini-golf lawn outside, you don’t really need dinner to have a grand time at Ford Fry’s seafood sensation. But you'll want to eat.
38. Food Terminal
Food Terminal is the quintessential expression of Buford Highway’s tradition-bending resurgence.
39. One Eared Stag
Anchored by a long, friendly bar, One Eared Stag is the kind of place nearby residents hit up twice a week.
40. 8Arm
Dwarfed in size by Ponce City Market across the street, 8Arm beams with independent spirit.
41. Rumi’s Kitchen
Ali Mesghali’s Persian restaurant is staged against a turquoise-tiled open kitchen curving along the back wall.
42. Table & Main
Ryan Pernice has invigorated downtown Roswell with two of the busiest restaurants in the area: Table & Main and Osteria Mattone.
43. Busy Bee
We’d be a lesser town without this institution, which has been a go-to for the comforts of smothered pork chops, oxtails, and fried chicken since 1947.
44. 9292 Korean Barbecue
Good Korean barbecue is the sum of its parts. At 9292, each part is a cut above.
45. Kevin Rathbun Steak
This glossy steakhouse along the BeltLine’s Eastside trail has long attracted expense-account diners as well as date-night couples.
46. Community Q BBQ
Dave Roberts is a veteran pitmaster dedicated to tender pulled pork and smoky St. Louis–style ribs.
47. Desta Ethiopian Kitchen
You’ll find Desta’s dining room packed with people born in both Atlanta and Ethiopia.
48. Empire State South
This rustic Midtown centerpiece still draws enormous energy from its handsome bar, which opens at 7 a.m. with coffee, pastries, and bagels.
49. Rising Son
When Hudson Rouse, formerly of Home Grown, and his wife, Kathryn Fitzgerald Rouse, opened this earnest meat-and-three for breakfast and lunch almost two years ago, crowds flocked.
50. Arepa Mia
Lis Hernandez has been slinging arepas—stuffed cornmeal patties, crunchy from a hot grill—at the Sweet Auburn Curb Market since 2012.
