Photograph by Bailey Garrot
The year is 2013, Atlanta is crawling out from economic recession, and James Beard–nominated chef Hector Santiago has recently closed Pura Vida, his beloved tapas staple in Poncey-Highland. He’s cooked in New York City and Washington, DC, and he loves Atlanta, though the city feels to him like “a big suburb,” lacking walkability and the human electricity of Brooklyn. The more Santiago ponders his next move, the more a concept called Ponce City Market sounds appealing—largely because it would be connected to the Atlanta Beltline’s brand-new Eastside Trail.
“The Beltline brought that kind of cosmopolitan, walking-around feel of a city,” recalls Santiago. “It really changed the city to me. And I wanted to be in the center of it.”
Meanwhile, a little more than a mile away on the Beltline, or what the New York Times once disparaged as a “glorified sidewalk,” Paces Properties president and CEO David Cochran contemplated bulldozing a postindustrial warehouse on Inman Park’s Krog Street that had served as Tyler Perry’s studios. Cochran’s inclination was to build apartments from scratch. That is, until he walked the site with Ford Fry, another celebrated, prolific local chef. Fry said he’d develop a restaurant concept (what became the first Superica) for the airy, character-rich old building, but if it was gone, he would be, too. Thus, Krog Street Market—the other pioneering food hall that helped give rise to Beltline mania and thrust Atlanta into a fresh, global culinary spotlight—was born.
Photograph by Bailey Garrot
Perhaps it’s hard to believe, because the tidal wave of buzz that preceded their
debuts has never fully ebbed, but Ponce City in Old Fourth Ward and its smaller Krog Street cousin both started opening 10 years ago. As corrals for A-list chefs and smart, one-off concepts under a single roof, both were trendsetters and incubators. Both were foreign to Atlanta at the time; Cochran, for one, recalls breathlessly explaining to people that he wasn’t creating a mall food court but rather something akin to Seattle’s Pike Place Market or San Francisco’s Ferry Building. Both were big bets and immediate hits, on parallel paths during construction, but unwittingly so. (Notes Cochran: “There was never really any race to the finish line between us and Ponce. We were, frankly, always kind of shocked to be mentioned in the same conversation with [that project], given the scope of it.”) Both concepts have kept growing, and spawned numerous imitations since. And both, in distinctive ways, are emblematic of the past decade in the Southeast’s largest city, where so much decay and vacancy have been scrubbed away for human-scale vibrancy, commerce, and an onslaught of higher prices.
Try to imagine being asked, in Old Fourth Ward in 2014, to pay $9 for a cup of local beer, or $23 for a burger and fries (albeit a double-stacked H&F cheeseburger). Or $20 for chicken enchiladas on formerly shabby Krog Street. Yes, inflation. But as with expensive and complex adaptive-reuse development itself, food hall fare and international attention don’t often come cheap. To name just one accolade, Travel + Leisure magazine anointed Ponce City one of “The World’s Coolest New Tourist Attractions” in early 2014—long before the $250 million venture had fully opened.
Photograph by Bailey Garrot
“I think our followers and consumers come from 100-plus countries,” says Michael Phillips, the president of Ponce City developer Jamestown. Phillips’s relationship to the building dates back to him shuffling through Sears Christmas catalogs there at age four. “Much the way Chelsea Market is known internationally, it’s certainly in the consciousness of people who care about adaptive-reuse and new urbanist ideals.”
You know who else cares? Other developers and food entrepreneurs. Consider the long (and growing) list of metro Atlanta food halls that have cropped up in the wake of the two Beltline-adjacent landmarks: Marietta Square Market, Market Hall at Halcyon in Forsyth County, Politan Row at Midtown’s Colony Square, Southern Feed Store in East Atlanta Village, the 19-stall food hall at Lee + White in the West End (also linked to the Beltline), and the new Halidom Eatery in southeast Atlanta—to name just a handful, with others in the pipeline.
Elaine Read, cofounder of bean-to-bar artisan chocolate maker Xocolatl, says the competition is a good thing, to help spread out customers. “Especially in the first two years, Krog Street Market was so crowded,” says Read, one of several original, local food-and-beverage tenants who remain. Others include Superica, Ticonderoga Club, Hop City Beer & Wine, Fred’s Meat & Bread, Yalla, and Little Tart Bakeshop.
“I remember witnessing people sort of balance their food trays on the rims of trash cans, or eating on the floor,” says Read. “They were so excited about being there and willing to do whatever.” (One post-Covid change, Read notes, is the prevalence of drivers working for Uber Eats, Grubhub, and other delivery platforms, as people grew used to ordering food hall fare from couches.)
Photograph by Bailey Garrot
An unexpected boon for all Krog Street vendors came last fall, when the Michelin Guide awarded Fred’s a Bib Gourmand certification. “The fact that Michelin came through . . . has been pretty amazing and brought a lot more traffic,” says Fred’s co-owner and chef Todd Ginsberg. “The guests and patronage of Krog started off strong, and it’s as strong if not stronger to this day.”
According to Asana Partners, the Charlotte-based developer that bought Krog Street Market from Paces in 2018, the numbers support Ginsberg’s statement. Asana added neighboring properties to the fully leased food hall. Sites such as SPX Alley and Stove Works, along with recently constructed office and retail buildings, form the now denser and more cohesive Krog District. Matt Saylor, an Asana director, says foot traffic across the district increased 28 percent between 2018 and 2023.
Photograph by Bailey Garrot
As for Santiago, his Ponce City bet paid off. El Super Pan, his Latin bar for sandwiches and cocktails, has become a cornerstone (literally, on a can’t-miss corner) of the food hall, and joins original tenants such as Bellina Alimentari, Minero, Jia, and W.H. Stiles Fish Camp, which are still feeding roughly 10,000 daily visitors. Santiago has claimed another corner space for a second concept, tapas bar La Metro, and he estimates his original fast-casual business tallies 300 orders per day on average. “We have the traffic of being at the airport,” Santiago says. “And every year it grows—well, apart from the pandemic.”
Ponce City has undergone a titanic postpandemic growth spurt. With the addition of two new residential high-rises that lord over the 1920s-era former Sears, Roebuck & Co. distribution center and retail store, the 16-acre block now counts more than 800 apartments and lofts, alongside 2,000 office employees, 43 food vendors, and almost 50 retail tenants spread across an immense 3 million square feet. Another fun fact: According to Uber, Ponce City is metro Atlanta’s second most popular destination, behind only the airport.
“It’s a vibrant, living organism, a place where many people are kind of writing the stories of their lives at one step or another,” says Phillips. “Whether it’s a little kid with a parent, or a retiree, or a coding tech worker, or visitors from out of town—it’s astounding.”
This article appears in our November 2024 issue.
