Courtesy of Sagra
When Eric Di Nardo talks about Sagra, the neighborhood wine bar he soft-opened in East Atlanta Village this week, he does not cite trends, square footage, or even beverages. He starts with a feeling of warmth from the convivial gatherings he came to love in Italy, where food, wine, and community spill into one another.
In Italy, a sagra is a local festival, often centered on a harvest or the release of a local wine. For Di Nardo, who minored in Italian at the University of Georgia and lived in Verona for four years, the name captures what he hopes to create: a casual place to gather, eat, drink, and celebrate ordinary pleasures.
“I’m Italian in my spirit,” says Di Nardo, who has built much of his life around the country’s language, food, and hospitality. His wife is Italian, and he says she has been a steady sounding board throughout the years-long process of bringing Sagra to life.
Di Nardo has wanted to open an Italian wine bar for nearly two decades. His restaurant career has taken him from Italy, where he made pizza, to Brazil, Boston, and Washington, D.C. After moving back to Atlanta in 2021, he bought a house in East Atlanta Village and worked as a sommelier at Bacchanalia, an experience he says deepened his appreciation for restaurants with staying power.
“So much restaurant culture is about the new and shiny,” he says. “The opportunity to work at a place executing at such a high level since 1993 gives me perspective on what this business really takes.”
Courtesy of Sagra
At Sagra, Di Nardo is both chef and sommelier, cooking the food, pouring the wine, and telling the stories behind both. The menu leans Italian, with classic cicchetti, focaccia, and a rotating selection of sourdough pizzas meant to be shared. Expect simple small plates such as baccalà mantecato (whipped salt cod spread), anchovies with burrata, charcuterie from Spotted Trotter, and zucchini marinated with mint, vinegar, and lemon.
The pizzas are personal in size but communal in spirit, with rustic rounds inspired by Roman pizza in pala and pasta dishes. Di Nardo expects to offer four varieties at a time, changing seasonally. One early idea is an amatriciana-inspired pizza with guanciale, red onion, pecorino, and red sauce.
At the bar, wine will be the focus. (For now, Sagra is BYOD, while awaiting its liquor license.) Rather than organizing the list strictly by region, Di Nardo wants to highlight Italian grape varieties and the many places they show up, from Italy to the United States and Australia. The bottle list will include roughly 100 selections, along with wines on draft and by the glass. A small cocktail program, local beer, and nonalcoholic options will round out the beverage menu.
Courtesy of Sagra
Cocktails will be designed for speed and ease, with four or five batched drinks available, alongside spirits served neat, on the rocks, or with amaro, tonic, or soda. There will be a negroni, but Di Nardo says the cocktail list will not be exclusively Italian. “A cocktail program in Italy isn’t exclusively Italian,” he says.
The 2,200-square-foot space, located behind Banshee and across from Octopus Bar, has a dark hardwood floor, white stamped-metal ceilings, exposed concrete, and stucco walls meant to evoke the feeling of ducking into an alleyway in Venice for a glass of wine and a bite to eat. The dining room offers table service. The 10-to-12-seat bar features a tiled top and looks toward an electric pizza oven.
Sagra also havs an eight- to 10-person tasting room that can double as private dining, plus a small shaded back patio with 10 to 20 seats. Reservations only be accepted for the tasting room, and a small retail license will allow guests to bring wine home.
For Di Nardo, the project is as personal as it is professional. He lives half a mile from Sagra and says he is looking forward to walking to work every day. The goal is not a special-occasion restaurant, but a “come as you are” neighborhood spot.
“There’s a need for spaces that present wine and food in a slightly more casual setting,” he says.
