Tag: Ann’s Snack Bar

“Atlanta isn’t easily defined, and I think the more you try to define it, the less you're going to enjoy it," Andrew Zimmern says while touring the city in his new show, The Zimmern List.

“There’s very few places up and down this strip that [our customers] can get the kind of burger that they get here. They can find a McDonald’s, they can find a Burger King, but that’s not the same thing, and that’s what they tell us every day.”

It was really important to Ria that anybody can come here and feel welcome,” Pender says. “She created a space that everybody wanted to be a part of. And that is still here.”

Last April, the fiery-tempered face of the restaurant who kept customers in line, kicking out anyone who broke her rules, passed. In her place, Ann’s sister, Josephine Culver, and her three brothers stepped in to keep the restaurant going.

As recently as the late 1990s, the DeKalb County neighborhood of Kirkwood was known for street-corner drug deals, blatant prostitution, and a crumbling central business district. An influx of families and commercial investment has softened Kirkwood’s hard edge, resulting in an urban village of roughly 5,000 people that residents call harmoniously diverse.