Tag: Foundation Social Eatery

Born in Puerto Rico and raised in Southern California, Mel Toledo enjoyed tinned fish regularly for dinner. “My mother would heat up a tin of sardines in tomato sauce and we’d eat it with rice,” says Toledo, who today is a co-owner of Foundation Social Eatery and Petite FSE in Alpharetta—and one of a growing number of chefs in the metro area celebrating the sophisticated joys of preserved seafood in small packages.

Chefs today are building dishes around mushrooms that let their earthiness shine and allow their textures to reach their potential. Of course, if you’re watching HBO’s The Last of Us, mushrooms might be the last thing you’re craving, but, everyone else—let’s rejoice.

Chef Mel Toledo’s original restaurant Foundation Social Eatery is rising from the ashes one suburb over. The fine dining establishment closed in Roswell on December 31, 2020, after the lease ended. Toledo and wife Sandy, along with operating partner Nick Hassiotis, had a new location in Halcyon picked out, but decided against it due to the pandemic-induced economic instability. Two years later, the Foundation Social Eatery team has a new space—55 Roswell Street—in Alpharetta. It is slated to open the first week of December with an adjacent Parisian-style café called Petite FSE to follow in January 2023.

Whether you’re hosting an intimate party of four or throwing a big bash for 20, don't feel like you have to lock yourself in the kitchen for Thanksgiving. Better yet, consider outsourcing the food (and the dirty dishes) to these Atlanta restaurants.

Though previously confirmed as an incoming Dekalb Avenue Inman Park tenant, Mel and Sandy Toledo’s Foundation Social Eatery will open in Roswell behind Aqua Blue this December. Mel says the husband-and-wife team had signed a lease for the Inman Park space, but the landlord lost funding for the project. When that happened, they decided to look closer to their Marietta home for a location for their “rustic new American” restaurant.