Buckhead’s Greatest Tables
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The Top 5 Buckhead Restaurants
Atlas
Atlas opened in 2015 inside The St. Regis Atlanta on West Paces Ferry Road, developed by Atlanta restaurateur Gerry Klaskala together with Tavistock Group and conceived from the outset as Buckhead's case for a Michelin-level address before the inspectors ever crossed the Mason-Dixon line. The dining room reads more like a private gallery than a hotel restaurant: forty-eight seats arranged across a single floor under coffered ceilings, surrounded by a rotating selection of works from the Lewis Collection of Modern Masters — Picasso, Chagall, Léger, Hockney — installed at eye level on the velvet-paneled walls. The room is one of the most architecturally serious dining environments built in the American South in a generation, and the food is the operating reason it exists.
Bone's Restaurant
Bone's opened its doors in 1979 on the southwest corner of Piedmont Road and Peachtree, in a two-story converted house whose interior has been deliberately preserved across nearly five decades: crisp white linens, red leather chairs, dark walnut paneling, framed black-and-white caricatures of regular guests on every wall, and the kind of carefully cared-for warmth that comes from a single ownership group running the floor for forty-six years. The room seats about a hundred and forty across two levels, with a private dining suite called the Marsh Room upstairs that handles closing-dinner work for twelve to twenty guests. Atlanta restaurant critic John Kessler has written that Bone's is the city's most institutional restaurant — and the institution is the architecture, the service, and the menu all reinforcing one another.
Aria
Aria opened in the spring of 2000 inside a converted single-family house on East Paces Ferry Road in Buckhead Village, founded by Atlanta chef-restaurateur Gerry Klaskala on the simple operating idea that a refined modern-American dining room could carry the architecture of a residence rather than a hotel. The result has been one of the most durable independent fine-dining rooms in the American South: a ground-floor main dining room of about sixty seats wrapped around a central fireplace, an intimate upstairs lounge for pre-dinner cocktails, a private dining suite for closing-dinner work, and the kind of warmth that comes from a fifty-year-old chef running the line nightly for two decades.
Chops Lobster Bar
Chops Lobster Bar opened in 1989 inside Buckhead Plaza at 70 West Paces Ferry Road, the flagship operation of Pano Karatassos's Buckhead Life Restaurant Group and one of the most consistently rated steakhouses in the United States across three and a half decades. The building runs on two levels by deliberate design: upstairs is Chops — a hundred-and-twenty-seat traditional steakhouse with dark walnut walls, leather banquettes, and a long marble bar; downstairs is Lobster Bar — a more intimate eighty-seat seafood room with a curved-tile ceiling, a sunken floor plan, and a Manhattan-by-way-of-Mediterranean palette that the design press has compared favorably to Grand Central's lower oyster bar. The two operations share a kitchen and a wine cellar but carry different briefs.
Kyma
Kyma opened in 2001 at 3085 Piedmont Road, three blocks south of Bone's, as Buckhead Life Restaurant Group's argument that modern Greek cooking could carry a serious fine-dining floor outside Athens or Thessaloniki. The room is one of the most photographed dining environments in Atlanta: a deep-blue domed ceiling installed with a constellation of fiber-optic stars, a forest of white marble columns rising the full height of the dining floor, a long iced display of whole Mediterranean fish at the centre of the room that doubles as the menu's working argument, and a wraparound bar that handles the pre-dinner cocktail and late-evening dessert format. The seating runs about a hundred and forty across the main floor with a private dining suite for closing-dinner work upstairs.