Metro Atlanta’s population growth and economy might not be what it once was, but you wouldn’t know that by the droves of restaurants opening here.
Despite income stagnation and a struggling employment picture, the number of restaurant openings has jumped 63 percent in the last year.
Metro Atlanta has added about 540 restaurants in the past six months, an average of 90 a month, according to the Georgia Restaurant Association. The area added around 330 restaurants over the same period last year, an average of about 55 per month.
The dining scene is important to metro Atlanta because it creates jobs, generates tax revenue and drives tourism.
“Restaurants not only elevate the perception of our destination for visitors, but also play an important role in the sales process for meetings and conventions,” said William Pate, president and chief executive officer of the Atlanta Convention & Visitors Bureau.
That’s not to say all is perfect. Hundreds of restaurants close annually, including flashy chef-driven enterprises such as Emeril Lagasse’s Emeril’s and Tom Colicchio’s Craft. The area also went through a period where prices were too high and operators didn’t adjust quickly enough, said Ford Fry, who recently opened The Optimist on Howell Mill Road.
“There’s definitely a move away from fine dining,” he said. “Customers still want high quality, but at a better price.”
The profits that metro restaurants were enjoying the first half of 2012 started slowing down in the most recent quarter, said Bob Wagner, president of NetFinancials, which studies the industry. Americans also are not eating out as much as they did more than a decade ago, said Harry Balzer, an NPD Group food industry analyst. The average American ate out 215 times a year in 2000, Balzer said. By August 2012, that number had dropped to 194 times a year.
Still, Atlanta is popular for many reasons: affordable real estate because of the area’s overbuilding, a large population of young workers and its designation as the South’s capital, restaurateurs and experts said.
“You can’t do business in this part of the country without Atlanta,” said Steve Difillippo, the owner of Foxborough, Mass.-based Davio’s Northern Italian Steakhouse chain, which opened at Phipps Plaza a little more than two years ago. “While we could’ve gone anywhere in the region, it would not have made as much sense because we wouldn’t have been in its business center.”
Location was critical for new Midtown eatery Mi Cocina, said Michael Cox, chief executive officer of M Crowd Restaurant Group, the restaurant’s Dallas-based owner. A strong business crowd during the day that is replaced by a vibrant turnout of young diners at night is expected to make the location successful.
Roi Shlomo, who has opened more than 20 Yogli Mogli stores in metro Atlanta and Georgia since 2009, said metro Atlanta is a restaurant destination because it has the perfect mixture of population density and high income and education levels, elements crucial to a restaurant’s success.
“People kept telling me to go to Florida for the sunshine, but I chose Atlanta because it’s a stable community that spends heavily,” Shlomo said.
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