First look: Heritage Supper Club opens in Summerhill
The meal begins with something small enough to disappear in one bite. A bon bon, served on a plate that arrived broken.
The shell is dark chocolate, sourced from South America, “the hard shell I have to put on,” said chef Demetrius Brown while plating it in the newly painted kitchen. Inside, peach jam stands in for “the sweetness and joy for life that I have.” Beneath that, ground nut, “to stay grounded.” On top, a sprinkling of scotch bonnet dust, “for my fervor and being able to be successful,” he said.
The plate itself was never meant to be used this way. He pulled it from a box of dishware that arrived shattered in transit, and rather than discard it, he filed the edges by hand — “Taking pieces and making something useful, like what I am doing with my food,” Brown explained.
Heritage Supper Club, delayed and discussed in the expectant tones of restaurants that already feel important, has been eagerly awaited since announced. The bon bon, gone in a single bite, is the story distilled: the flotsam of a pop-up gathered up with intention, made to carry more weight than its size suggests. It’s the story of diaspora, risen, tangled together, fragments picked up along the way and pressed into something whole. Each dish, he said, “has a story, has meaning.”
Nothing is served for the sake of spectacle.
Why chef Demetrius Brown opened Heritage Supper Club in Summerhill
Brown and business partner Brandon Blanchard, who together also own Bread & Butterfly, wanted a location with historical weight.
“We really wanted to be in a place that has cultural significance to Atlanta, especially Black significance,” Brown said.
Summerhill, one of the city’s original Reconstruction-era settlements, which was hollowed out by highway construction in the 1950s that displaced Black and Jewish businesses, sat at the top of their list.
“To be a part of the revitalization that is happening, that’s something we really wanted to help along,” Brown said.
The timing feels deliberate, too. Brown and Blanchard could have opened Heritage three years ago, he said, but he wasn’t ready, and neither was the moment.
“Bread & Butterfly prepared us for this, the successes, but also the headaches, the misunderstandings and the perception,” Brown said.
He pointed to other chefs and restaurants he admires: Kwame Onwuachi, Charlie Mitchell, Pierre Thiam’s Teranga in New York and the way David Chang once pulled Southeast Asian flavors into the mainstream.
“I think we’re in that moment now for African and Caribbean food,” Brown said.
Borrowing a line from Outkast, he put it more plainly: “Africa has something to say. The Caribbean has something to say.”
How Heritage Supper Club expands Atlanta’s idea of Black food
Atlanta, Brown said, “has spent too long known as a meat-and-potatoes” city, and he believes it has lost ground since the pandemic rather than gaining it. Heritage, he hopes, will be different — not comfort food dressed up, but something closer to Atlanta significance, and especially Black significance.
“Whether we succeed or fail, we’re going to be the benchmark for everybody else to live up to, or exceed,” he said.
Could this become a Black-owned restaurant with a Michelin star?
“It’s a lofty goal,” he said, “but we are aiming for the stars.”
Brown is also direct when asked about what he thinks Atlanta still gets wrong about Black food in a city that calls itself a Black mecca.
“Whenever anybody thinks of Black food, it’s always just soul food,” he said. “That plays a big part of our history, but we have to look past that to see where this food actually came from.”
He is equally determined to undo the assumption that his food will simply be spicy. Nearly every dish on the tasting menu, including a sorbet, carries scotch bonnet, a cornerstone of flavor and cultural identity in Afro-Caribbean diasporic cooking. But heat isn’t the point.
“We’re pulling out all the floral notes and leaving the spice behind as much as we can,” he said.
What’s on the tasting menu at Heritage Supper Club
What Heritage refuses to do is flatten African, Caribbean and Black American food traditions into one undifferentiated story. Brown calls out the distinctions on the menu as food touches the table. Jollof rice, he noted, shares lineage with Carolina Gold rice, which threads forward into New Orleans jambalaya.
“We’re connecting the dots to show how much of what’s considered classic Southern food traces back to the diaspora,” he said.
A jerk chicken yakitori borrows the discipline of Japanese cookery while keeping its soul planted in Jamaica, “a balancing act,” he said.
The beverage program, developed by beverage director Keyatta Mincey, follows the same logic. Hibiscus and uziza seeds (West African peppercorns) turn up on both sides of the pass.
How Demetrius Brown’s heritage shapes the menu
Trinidadian by family, and raised in a Puerto Rican and Dominican neighborhood in Rhode Island, Brown remembers crossing the street for a Jamaican patty and walking a block the other direction for lo mein.
“I was well-traveled without going many places,” he said.
His trajectory arrives on the plate. Carmen’s cucumbers rebuild a memory of his aunt’s garden, the veggies picked at night, sliced on the porch and eaten with salt and vinegar.
“The best cucumber I’ve ever had in my life,” he said, now made into a half dozen preparations of the same reminiscence.
Heritage’s Jamaican beef patties recall that neighborhood bodega, the paper bag turned translucent with grease on the walk home, now made with local beef and house-made dough. The Hispaniola burger, dreamed up on a whim for an event, layers Haitian epis and Dominican sofrito onto a plantain bun — like the “two distinct cultures coexisting on one shared island,” he said.
Inside Heritage Supper Club in Summerhill
Heritage is built to be walked through, not simply sat in. Guests check in at a host stand, and what looks at first like a wall of framed art swings open to reveal a long, dim hallway that winds you deeper into the building before abruptly delivering you into the light and clatter of the open kitchen and chef’s counter where the tasting menu is served. Dessert awaits up a staircase at a separate dessert bar. Afterward, guests who want to linger can drift into the cocktail lounge, where an a la carte menu runs first come, first served.
The journey to dinner deliberately follows a kinked passage rather than a straight line, and the walls along the hallway carry the weight of what the passage is meant to evoke. Wallpaper is patterned to suggest the movement of water, the ocean crossed and recrossed during the trans-Atlantic slave trade — a long unlit stretch between one place and another, as Brown described. One brick wall along your dinner route is left deliberately unfinished, raw against the warm wood.
“The old coming into the new,” Brown said.
It’s the whole thesis of the restaurant, walked rather than told. And the walls, covered in art created by Black artists from Atlanta and the Southeast, tell Brown’s story as well.
Heritage Supper Club will host Cocktails & Castoffs for DIG
On Sept. 20, Brown’s instinct toward connection and repair becomes public and communal. Just 10 days after opening, Heritage will host Cocktails & Castoffs, a benefit for DIG, a nonprofit building sustainable community gardens across Africa, helping communities move toward long-term food sovereignty. Brown sits on the board, and the mission is personal to him: “teach a man to fish …” as he puts it.
He will cook alongside chefs Justin Dixon and Max Hines, whose backgrounds run parallel to his without overlapping. Hines is rooted in the food of the Northeast and Dixon in classic Southern technique; Brown bridges both with Caribbean and African influence. It’s diaspora in practice, not metaphor.
When does Heritage Supper Club open in Atlanta
Heritage Supper Club opens Sept. 10 on Georgia Avenue in Summerhill, serving dinner Tuesday through Saturday.
Whether Heritage becomes the restaurant Brown hopes it will — awarded, imitated, remembered as the moment Atlanta’s idea of Black food widened — the ambition was never about the accolade. It’s about his grandmother’s pone for dessert; the best cucumbers of his life and the bon bon shaped like the man describing himself.