During one eventful week in February 2012, at the height of the post-recession dining shakeout, Atlanta lost a pair of notable restaurants. The first was the Chick-fil-A outlet in South DeKalb Mall, a community anchor for 42 years. The second was MF Buckhead. It was barely 4 years old, but the last standing and by far grandest of the three restaurants the Kinjo brothers had operated in Atlanta for more than a decade.
The Japanese restaurant anchored Terminus Atlanta, the Buckhead tower, with a palatial 8,000-square-foot dining room. An upstairs chef's omakase table with a mere eight seats hovered like a space pod above the dining room, glinting behind smoked glass windows. Climbing those stairs, entering that room and then settling into a white Italian leather slingback chair at the counter was like gaining passage into the holiest of holies sushi sanctum.
During its first year of operation, up until the recession, MF Buckhead attracted a big-spending crowd and brought in $400,000 a month. Sales nosedived the second year, and by the end of the fourth the family reorganized the business under Chapter 11 bankruptcy. There were plans to relocate but instead the restaurant closed without warning, a mere day after assuring an Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporter they would soldier on.
In just over one year, the Kinjos had lost all three restaurants.
