What's New in Virginia-Highland on North Highland

Walk the block between Virginia Avenue and Amsterdam this month and the sidewalk feels the same. The awnings are the same. Kinship Butcher & Sundry is still slicing dry-aged ribeyes behind the same window. What's different sits inside two doors most residents pass without thinking about, and underneath a lease agreement almost nobody read.

On July 2, So. Fox, a wine-focused restaurant from the team behind Kinship Butcher & Sundry, opened in Virginia-Highland next to the butcher shop in the former Farm Burger space. A block south on North Highland, a basement room that has been quiet since the Highland Ballroom Lounge era is finishing its buildout for Some Luck. Two chef-driven rooms, walking distance apart, opening in the same summer, is not a coincidence of the calendar. It is the surface of a longer decision that has been playing out on this corridor for the better part of a year.

What 1017 North Highland Used to Be

The address matters because of what it held before. So. Fox took the space at 1017 N. Highland Ave. NE that Farm Burger vacated at the end of 2025. The chain's exit was not a quiet one for anyone who has lived here more than a decade. Farm Burger sat inside the neighborhood's calendar as much as its dining rotation.

The tenants who came next did not treat that history as decoration. Chef and co-owner Myles Moody serves a hyperseasonal a la carte menu, and co-owner and sommelier Rachael Pack developed a natural wine program for the restaurant. The name is a slow pun for readers who know their Southern botany. So. Fox is named after Georgia's indigenous grape varietal, the southern fox grape, also known as the muscadine. A wine bar in Virginia-Highland naming itself after the local grape is a small tell. This is a room built to sit here for a long time, not to test a concept.

The Basement on the South End

The second opening is quieter and, in its way, more surprising. Chefs Parnass Savang and Rod Lassiter, owners of Summerhill Thai restaurant Talat Market, are opening Thai bar Some Luck in the former Highland Ballroom Lounge beneath the Highland Inn, now Otto's Apartment Hotel, with a Thai-focused menu of bar snacks, noodle soups, wings, and late-night food inspired by dishes found at street stalls throughout Thailand.

Talat Market is not a casual reference point. Talat Market appeared on the Atlanta Magazine "Best New Restaurants" list in 2021, and Savang was a semifinalist for the James Beard Rising Star Chef of the Year in 2018. That resume typically leads to a downtown follow-up in a glass-front build-out, not a basement bar under an old inn on a residential street. As of late spring, Some Luck was anticipated for summer 2026 after delays pushed out its opening earlier this year.

The design decision is worth pausing on. Lassiter and Savang wanted to leave elements of the Highland Ballroom intact, including checkerboard flooring throughout the dining room and bar, hexagon flooring in the bathroom, and several vintage light fixtures, with tropical plants and pops of pink and yellow neon. A decorated Thai kitchen chose a preserved basement room over new construction. That is not a real estate detail. It is a real estate thesis.

Two Kitchens, One Bet on the Block

Read the two openings in isolation and you have a wine bar and a Thai bar. Read them together and the shape shows.

Two accomplished, chef-owned kitchens planted small-format rooms on the same short walk in the same summer. Neither is a national chain replacement. Neither is a rushed pop-up. Both operators chose Virginia-Highland when they could have chosen anywhere. If you live here, that pattern is more useful than any single review, because it tells you what the next twelve months of dinner reservations are going to look like.

The Fall Calendar the Newcomers Are Walking Into

Both rooms are opening into a neighborhood that has a rhythm of its own. Residents already know the beats. Newcomers who moved in over the last year may not have all the dates on the fridge yet, so here is the working calendar for the back half of 2026:

1. VaHi Farmers Market, Sunday mornings. The seasonal Sunday morning market hosts 25 rotating vendors and five local produce farmers at Highland Woodworking's parking lot. Reimagined in 2024 and back on its stride.
2. Candy Crawl, the Wednesday before Halloween. A neighborhood favorite that invites families to dress up in costumes and trick-or-treat at local businesses.
3. North Highland Restaurant Week, November 8–12. A culinary celebration held the first week of November, offering prix fixe menus at 20 neighborhood restaurants from Morningside Village to Atkins Park. This will be the first Restaurant Week with So. Fox and, in all likelihood, Some Luck on the map.
4. Murphy's Tree Lighting, first Thursday in December. Each year on the first Thursday in December, Murphy's kicks off the season with the lighting of their Christmas tree atop the restaurant, complete with caroling, hot cocoa, and even a visit from the Clauses.
5. Winterfest & Tour of Homes, December. An annual holiday celebration featuring the Jingle Jog 5K, Holiday Parade, Gift Market with 80+ vendors, and Kids Corner, with the Virginia-Highland Civic Association's Tour of Homes joining the weekend festivities as of 2025.

For the Porchfest crowd, this year's edition is already in the books. On May 16, Virginia Highland District Porchfest returned for its sixth year, turning more than 50 neighborhood homes into stages for over 100 bands and drawing tens of thousands of people from across Atlanta and beyond. The number worth remembering is what it funded. Last year alone, Porchfest raised $95,000, funding everyday improvements in the community like cleaner streets, added tree lighting, and enhanced public safety, while also sustaining events such as the VaHi Farmers Market, North Highland Restaurant Week, and Winterfest that keep the neighborhood active year-round. Every prix fixe you order in November and every string light you notice in December has that fundraiser stitched into it.

Why This Summer Reads Differently

The instinct in a neighborhood story is to treat two restaurant openings as two restaurant openings. That is not what happened here. What happened is that two accomplished operators, on their own timelines, with their own capital, arrived at the same read of the same three blocks. They decided that the highest-return move for their next room was to open it next to each other on North Highland Avenue, in preserved spaces, at small-format scale.

For a resident, the operational effect is simple. The walking radius from Virginia and North Highland just got denser without getting louder. There is now a natural-wine dinner at one end of a short stroll and a late-night Thai bar at the other. Kinship still sits between them, still slicing. La Tavola, Murphy's, and Atkins Park have not moved. The 2026 addition is that the corridor now holds the kind of chef-driven small rooms that residents used to drive to Summerhill, Reynoldstown, or Old Fourth Ward to find.

For anyone whose calendar runs on Saturdays at the market and Sundays at the park, none of this asks you to change your routine. It just adds two rooms to it. And if you have friends in from out of town in November, the Restaurant Week map is going to look meaningfully different than the one you handed them last year.

An Invitation

We watch this corridor closely because our clients live on it, walk it, and eventually pass their houses to the next family that will. If you have questions about how the corner is shifting, what any of it means for the block you live on, or simply want a second opinion on what you are seeing from your porch, Kim Boyd and The Boyd Team are always glad to talk. Request a Confidential Consultation whenever the timing feels right.