Walk the stretch of North Highland Avenue between Virginia Avenue and Amsterdam this month and you'll pass three storefronts in three completely different stages of becoming something else. One has its lights on and a line at the host stand. One still has butcher paper taped to the glass and a projected date nobody quite trusts anymore. One, a block over on the Poncey-Highland side, has been "almost open" for so long that regulars stopped asking a while back.
What makes that worth noticing is that all three used to be something the neighborhood had counted on for decades. Two sat within a few doors of each other on the same corner. The third sits inside a building most people in Virginia-Highland have walked past a thousand times without knowing its name.
Two Closures That Looked the Same and Weren't
Taco Mac's original location, at the corner of North Highland and Virginia, closed in 2025 after 46 years. Fox 5 Atlanta reported that the chain began as a single neighborhood bar in 1979 before growing into 28 locations across the Southeast. A few doors down, Farm Burger closed at the end of 2025 after roughly five years in the neighborhood.
On paper those look like the same story: an old restaurant loses its lease. Talk to the people who watched both happen and you get two different explanations.
Scott Drake, who's been part of Moe's and Joe's ownership group since 2012 at a bar that's held the same corner since the 1940s, told the Southerner Online that Taco Mac's decline traces to a specific moment. "Taco Mac was big back in the day, but when they sold out and went corporate in 2018, in my opinion, that brand fell apart." His read is that the chain lost the local feel that had carried it for decades once ownership changed hands.
Farm Burger's problem was different. Jennifer Cohn, an 11-year resident quoted in the same piece, pointed to what was sitting on either side of it: "We had Farm Burger right next to Moe's and Joe's, with George's right down the street. All of these are burger restaurants, so I feel like the reason Farm Burger had to leave is due to competition and a lack of diversity in restaurants." One restaurant lost the thing that made it distinct. The other never had enough distance from its neighbors to begin with.
That distinction matters because it predicts something about what comes next. A brand-loyalty problem and a category-crowding problem don't get fixed the same way, and the two replacements on this block are betting on opposite fixes.
What's Already Open
The Farm Burger space at 1017 North Highland has a longer history than the burger chain that most recently occupied it. Building owner Lynn Dewitt told WhatNow that the corner lot started as a Standard Oil filling station, was expanded for decades as Herrington Service Station, and only later became a restaurant space, all while keeping its original bones.
As of July 2, that space is So. Fox, a wine-focused restaurant from Myles Moody and Rachael Pack, the husband-and-wife team behind Kinship Butcher & Sundry across the sidewalk. Rough Draft Atlanta confirmed the opening date in its June restaurant roundup. The name nods to the muscadine grape, sometimes called the Southern Fox, and the menu leans into that regional focus with in-house fermented vegetables, Georgia-grown olives seasoned in beef fat, and entrees built from cuts sourced through Kinship's own butcher operation next door.
That last detail is the important one. So. Fox didn't have to build a supply chain, hire a separate purchasing team, or introduce itself to the block. It's the same owners, the same walk to work, expanding into a second dining room a few steps from the first. That's a fast reopening because very little about the operation actually had to start from zero.
It also directly answers Cohn's complaint. Where the old lineup was three burger spots in a row, the corner now has a wine bar built around fermentation and whole-animal butchery sitting where the third burger option used to be. The diversity problem she named gets solved by the exact tenant who moved in.
What's Still Finishing
A few doors down, at 1006 North Highland, Jack Brown's Beer & Burger Joint is taking over the old Taco Mac space. It's the first Atlanta location for a chain that started in Harrisonburg, Virginia in 2009 and now runs more than 20 locations across six states, according to WhatNow's reporting on the permit filings. A Georgia LLC tied to the company's president was registered in May of last year, and building permits for the space have been moving through the city since.
The company's own site has had a live menu and address posted for months, and food-delivery listings already treat the location as active. But the original target was summer 2025, and more than a year later there's still no confirmed opening date attached to the address, just the live menu. That gap is worth sitting with for a second. So. Fox went from a closed lease to open doors in about six months because it slid into an existing restaurant shell with an owner who already worked next door. Jack Brown's is a chain retrofitting a former sports-bar space it doesn't have deep local ties to, filing permits for structural work along the way. The difference in those two timelines isn't bad luck. It's the difference between moving in and building out.
Whether a second national burger brand fixes what corporate ownership did to the first one is an open question. Drake's read on Taco Mac was that the brand lost its local feel once it went corporate. Jack Brown's arrives in Virginia-Highland already corporate, just from a different state. The neighborhood is about to find out if that matters as much as he thinks it does.
The Slowest One Is a Block Away, and It Proves the Point
One block into Poncey-Highland, in the basement of what used to be the Highland Inn and is now Otto's Apartment Hotel, the Talat Market team has been trying to open a Thai bar called Some Luck since Rough Draft Atlanta first reported the plan in November 2024. Chefs Parnass Savang and Rod Lassiter, who run the Michelin-recommended Talat Market in Summerhill, are taking over the old Highland Ballroom Lounge next to Madeira Park. The original target was early summer 2025. As of Rough Draft's most recent update this past May, it was still being described as "just weeks away," roughly a year past the original date.
Some of that delay is by design. The team has said they want to preserve the room's checkerboard flooring, hexagon tile in the bathroom, and vintage light fixtures rather than gut the space, which takes longer than a standard buildout. Some Luck is the opposite case from So. Fox: an independent, chef-owned concept trying to keep an old room's character intact, without a chain's construction crew or a sister restaurant's supply chain to lean on. It's the slowest reopening on this stretch precisely because it's the most custom.
Line up all three and the pattern holds. The tenant who reused the most of what was already there opened fastest. The tenant retrofitting a chain concept into someone else's old space is still finishing, more than a year after its first announced date. The tenant preserving the most character in an old room has taken the longest of all. Reopening speed on this corridor has very little to do with how popular a concept is and a lot to do with how much of the original building gets kept.
What This Means If You Live Here
If you've been waiting for the corner to feel finished, it isn't going to happen all at once. So. Fox is open now, with Kinship's butcher counter still next door if you want the same team's original format. Jack Brown's will likely open before Some Luck does, if the pattern above holds, since a chain retrofit has fewer preservation decisions to slow it down than an independent operator trying to save a checkerboard floor. Some Luck remains the one worth checking on periodically rather than planning around.
What's actually changed is more interesting than any single opening. Three burger-and-bar concepts on one short stretch have narrowed to one, replaced by a wine bar built around fermentation, a national chain betting a fresh operator can succeed where a corporate-owned local brand couldn't, and a late-night Thai room a block away that will eventually add a fourth category entirely. The corner isn't just turning over. It's diversifying in exactly the direction an 11-year resident said it needed to.
Engel & Völkers Atlanta advisors work these blocks daily, which means we notice the small shifts, like which storefronts are actually open versus still finishing, before they show up anywhere else. If you're curious how changes like these are shaping Virginia-Highland street by street, connect with an EV Advisor.
