Atlanta’s South City Kitchen celebrates 30 delicious years

ATLANTA - Atlanta has changed a lot over the past three decades. But when it comes to getting your fill of fried chicken, corn muffins, and shrimp and grits, one restaurant has more than stood the test of time: South City Kitchen.

This month, the team at South City Kitchen is celebrating 30 years of serving up Southern classics to a very loyal army of eaters. The flagship restaurant of Atlanta’s Fifth Group Restaurants, South City Kitchen launched in April 1993, in the wake of the historic "Storm of the Century" blizzard (which, remembers founding partner Steve Simon, delayed the restaurant’s opening). The original location — on Crescent Avenue in Midtown — remains a popular gathering spot for locals, and has since been joined by locations in Vinings, Buckhead, and Alpharetta’s Avalon. 

In honor of the restaurant’s 30th anniversary, the South City Kitchen team dug into its archives and pulled out some fun facts for us: since opening, the Midtown location has served up more than a million pieces of fried chicken, more than six million corn muffins, and more than 200,000 individual fried green tomatoes! Oh, and they’ve got a Pimiento Cheese Burger which was a given a very enthusiastic thumbs up from our own Buck Lanford back in 2021.

Of course, we’ve never ones to turn down a celebration — so, this morning, we spent time at South City Kitchen Midtown, reflecting with the team on the restaurant’s legacy and taste-testing a few of the menu favorites. Click the video player to check it out — and click here for more information on South City Kitchen.