A new culinary offering at the Ashford Lane development is underway, but the opening is delayed.
The Hall at Ashford Lane – a new food hall and bar – will come to Ashford Lane, a mixed-use project with restaurants, retail and office space. It will be located at 4500 Olde Perimeter Way in the former Perimeter Place shopping center, which is being redeveloped with new tenants and green space.
Ashford Lane’s website says the food hall is expected to open this summer, but a spokesperson for The Hall said that opening date is incorrect. According to Director of Agency Leasing Coleman Morris of JLL Atlanta – the retail group tasked with repositioning and leasing the property – the development team for The Hall is starting to see supply chain effects of COVID-19 on construction materials, causing a delay in the building process.
“As of now, they are targeting a fall opening but cannot guarantee that they will open by that date since it is dependent on whether or not they are able to obtain their construction materials,” Morris said in an email.
The Hall at Ashford Lane is another in a line of food halls that owner Jamal Wilson has opened and plans to open in locations such as Tampa, Fla. and Nashville, Tenn.
At least one tenant has been announced for the location at Ashford Lane. According to The Hall’s Facebook page, Chef Teresa Acosta won a complimentary vendor space at the food hall. Acosta’s culinary style highlights Cuban, Latin American, and Spanish cuisine, and her signature dish is a “classic Cuban Sandwich with Yuca Fries.”
No other tenants have been announced. According to Morris, the food hall will be about 17,000 square feet with a plethora of food stalls to choose from.
Morris said when The Hall opens customers will be able to order at the separate restaurant stalls, like you might at Krog Street Market in Atlanta. But, what sets The Hall apart is the customer’s ability to sit down at a table, have a waiter, and be able to mix and match different offerings from different stalls.
“It’s like just being in one restaurant, but you have all of these different choices from the different vendors that are in the food hall,” she said.
Morris said the food hall will also feature a bar that will open to the outdoors, featuring cocktails and other drinks.
“It’s not only just bringing in a lunch crowd, like so many food halls do,” she said. “It’s also bringing in a nighttime crowd as well, especially since people can come in and feel like they’re having a true dining experience by being able to sit at a table and have people wait on them.”
In addition to the food hall, the overall Ashford Lane project has other planned retailers and restaurants. Morris said some of the team working on Ashford Lane was also involved in the redevelopment of Shops Around Lenox in Buckhead.
“A lot of the same team members that worked on that are working on Ashford Lane, to give you a reference of the types of tenants that we’ll be pursuing,” she said.
Superica, the Atlanta-based Mexican chain, will be opening up a new location in Ashford Lane in the summer of 2022, and Morris said the development’s central area – The Lawn – will also open up in the summer of 2022.
“The lawn will be surrounded by all restaurants,” she said. “All the restaurants will have these incredible patios, but then they kind of spill out into the lawn area.”
Morris wasn’t ready to announce any of the other restaurants, but did give a vague outline of what types of restaurants residents can expect. Those include an ice cream chain, an Asian concept, a breakfast space, and a sandwich place.
Morris also said that specialty retail stores – such as home furnishings, boutiques and fitness centers – will be included in the Ashford Lane tenant mix. The retail space, she said, is helping fill a demand in the market.
“What we kept hearing from retailers out there that wanted to be in the market, but weren’t was that there was just no cool real estate. There was no real estate that really had any soul to it,” she said. “It seems like this place will have soul, and it will be a gathering place for Dunwoody, which is really something that’s missed right now.”
Correction: A previous version of this article misspelled Chef Acosta’s name. The spelling has been updated.