This story is part of a Georgia Voice series highlighting LGBTQ+-owned restaurants in Atlanta.
Named for the PJ Harvey song “Long Snake Moan,” Long Snake is not your typical Atlanta restaurant.
The nomadic wine bar, created by Joshua Fryer, has called many places in the city home since its founding in 2023, traveling from Whoopsie’s on the edge of Reynoldstown to Georgia Beer Garden on Edgewood Avenue to Pure Quill Superette in Kirkwood, finally landing at its current location at Banshee in East Atlanta Village.
On Sunday and Monday evenings, Long Snake serves a revolving menu celebrating seasonal ingredients and the cultural melting pot of the Southeast, with dishes like collard steamed catfish, deviled country ham ravioli, and its much-loved hoecakes.
Due to its transitory status, Long Snake is not quite a pop-up and not quite a traditional restaurant.
“[The nomadic format] allows us to exist because we don’t need the capital investment to be a brand, but it doesn’t necessarily make it easier to exist,” Fryer said, who is a veteran of the Atlanta restaurant scene and former 8ARM general manager and beverage director.
“It comes with a whole host of other challenges; you’re having to pack everything up in your car and move it over and unload it all and set everything up and break it all down,” Fryer explained.
Without a permanent location, ordering ingredients and supplies for Long Snake can be rough. Each time Fryer orders from his regular vendors, he must tell them where Long Snake will be that week and how and when to access the host restaurant.
Faced with these additional challenges amid working in an already difficult industry rife with rising costs, thin profit margins, and long hours on your feet, Fryer said he’s ready to take a break. It’s also time to rethink how he operates Long Snake in the future.
Fryer will sunset Long Snake in its current form at Banshee on Monday, Feb. 24.
But fans of Long Snake won’t be saying goodbye forever to Fryer’s roving restaurant. He’ll use the hiatus to regroup and reimagine its format, transforming Long Snake into something more consistent and sustainable.
“It’ll probably look something more like a monthly or semi-monthly event,” he said. “We haven’t decided whether it’ll be open to the public or whether it might be ticketed.”
While Fryer isn’t quite sure what Long Snake will look like when it finally returns, he hopes to build off of the community-driven aspect of the restaurant industry by collaborating more with other chefs and working directly with local farmers.
“Because it’s already such a welcoming and diverse industry, I think it leads to more collaboration because [restaurant] people are more open-minded, in general,” he said.
“They come from different backgrounds; there are a lot of people who come from backgrounds such as the LGBTQ+ community who have been ostracized or oppressed in some form or fashion in their lives,” Fryer added.
He sees Long Snake as an opportunity to be creative with his food and the service model. Through Long Snake in the future, Fryer hopes to provide a platform and culinary springboard to help benefit other people in the Atlanta restaurant community.
Long Snake at Banshee, 1271 Glenwood Ave., East Atlanta Village. Feb. 23-24, from 6 to 11 p.m. Check out the menu here. Follow Long Snake on Instagram for updates.
