Mothers Best will expand into the former Decatur Station Food Mart later this summer, doubling the footprint of the Church Street fried chicken restaurant and adding up to ten seats in a new bar area as well as a second restroom.
The expansion will also allow owners Ean Camperlengo and Ross Winecoff to expand the food and beverage menu and open the downtown Decatur restaurant for service seven days a week. This includes keeping the to-go window, steps from the Decatur MARTA station, operating daily on the side of the building.
Mothers Best will remain open during construction. Camperlengo and Winecoff expect to complete renovations on the old food mart space by mid-September.
“It was always something we’d pictured if the bodega left. It just happened earlier than we expected,” said Armando Celentano. “Decatur goes out of its way to be pro-small business.”
Camperlengo and Winecoff partnered with Celentano and Donald Durant to open Mothers Best and Smileys Burger Club on East Howard Avenue. Both restaurants opened late last year. Celentano owns Argosy in East Atlanta Village and co-owns Sceptre Brewing Arts in Oakhurst with Durant.
When it opened in December, Mothers Best immediately faced challenges with a lack of seating and proper storage. Mothers Best operates as a counter-service restaurant. The narrow dining room, seating around 25 people, means space is tight, and even tighter when lines to order snake out the door.
Related stories:
• Mothers Best opens in the heart of Decatur
• Smileys Burger Club across from Kimball House
Combining the two spaces will add up to 25 more seats in the dining room, along with another ten seats at the bar. Dubbed the “Bird Garden,” Camperlengo and Winecoff have already started to expand the patio seating out front, including rail seating overlooking Church Street.
With the expansion, the plan is to eventually use the current space as a takeout ordering area and provide counter service to people popping into Mothers Best for a quick bite. The expanded dining room will offer overflow seating during the afternoon and shift to table service after 5 p.m.
The bar at Mothers Best will continue serving popular cocktails like the frozen Irish coffee, rum-based Brickey Blast, and Lemonade Crusher, but add new drinks to the menu, including more beer and wine. And look for a late-night menu to launch this fall.
Mothers Best started life as a pop-up serving crawfish boils, fried chicken, and chargrilled oysters hosted at Argosy, Sceptre Brewing Arts, and Decatur cocktail bar S.O.S. Tiki Bar around the corner. At the restaurant, Camperlengo and Winecoff now serve buckets of bone-in fried chicken, two- and three-piece fried chicken meals, and fried chicken sandwiches with sides of red beans and spiced rice, creamy velvet potatoes, and collard green coleslaw.
It’s already been a busy spring for Camperlengo and Winecoff, who shut down Smileys Burger Club for a month in April to widen and cover the front patio and add another restroom on the side of the building. The walk-up burger joint, located across from Kimball House, reopened in early May.
Mothers Best, 406 Church St., Decatur.