At Avize, the Westside fine dining restaurant recently named one of Bon Appétit’s “Best New Restaurants in America,” Chef Karl Gorline serves modern Alpine dishes with luxe ingredients like foie gras and American Wagyu. But Bar Avize, the restaurant’s sibling next door, has become just as much of a destination for its fancy takes on comfort food, including caviar-topped chicken nuggets and a viral, $20 “NYC Happy Meal,” featuring a broccoli Caesar salad, truffle fries, and a mini martini.
Across Atlanta, restaurants like Bar Avize are launching weekly specials, swapping finer-dining dishes for nostalgia-fueled plates, and offering budget-friendly tasting menus and meal deals in hopes of attracting price-conscious diners back to the dining room and boosting sluggish sales.
Greg Best, a partner at Krog Street Market’s Ticonderoga Club, told Rough Draft these recession indicator menus are the direct result of skyrocketing food costs, tariffs, and recent declines in consumer restaurant spending.
“The sector, at large, is taking a massive hit now,” said Best of the country’s current uncertain and chaotic political and economic climates. According to CNN’s analysis of Commerce Department data, the first half of 2025 marked one of the weakest growth periods for U.S. restaurants and bars in the last decade, even slower than the COVID-19 lockdowns of 2020 and 2021.
Best said Ticonderoga Club, which also closed for four months in 2022 and 2023 due to a water main break, has experienced a significant drop-off in customers this year, including many multi-week regulars.
“We had a brief period of time after the height of Covid where people wanted luxe (food) again,” he said. “But I think right now the average dining public is getting fatigued, and when times are hard, people want nostalgic foods. They want the mac and cheese, the burgers, and the pizza,” he continued.
In August, Ticonderoga Club revived its popular pop-up, Captain B’s Fish Camp, to try and draw more business during the restaurant’s slower days and offer more affordable options on the menu to new and existing patrons. The menu features what Best calls “well-sourced, comfort-level seafood,” available for takeout and dine-in service on Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday evenings from Ticonderoga Club’s “Pineapple Room”.
“We’re trying to be smart and fall back on things that our customer base has reacted positively to in the past,” he said of Captain B’s. “It’s also a new opportunity for guests of ours to get the Club experience without the same price tag of sitting down and doing a full dinner.”
Captain B’s “Country Boy,” for instance, is a Mississippi-style catfish sandwich on white bread and costs $16, and can come with sides like hushpuppies or coleslaw for $4 each.
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Chef Deborah VanTrece, owner of Twisted Soul Cookhouse & Pours in Blandtown and Oreatha’s At the Point in Cascade Heights, is also adding more affordable dishes to her restaurants’ menus.
“Honestly, this has been the slowest summer I’ve ever had since I’ve been open, and we are definitely feeling the pinch and adjusting our menus accordingly,” she said.
Like Best, VanTrece believes consumers are becoming price-conscious at the same time restaurant owners like herself are facing rising food costs and challenges sourcing menu items due to ongoing tariffs. For example, one of Oretha’s most popular cocktails, My Okassan, uses a Japanese whisky that took six months to procure due to tariffs and shipping delays.
“So much [of my menu] depends on what products are available or what we can afford, so we’re constantly changing everything, making it all subject to availability and pricing,” VanTrece said of sourcing ingredients and navigating price adjustments.
Recently, she subbed a strip loin for filet mignon in one of Twisted Soul’s most popular dishes, the Steak Lady D, the restaurant’s play on classic steak Diane. The decision to switch from strip loin to filet mignon came down to the price of meat rising by $3 a pound in a single week.
VanTrece is trying to fill her menu with comforting, budget-friendly staples, like rice and potatoes, and started offering a $15 blue plate special during lunch service at Twisted Soul.
“I’m constantly paying attention to what’s moving and what isn’t [on the menu], and switching things out, which in the past I didn’t really worry about so much, and I could give things time to catch on,” VanTrece said of her menu development strategy these days.
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Michelin-starred Lazy Betty in Midtown is another Atlanta restaurant adding more budget-friendly options for customers. The restaurant recently launched a four-course dessert tasting, a menu of four rotating sweets from pastry chef Lindsey Davis, available only at the bar. Davis offers desserts like an elevated take on a cookies and cream bar that hints to nostalgia, but stays true to the fine-dining aesthetic of Lazy Betty.
At $110 per person, the dessert tasting menu is still a luxury, but attainable, especially for special occasions. And while Lazy Betty also serves a $285 eight-course tasting menu in the dining room, the bar features a scaled-down, four-course version for $170 per person.
Lazy Betty chef and co-owner Ron Hsu said the concise tasting menus at the bar give people the chance to experience the restaurant without the time commitment—or price tag—of the full, eight-course tasting experience, which can last for more than two hours.
At Little Bear in Summerhill, Chef Jarrett Stieber has served an affordable tasting menu since the restaurant opened in February 2020.
“So many people are turned off by fine dining because it seems pretentious,” explained Stieber. Little Bear’s four-course, prix-fixe menu with an amuse bouche is just $75, significantly less expensive than most tasting menu experiences at restaurants in Atlanta.
“We can charge $75 and make a good profit margin and make interesting food that’s a bit more approachable without sacrificing attention to detail and quality,” he said.
Like Ticonderoga Club, Little Bear is experimenting with a new service format, opening for dinner on Monday nights, starting on Sep. 29. Stieber’s goal is to draw an industry crowd similar to Gigi’s Italian Kitchen in Candler Park, while offering a dining option on a day when most restaurants are closed.
“This is a way for us to grow and generate revenue and expand as a business without killing what makes us special,” said Stieber. “It’s more logical to open an extra night or two rather than jam more seats in and have inconsistent service.”
Monday nights at Little Bear will feature off-menu specials, plus industry discounts and drink specials, like a rotating staff-choice beer and a shot.
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While VanTrece does not plan on adding service days, she does plan to experiment with additional offerings, including opening on Thanksgiving for the first time this year, serving affordable to-go meals for families, and starting a monthly, multi-course supper club dinner.
“I think it could be another great way to bring people together and offer some fun things that are off-menu,” said VanTrece of the potential supper club.
According to Best, Captain B’s has been a hit so far at Ticonderoga Club. So much so that he and his partners are prepared to mix things up again, if needed, potentially launching other restaurant-within-a-restaurant concepts. That could include the return of Chef David Bies’s Hooters-inspired sports bar, Coach B’s Sports Bar & Grill, or an Indonesian street food stall.
“The trend in Atlanta for quite a while now has been about what’s new on the pop-up landscape or on social media, but we’re tenured enough in this game to feel confident in understanding how to pull levels and push buttons that will lend us some flexibility [as a restaurant],” said Best.
All restaurants can do right now, Best said, is continue to weather whatever storms arise and meet their customers where they are, because hospitality remains the through-line no matter the challenges.