Table Talk: Grant Park Restaurant Exclusive + Coquilles Recipe
Oct. 8 — Happy Tuesday, and welcome to the table!
In today’s “Family Meal,” I’m bringing you a subscriber-first exclusive on an upcoming butcher shop, seafood counter, and cafe headed to the Beacon in Grant Park.
➕ Plus, Rough Draft Dining Reporter Sarra Sedghi kicks off her “Grandmas of Atlanta” recipe series with the coquilles from former Red Snapper Seafood Restaurant owner Somporn Veeranarong.
But first, I’m sharing answers to a few questions I’ve received recently from readers about my dining strategies and Atlanta’s food scene.
Cheers!
🍸 Beth
🍽️ Grand Tasting Midtown returns Oct. 17 at Epicurean Hotel! Sample top Midtown eats, cocktails & meet local chefs—all under one roof. VIP sold out, but GA tickets remain. 21+ only. Don’t miss this flavor-packed night! SPONSOR MESSAGE
Ask the (Dining) Editor
🥄 While I’m not anonymous, I try to keep a low profile when dining at restaurants. It helps to slip into places mostly undetected, providing me the opportunity to blend in with the crowd and experience meals just like everyone else.
After nearly 15 years of doing this job, getting spotted happens, which invariably leads to people asking for my restaurant recommendations or food opinions.
Today, I’m sharing answers to a few questions I’ve been asked recently.
🍝 How many days a week do you dine out?
It varies from week to week, depending on research needed for stories. On average, I dine out four days a week, sometimes eating multiple meals at restaurants in one day.
🏃🏼♀️ How do you stay healthy eating out that much?
Sharing is caring. Part of my process as a food writer and editor is bringing people along to help me eat, which allows me to try multiple dishes. Family-style is the way to go. I often request a doggie bag.
Eating lighter when I am at home and running, walking, and strength training five to six days a week are key to my weekly routine.
🐔 What dish defines Atlanta?
Wings. Hands down. We make the best wings in the country. Sorry to all other cities, but your wings will never measure up to Atlanta, nor will your sauces or flavor combos.
🍕 Does Atlanta have good pizza?
Yes. It’s not hard to find good pizza in Atlanta these days.
I grew up in a city sandwiched between New York-style and New Haven-style pizza (“apizza” ah-beetz). Living near New Haven, we regularly ordered from the OG Pepe’s on Wooster Street. New Haven-style all the way, baby. It’s a style defined by a long-fermented, wet dough, which gives the pizza a crispy thin crust with a little bit of char when baked.
I have yet to find a pizzeria in Metro Atlanta with a good handle on making New Haven-style pizzas. But we’ve got some great pizzerias doing serious justice to New York-style and Neapolitan pies that scratch that itch. However, I’m told Pizza54 in Peachtree City serves real-deal New Haven-style pies.
👍👍 What food-related TV shows are you watching?
I don’t like watching food competitions, unless the shows are funny or low-key. “The Great British Baking Show” is a balm. I also enjoy “Is it Cake?” because it’s crazy how realistic those cakes look. And give me more episodes of all the baking fails in “Nailed It,” hosted by comedian Nicole Byer and pastry chef Jacques Torres.
I just finished watching “House of Guinness” on Netflix and give it two thumbs up. And I hope the incomparable Padma Lakshmi returns with more episodes of her food and travel show, “Taste the Nation.”
Taste the flavor and fun of Chamblee
SPONSORED BY DISCOVER DEKALB
✨ Taste of Chamblee returns on Saturday, Oct., 18, from 3 p.m. to 8 p.m. in downtown Chamblee.
Explore over thirty local food vendors serving bold flavors and creative dishes. Enjoy live music, family activities, and a vibrant atmosphere. Shop handcrafted goods from local artisans and let the kids play in the dedicated activity areas. Gather friends and family to celebrate the flavors of Chamblee while connecting with the community.
➞ Come hungry, leave inspired, and discover why this annual festival has become a local favorite for food lovers and families alike.
Exclusive: Kinship Bringing Seafood Counter, Butcher Shop, All-Day Cafe to Grant Park
🥩 A second location of Virginia-Highland butcher shop and market Kinship will open at the Beacon in Grant Park next fall.
Kinship will take over an unoccupied retail spot next door to the former Elsewhere Brewing, which closed last year at the Grant Park complex.
The expansion into Grant Park will triple Kinship’s operation, allowing owners Myles Moody and Rachael Pack to build upon its whole-animal butchery production, add a seafood butchery program, and provide more room to stock market shelves with seasonal produce, wine, and local pantry goods.
🍸 Most significantly, however, the Grant Park location will include a full-service cafe serving breakfast, lunch, and dinner and a bar offering beer, wines by the glass, and cocktails. (In Virginia-Highland, Kinship has become known for its breakfast sandwiches.) Moody’s brother, Connan, owns and operates Academy Coffee at Kinship and will oversee both coffee and cocktails in Grant Park.
For Moody and his brother, Grant Park is familiar territory, having grown up in neighboring Ormewood Park to the east. Five generations of their family have also lived in Ormewood Park.
Moody and Pack, who are married and now live in Ormewood Park, said they’re banking on foot traffic at the Beacon from the surrounding neighborhoods and the Southside Beltline.
“This is another hub of community. We walk the Beltline all the time through the neighborhood. It’s how we spend our free time,” Pack said. “We are really excited to dive into another neighborhood and another creative community.”
☕ 🥪 With a full kitchen and an a.m. prep team, the cafe at Kinship will open early in the morning for breakfast and coffee. Expect a similar menu of breakfast sandwiches here from Moody and his team, along with sides of hash browns and granola and yogurt with seasonal fruits and berries.
Lunch will begin around 11 a.m., with seasonal salads and sandwiches, before shifting to heartier fare later in the afternoon. Dinner will showcase meats and seafood from the butcher counter at Kinship. Expect a menu of around 12 a la carte dishes, including starters and oysters, seasonal vegetables and mains of fish and meat, and a small selection of desserts. The bar will open at lunchtime, with Connan Moody creating a tight list of cocktails. Most of Kinship’s seating in Grant Park will be outside on the covered patio.
Moody gets excited when he talks about the butchery program at Kinship, especially the potential for growth in Grant Park.
The new location will feature a cutting room, something Kinship lacks in Virginia-Highland. Having more space for curing and sausage production, hanging racks, and whole-animal breakdown, means Moody can install a proper roasting oven and steam kettle for making stocks and soup broths.
🐟 New to Kinship, the Grant Park location will feature seafood butchery. Moody will continue Kinship’s dedication to sustainability and zero waste through its seafood offerings at the Beacon.
“We’ll source seafood predominantly from the Southeast, whether that be the Atlantic – Brunswick or Savannah in Georgia – or the Gulf of Mexico – Florida and Alabama,” Moody said. “It’s about educating people [on using different parts of fish], like the cheeks of a fish are edible or utilizing the bones to make stock or fish sauce.”
To start, Kinship will open Wednesday through Sunday in Grant Park. Hours will eventually expand to six days a week. Kinship will maintain that schedule for at least a year before opening daily, giving the couple and their staff time to adjust to running two locations and to understand the wants and needs of the neighborhood.
🍷 Events like barbecues, Fourth of July cookouts, and wine tastings, which Pack describes as more of a party atmosphere in Virginia-Highland, will play a big part in the community engagement aspect at Kinship in Grant Park.
“We want our neighbors to support us just as much as we want to support them,” Pack said.
This summer, Moody and Pack debuted a twice-monthly, chefs counter pop-up in Virginia-Highland. Called k|n, the four-seat, 12-course tasting menu, led by Moody, provides people an intimate dinner experience with wine pairings from Pack. It’s a chance to meet and converse more personally with their customers, Moody said, while showcasing the mission behind what they do every day at Kinship.
Reservations booked up quickly through the end of the year. After December, k|n will go on hiatus for the entirety of January. Moody and Pack plan to do a complete post-mortem on k|n and explore how to fine-tune the dinner experience in the future.
But, they don’t foresee launching k|n in Grant Park.
“The question really becomes how far, how big we go [with k|n],” said Moody. “I would love to have a fine restaurant some day, given my background, but that’s a lot easier said than done.”
Moody previously worked for Chef Linton Hopkins (Holeman & Finch, Restaurant Eugene), as well as at Eleven Madison Park, Atera, and Aska in New York City. Pack worked as a food writer, then as a sommelier at the Beatrice Inn. She later worked as the beverage manager at Aska, where she met Moody.
🍽️ The couple struck out on their own in 2021, opening Kinship Butcher & Sundry in the renovated VA-HI building, also home to Paolo’s Gelato and Pielands Pizza and Subs.
Other than splitting their time between two Kinship locations next fall, Moody and Pack said little will change at the shop in Virginia-Highland.
“We’re committed to exceptionalism in both spaces and we’ve cultivated a great team, some of whom have been with us since we opened the original location,” Moody said, noting that Kinship’s main butcher has been with them since the beginning. “A lot of our team will stay on at the original location and some of them will straddle both locations and some of them might move to the second location.”
👉 Kinship Butcher & Sundry will open in the fall of 2026 at 1039 Grant St., Grant Park.
Recipe: Coquilles From the Former
Red Snapper Seafood Restaurant
❤️ This week, we’re bringing you a recipe for the coquilles found on the menu at the former Red Snapper Seafood Restaurant on Cheshire Bridge Road. We’re also introducing you to one of its owners, Somporn Veeranarong, an Atlanta restaurant scene icon and a proud grandmother who loves to bake and cook for her family.
You may have met Veeranarong at The Red Snapper, which she and her husband, Jimmy, owned from 1986 to 2019, before they sold it. Prior to her restaurant career, Veeranarong worked as a nurse on the IV team at DeKalb General Hospital (now Emory Decatur Hospital). Veeranarong credits her husband for her first cooking lessons, later attending the Institute of Culinary Education in New York.
At The Red Snapper, Veeranarong became known for her ginger-spiced snapper, the restaurant’s Southern-style coconut cake, and coquilles, an appetizer combining creamed spinach with shrimp or crab in spring roll wrappers.
🥥 “Just about every table ordered coconut cake when they came in,” Veeranarong said.
Veeranarong recalls one couple who came into the restaurant six nights a week for many years. She made them special salads and desserts, and, of course, whatever dishes they wanted from the regular menu.
At the tail-end of the last decade, Veeranarong became a grandmother to twin girls, Aina and Isra. Veeranarong said she was ready to leave working 10 to 12-hour shifts, six days a week at The Red Snapper and move on to the next phase of life. That included being a grandmother. These days, she’s known by family and friends as “Yaiyai,” which means “grandmother” in Thai.
👵 While she’s no longer working in the restaurant industry, Veeranarong is still an avid cook. She makes her granddaughters’ lunches and has ventured deeper into baking and desserts. Veeranarong now makes a lighter, Thai-style version of The Red Snapper’s coconut cake, which contains less sugar, but uses more eggs to achieve a fluffier, chiffon-like texture. She calls it “diet cake.”
But, today, Veeranarong is providing Rough Draft readers with the recipe for her coquilles.
You can read an extended version of Sarra’s interview with Veeranarong on “Grandmas of Atlanta.” Rough Draft will publish one recipe a month from “Grandmas of Atlanta.” Know a grandmother with a stellar recipe to share? Send details to sarra@roughdraftatlanta.com.
📋 Coquilles Ingredients
- 1 1/2 pounds frozen chopped spinach, defrosted
- 3 Tbsp unsalted butter
- 3 Tbsp all purpose flour
- 3/4 cup milk, plus 3/4 cup cream, or, 1 1/2 cups half-and-half
- 2 tsp kosher salt
- 1 tsp sugar
- 1 tsp Worcestershire sauce
- 1/2 tsp white pepper
- 1/4 tsp tabasco sauce
- 1 pinch nutmeg
- Pre-cooked shrimp or crab meat
- Neutral oil, such as avocado or canola, for frying
- One pack spring roll wrappers
🥬 Make the spinach
- Squeeze excess liquid from the spinach and melt butter in a pan over medium heat. Add flour, then cook one minute.
- Add cream and milk (or half-and-half) and seasonings. Stir until smooth.
- Add drained spinach to the mixture. Bring to a boil, stirring constantly. Remove from heat and let cool.
🥠 Make the coquilles
Let cool, and serve immediately, preferably with honey mustard sauce.
Remove wonton wrapper from package and lie diagonally on a clean, flat surface.
Using a tablespoon, add two scoops creamed spinach mixture to the center, then add two pieces of shrimp or crab on top.
Wrap the coquille by folding in two side corners, and then the top and bottom.
Add crab meat or cooked shrimp on top of spinach (not mixed) and wrap.
Fry in oil between 325 degrees and 350 degrees Fahrenheit until golden brown, flipping to ensure both sides are fried sufficiently. Repeat until you’ve run out of ingredients.
🍽️ Grand Tasting Midtown returns Oct. 17 at Epicurean Hotel! Sample top Midtown eats, cocktails & meet local chefs—all under one roof. VIP sold out, but GA tickets remain. 21+ only. Don’t miss this flavor-packed night! SPONSOR MESSAGE
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