The original location of MetroFresh permanently closed at Midtown Promenade, nearly five months after sustaining damage from a fire. The One Midtown Plaza location on Peachtree Street will remain open.
Actor-turned-restaurateur Mitchell Anderson opened MetroFresh in 2005, drawing customers to the Monroe Drive shopping center long before Trader Joe’s, Starbucks, and the Beltline existed there.
In addition to being one of Midtown’s best lunch deals, as an LGBTQ-plus-owned restaurant, MetroFresh also offered residents and visitors to the neighborhood a welcoming and inclusive environment in which to dine. The restaurant hosted weekly trivia and karaoke nights, and celebrated 20 years in Midtown last October.
“What I have always been most proud of is that MetroFresh represents exactly what Midtown Atlanta is, in all of its diversity and its special quality of the kind of people who live here,” Anderson told Rough Draft. “It’s old and young, and artistic and professional, and gay and straight. It’s cool to look out [on] a busy Tuesday afternoon and see so many different kinds of people enjoying each other’s company.”
But a fire earlier this winter at the restaurant changed everything.
The Feb. 27 blaze began in the mop and storage room, sparked by a lithium battery from a leaf blower. While fire fighters quickly put out the flames, the kitchen and dining room suffered significant smoke damage. The restaurant closed, albeit temporarily – or so Anderson thought. The plan was to repair the damage and reopen MetroFresh.
In a July 16 post on the MetroFresh website, Anderson announced the permanent closure of his Midtown Promenade restaurant, calling the post-fire period an “emotional roller coaster.”
Anderson recognized how important MetroFresh was to many of its patrons and thanked them for their loyalty over the years, something he said he never took for granted.
“While the insurance has paid out everything they were supposed to, the actual cost of rebuilding and basically starting over makes it impossible,” Anderson wrote in the post. “I may feel like a young man, but the reality is, at this point in my life, it just doesn’t make sense to start from scratch.”
He was able to support his employees for six weeks with business interruption insurance, placing a few staff members at the Peachtree Street location. With MetroFresh’s outcome up in the air, however, Anderson told the remaining employees he completely understood if they needed to move on from the restaurant.
“It was impossible for me to absorb more people. That was the hardest thing in the world,” Anderson said.
Related: Celebrating 20 Years of MetroFresh at Midtown Promenade
Changes at Midtown Promenade
The closure of MetroFresh reflects several recent changes to Midtown Promenade, including to its tenant roster.
In 2022, Asana Partners and SRS Real Estate Partners finished reconfiguring the decades-old shopping complex, resulting in a larger footprint, new restaurants and retail shops, and direct access to and from the Eastside Beltline.
Longtime tenants like Richard’s Variety Store moved out to make way for Heyday Skincare and Restore Hyper Wellness. Greek-leaning restaurant and cocktail bar Buddy Buddy took over the former Tapa Tapa space beside the Landmark Midtown Art Cinema. New restaurants like Yumbii and Alici Oyster Bar also opened. The latter took over the former F.R.O.G.S. Cantina and Ah-Ma Taiwanese Kitchen spaces.
Yumbii closed at the beginning of 2026, and Chef Pat Pascarella closed Alici Oyster Bar in January, rebranding the restaurant to a red sauce joint called Rosso.
Related: Veteran Atlanta bartender opening cocktail bar Buddy Buddy
Despite the closure of the original MetroFresh, Anderson has no plans to close the One Midtown Plaza location of the restaurant on Peachtree Street. A much smaller operation, MetroFresh Uptown is only open on weekdays, serving mostly nearby residents and office workers. The location, which opened in 2021, also assumed catering operations for MetroFresh after the fire.
Anderson said MetroFresh Uptown is becoming more and more like home.
“The silver lining is that store has become a new hub and a new heart of a different part of Midtown, and that’s exciting,” he said.
Beth McKibben contributed to this report.
