Leon's Full Service

The Restaurant

Leon's Full Service opened in 2010 at 131 East Ponce de Leon Avenue, next door to No. 246, inside the converted body of a 1920s Standard Oil service station that gives the restaurant its name and its working architecture. The room — about eighty covers across a main dining hall with the original service-station's roll-up garage doors opened in warm weather, a front patio that runs onto the sidewalk, and a covered back patio with picnic-style tables — was the project of Atlanta restaurateurs Lisa Hood, Crystal Sullivan, and Ron Eyester. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution has carried Leon's on its Top 50 list every year since 2012.

The kitchen runs a modern American gastropub menu rewritten quarterly around the seasonal calendar. The starter shortlist includes a daily soup, a rotating crudo plate, a duck-fat fries plate with three dipping sauces that the regulars order by default, a daily flatbread, and a vegetable board with house-pickled accompaniments. The mains run a wood-grilled Berkshire pork chop, a daily Georgia trout, a slow-roasted chicken under a brick with a daily greens preparation, a Beretta Farms hanger steak with frites, and the burger plate that has been on every iteration of the menu since the opening — a six-ounce Brasstown patty, aged white cheddar, garlic aïoli, and a house-baked bun.

The bar programme — central to the room's working identity — runs about forty rotating craft-beer taps with proper Georgia and North Carolina representation, a small but careful bourbon shelf, and a daily cocktail board. The wine list, roughly eighty labels, leans on Loire, Languedoc, and a small but useful Spanish shelf. Service is the genuine Decatur-neighborhood variety: warm, fast, and aware of the table. The room does not take reservations. Saturday-night waits run to ninety minutes, but the front bar holds about twenty waiting guests at a stretch and the staff carries the line with the same operational precision the dining room runs on.