The Restaurant
No. 246 opened in 2011 at 129 East Ponce de Leon Avenue, two blocks west of the Decatur Square, as Ford Fry's first restaurant outside Atlanta city limits. The name references the original 1900s plat number of the land beneath the corner building. The room — about a hundred and forty covers across a long bar room facing East Ponce, a main dining hall arranged in deep banquettes, a small wood-fired pizza counter at the back, and a private mezzanine dining suite — was designed by the Atlanta firm Square Feet Studio in the warm-modern-trattoria mode that Fry's group has been refining since the original JCT Kitchen on Westside. Chef Drew Belline has run the kitchen since the opening year.
The menu is the polished American-Italian programme that the Ford Fry group does well: a daily antipasti board with house-cured charcuterie and a small selection of marinated vegetables, a wood-fired-oven pizza shortlist with a classic Margherita built on a sourdough crust, a hand-cut pasta menu that runs about eight preparations through dinner service, and a secondi list with a wood-grilled pork chop, a daily whole-fish, and a Bell & Evans chicken under a brick. The pasta plates — bucatini cacio e pepe, rigatoni vodka, agnolotti del plin, a daily lasagne — are made in-house each afternoon and the kitchen avoids the dry-stock pasta defaults of the family-trattoria format.
The wine programme runs about two hundred and forty labels with proper depth in northern Italy, a small Sicilian section, and a careful Champagne shelf. The bar — the working evening-anchor of the room — runs a rotating Negroni section, a tight bourbon shelf, and a daily cocktail board. The mezzanine private suite — about twenty covers behind a partition wall — handles the family-celebration and team-dinner format that the rest of the dining hall is not configured for. Service is the Ford Fry house standard: warm, fast, and operationally precise. For a Decatur birthday or team dinner that requires a working Italian programme without the chef-driven gravity of The White Bull, this is the address.
Why This Is Decatur’s Birthday Pick
No. 246 is the birthday answer for Decatur because the room is configured for celebration without crossing into theater. The deep banquettes on the main floor seat groups of six and eight without dividing the table. The wood-fired-oven pizza counter is the working visual that a birthday evening can build a moment around — the table watches the pies come out of the oven on the long wooden peels. The private mezzanine handles the larger family-and-friends format when the count crosses twelve, and the host stand handles the candle-and-dolci moment without the production-restaurant choreography. The Ford Fry group's operational pace keeps a birthday dinner moving through its courses without sacrificing the table conversation.
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