The Deer and the Dove

The Restaurant

The Deer and the Dove opened in 2019 at 155 Sycamore Street, one block off the Decatur Square, in a high-ceilinged former hardware-store building whose central architectural feature is the open wood-burning hearth that runs the kitchen's protein programme. The room — about eighty covers across a main dining hall, a small bar room with eight stools facing the hearth, and a back patio that opens in spring — was the project of chef-owner Terry Koval, an Atlanta-trained cook who won the James Beard Foundation Best Chef Southeast medal in 2023 and whose New York Times notice put the kitchen onto the Michelin Inspector radar before the inaugural Atlanta list.

The kitchen runs a rustic-but-precise wood-fire menu built around game, heritage breed pork and beef from named Georgia farms, and the seasonal vegetable programme that Koval has been developing since his Atlanta line years. Signature dishes include the crispy rabbit legs in fermented buttermilk with a hot-honey glaze, the duck-sausage roulade, a venison strip with foraged-mushroom jus, a quail with peach mostarda in late summer, a slow-roasted pork shoulder for the table, and the hearth-fired whole fish that rotates with the morning's market. The vegetable plates — a hearth-roasted carrot board, a daily greens preparation, a cured-tomato salad — read as polished rather than virtuous, and the bread programme uses house-milled grain. The dessert list runs short and deliberate.

The wine list is the city's most thoughtful programme outside Kimball House — about two hundred and forty labels with proper depth in Loire reds, Burgundy, and a selected Champagne shelf. The bar programme is shorter than at Kimball House but deeper in cocktail technique: a rotating-classics shelf, a single signature Manhattan with house-aged vermouth, and a small Negroni flight. Service is paced for the hearth-driven menu — a typical dinner runs about two hours — and the captains work the room rather than the bar. For an Atlanta-area proposal or anniversary that requires a real chef-driven evening without the corporate gloss of the Buckhead grand-hotel rooms, this is the address.