Table & Main

The Restaurant

Table & Main opened in 2011 at 1028 Canton Street in a lovingly restored two-story Roswell homestead whose front porch, brick path, and side garden still read as a private residence from the sidewalk. The room — about ninety covers across an upstairs porch, a downstairs main dining hall, a selected bar, and a fifteen-seat side patio — was the project of chef Woody Back, a Georgia-raised cook trained through the kitchen of Atlanta's well-regarded Holeman & Finch crew, and it has held a Michelin Bib Gourmand on every recent Atlanta-region list. The mood is unhurried, Southern, and grown-up — the antithesis of the city's resort-themed steakhouses.

The kitchen runs a 'simple, seasonal, and Southern' menu that turns four times a year around the Georgia growing calendar. The shareable starters include the bourbon-bacon-braised pork belly with grits, the deviled-eggs board, and a daily soup written off the Tuesday-morning farm market. Entrees rotate Carolina trout with brown butter and capers, a slow-roasted Sunday pork shoulder with collards, a wood-grilled hanger steak with red-eye gravy, and the dish that has become the restaurant's signature in every regional publication — the Sunday-night bone-in fried chicken with smashed potatoes and hot honey, an order count that runs into three-figure plates on busy weekend services.

The wine list runs to about a hundred and forty labels with proper depth in California Pinot, North Georgia Viognier, and a small Champagne section selected for the bar program. The bar runs a tight bourbon collection — about fifty bottles, mostly Kentucky, with a small Tennessee shelf — and the cocktail menu rewrites monthly. Service is the genuine variety of Southern: warm, fast, and never performative. For a city of one hundred thousand twenty-two miles north of downtown Atlanta, this is the room that pulled the city onto the AJC Top 50 list and kept it there.