Two New Restaurants Landed on the Same Virginia-Highland Corner This Summer, and So Did a New Landlord Who Already Wrote the Playbook

Walk north on Highland Avenue past Virginia this month and the corner reads differently than it did in the spring. Butcher paper is gone from the windows at 1017. A new sign faces the crosswalk. A few blocks south, across Ponce, a basement bar that spent two years promising to open finally has a line out front some nights. Both changes look like ordinary restaurant news, the kind that cycles through every intown neighborhood a few times a year. The part that doesn't show up on a menu is who now owns the buildings both restaurants sit inside, and that owner has already run this exact play once before, a few miles away, with a different food hall.

The corner that used to be Farm Burger

So. Fox opened July 2 next door to Kinship Butcher & Sundry, taking over the space Farm Burger held until the chain closed its Virginia-Highland location at the end of last year. Farm Burger's exit mattered locally beyond the burger count. Co-founder George Frangos noted the restaurant had helped start the Virginia-Highland Farmers Market and hosted neighborhood staples like Winterfest and Porchfest during its run at that address, so whoever took the lease was inheriting more than square footage.

The tenant that came next is the same couple behind the butcher shop across the sidewalk. Chef Myles Moody and sommelier Rachael Pack, who opened Kinship in 2021, built So. Fox as a 50-seat wine bar and restaurant, named for the muscadine grape's old colloquial nickname, the southern fox. The menu draws on the same supply chain as Kinship, including produce and herbs grown at Pack Hospitality's own Under Acre Farm in Ormewood, and the room was built with two separate bars so a couple can grab a glass of wine and a snack without booking ahead. As of this month the restaurant is running Thursday through Monday, 5 to 10 p.m., which tells you something about how the owners want the space used: a stop on the way somewhere else as much as a destination in itself.

That distinction matters for how the block behaves on a Friday night. Farm Burger's model leaned on walk-in families and a straightforward menu. So. Fox is smaller, wine-led, and dependent on the butcher shop next door for its meat program. It's a different kind of foot traffic than the corner has hosted for a decade, and it's not an accident.

A block away, the late-night gap finally closed

Half a mile south, in Poncey-Highland, Some Luck has been the neighborhood's most delayed opening for two years running. Chefs Parnass Savang and Rod Lassiter, who run the Michelin-recommended Summerhill restaurant Talat Market, first announced the Thai bar back in late 2024, aiming for the following summer. That date slipped, then slipped again into spring 2026, then landed on an early-July target this year. The space itself, the former Highland Ballroom Lounge beneath what's now Otto's Apartment Hotel, carries its own history for Lassiter, who used to stay at the old Highland Inn on visits to Atlanta before he lived here.

Some Luck fills a gap that VaHi regulars have complained about for years: a reliable place to eat after 10 p.m. that isn't a chain. The menu runs on Thai street-stall food, noodle soups, wings, bar snacks, paired with rum-based cocktails built around Thai ingredients and pitchers of Singha at a basement bar. It's a notable bet from a kitchen with a James Beard nomination and Michelin recognition behind it. Instead of chasing a flashier fine-dining follow-up, Savang and Lassiter chose a casual, late-night room a short walk from where they already had a following.

Put those two openings side by side and you get a pattern worth noticing on its own: two decorated Atlanta kitchens, in the same summer, choosing small, chef-driven rooms within walking distance of each other rather than bigger, splashier concepts elsewhere in the city.

The part that didn't make the restaurant column

Here's what most people walking past So. Fox this summer don't know yet. Two months before the restaurant ever opened its doors, the retail strip holding both the Kinship building and a second stretch a block over had already changed hands.

Atlanta real estate investment firm 26th Street Partners paid $17.3 million in May for two segments of Virginia-Highland retail space, according to Atlanta broker and preservationist Gene Kansas of Gene Kansas Commercial Real Estate, who represented seller Scott Stern in the deal. The purchase covers the century-old corner building at Virginia and North Highland, home to Kinship and now So. Fox, along with the Highland Avenue Market building at North Highland and Amsterdam, which holds longtime Thai and sushi spot Mali Restaurant (open since 1999), San Francisco Coffee Roasting Co., and a U.S. Postal Service branch. The deal closed off-market and hadn't yet appeared in Fulton County property records at the time it was reported.

The name matters more than the price tag. 26th Street Partners is the same firm that closed on the Krog District for $210 million last September, a deal that brought Krog Street Market, Atlanta Stove Works, SPX Alley, and the Butler and Gravel buildings, more than 40 tenants across roughly 180,000 square feet, under one owner. That's a firm with a specific, demonstrated playbook: buy walkable, high-traffic retail with an established tenant identity, and preserve it rather than gut it. Kansas, describing the tenants in the Virginia-Highland deal, said he believes people give spaces relevance through daily routine and ritual, the interactions that happen there over and over.

That's not the language of a landlord planning to bring in a national chain. It's also worth knowing that this isn't the only outside capital circling the corridor this year. Developer Third & Urban announced roughly a $3 million facelift for portions of North Highland back in March, a separate signal that investors have their eye on this specific stretch of the neighborhood.

What the ownership change actually predicts

None of this changes what's on the menu at So. Fox or Some Luck tonight. What it changes is how confidently you can predict what's still going to be there in three years. A landlord who paid $210 million to keep Krog Street Market's tenant mix intact isn't buying a Virginia-Highland retail strip to flip it for a drive-through. The more likely pattern, based on how 26th Street Partners has operated so far, is a slow rotation toward more of what's already showing up on the block: small-format, chef-owned concepts, careful treatment of the older building facades, and rents that favor operators like Moody, Pack, Savang, and Lassiter over national tenants who could pay more per square foot but wouldn't draw the same weeknight foot traffic.

For a resident deciding where to walk on a Thursday, the corner from Kinship to So. Fox to the Highland Avenue Market strip now functions less like four separate storefronts and more like a single curated stretch, run by an owner who has already shown what curation looks like when they get it right.

The read for the rest of the year

If you've lived in Virginia-Highland long enough to remember when Farm Burger anchored that corner, or when the Highland Ballroom Lounge was still just a lounge, the changes this summer might read as one more restaurant cycle in a neighborhood that's always had one. The ownership change underneath it suggests something steadier. Someone with a track record for holding onto a neighborhood's character, rather than trading it in, now controls a meaningful chunk of the block you already walk through for coffee, dinner, and a nightcap. That's worth knowing next time you're deciding where to eat, even if you're not thinking about real estate at all.

If you're weighing what a stretch like this means for property values or timing a move in Virginia-Highland, Home Luxury Real Estate knows this corridor block by block. Contact us.