It’s a Wednesday night in College Park, and, based on the energy level at a couple of recently opened restaurants, hump day is the new Friday. At the
Real Milk & Honey, an all-day brunch spot from
Chopped: Redemption–winning chef Sammy Davis, a standing room–only crowd is chowing down on Crown Royal peach cobbler French toast and Southern fried catfish with creamy grits. They snap selfies and shimmy to the sounds of a DJ. Next door, at
Virgil’s Gullah Kitchen & Bar, a karaoke-night crooner holds his microphone out so customers can back him up on the chorus of Erykah Badu’s “Tyrone.” The whole room seems to sway.
If you’re looking for a relatively quiet dinner, you’ll need to pivot one door south, to Soul Crab ATL, the second restaurant from
Greens & Gravy chef and social-media star Darius Williams. At Soul Crab, the real party starts on the weekend. That’s when diners can sing along to R&B tunes played by a DJ while sipping Kool-Aid cocktails and plunging into Williams’s seafood-with-soul dishes.
The weekend vibe at Soul Crab
PHOTOGRAPH BY ELEY
At Soul Crab, patrons can order Kool-Aid cocktails and sing along to the DJ’s R&B-heavy rotation.
PHOTOGRAPH BY ELEY
Welcome to College Park’s reborn restaurant row, where a trio of black-owned businesses has converted a once-quiet strip of Main Street into an Instagram-ready destination. The transformation has taken less than a year: Soul Crab opened in December 2018, followed by Virgil’s and the Real Milk & Honey over the summer.
The proprietors attribute their success to a perfect storm of real-estate availability, community enthusiasm, savvy social-media marketing, and a more-is-more attitude among patrons looking for multiple dining options in close proximity.
“There’s something to be said for the food-court model of business,” says Williams, who launched a second Soul Crab in his hometown of Chicago in August. “There’s something attractive about a cluster of restaurants being all in the same space.”
“All the people I saw cooking on TV did not represent who I was. That’s the core reason why I do a lot of what I do.”
After cultivating a robust social-media following around his soul-food cooking demos (with 317,000 Instagram followers and counting), Williams opened his first restaurant, Greens & Gravy, in 2017 in Westview—a neighborhood now home to another impressive cluster of black-owned restaurants. When Williams realized the Atlanta market was short on restaurants combining seafood and soul food—or crabs and collards, as he likes to say—he came up with the plan for Soul Crab. “My business model is to sort of be the underdog,” Williams says, “to serve a space where something wasn’t in existence.”
We call him Softball.
this is why i target the budget market. nothing nice in my rentals