Walk the corner of Virginia and North Highland this month and you'll see a wine list on the specials board where a burger menu used to hang. So. Fox, the restaurant that took over the old Farm Burger space at 1017 North Highland Avenue, has been open since the first week of July. In September, it became the only restaurant in Georgia to land on the New York Times' 2026 list of 50 restaurants, with critic Kim Severson singling out dishes like zipper peas with caviar and dashi and corn dumplings built around Sungold tomatoes, blue crab, and bottarga.
That's the story most people in the neighborhood already know. The story underneath it is less visible and, for anyone who lives here, more useful. In May, the same century-old retail strip that now houses So. Fox, along with Paolo's Gelato and Pielands Sub & Slice on Virginia Avenue, sold in an off-market deal for $17.3 million. The buyer was 26th Street Partners, the Atlanta investment firm that had bought the Krog District, including Krog Street Market, from Asana Partners just months earlier. One company now owns both halves of the neighborhood's biggest news cycle this year: what opened, and who profits from what opens next.
What Actually Replaced Farm Burger
Farm Burger closed its Virginia-Highland location at the end of December 2025 after five years on that corner, one of the longer runs for a business that had cycled through a Standard Oil filling station, decades as Herrington Service Station, and a stint as Yeah Burger before that. Co-founder George Frangos handed the keys to Myles Moody and Rachael Pack, the couple who run Kinship Butcher & Sundry next door, crediting the location with "helping start the Virginia-Highland Farmers Market and hosting Winterfest and Porchfest events."
Moody and Pack didn't replace one burger concept with another. So. Fox seats 50, leans on a natural wine list Pack curates herself, and draws its proteins directly from the butcher counter at Kinship. The name comes from the muscadine, the indigenous Southeastern grape colloquially known as the southern fox grape, and the menu treats Georgia ingredients as an agricultural throughline rather than a marketing angle. Bar snacks include warm Georgia-grown olives seasoned in beef fat and vegetables fermented in-house.
The national attention arrived fast. Three months after opening, So. Fox was the sole Georgia entry on the Times' list, with the review focused on how the kitchen bends Southern staples toward technique borrowed from elsewhere, including a dessert built from fermented peaches, peach-pit-infused marshmallow fluff, and purple shiso. For a restaurant occupying a gas station turned burger joint, that's a fast pivot from neighborhood staple to national name.
The Thai Bar Two Doors Down Is Still Not Open
Half a block away, in the basement beneath Otto's Apartment Hotel, formerly the Highland Inn, a second project has been unfolding on a much slower clock. Talat Market chefs Parnass Savang and Rod Lassiter first announced Some Luck in November 2024, aiming for a spring or summer 2025 opening in the old Highland Ballroom Lounge. That date slipped. By April 2026, the team was targeting July 1. As of the most recent reporting, the opening has moved again, with general manager Ashley Botzis now pointing to October.
That's nearly two years between the November 2024 announcement and an October 2026 target. Some Luck is designed as a late-night, Thai-forward bar: papaya salad, boat noodles, a Thai riff on lemon pepper wings, batched cocktails built around tamarind and mezcal, pitchers of Singha. Savang and Lassiter earned a James Beard semifinalist nod and Michelin recognition for Talat Market in Summerhill, and the team brings that track record to a basement space beneath Otto's.
If you've been checking the windows at 644 North Highland expecting a soft open, October is the date to watch, not July, and not the date that circulated back in the spring.
Who Actually Bought the Block
The retail sale is the part of this story that doesn't show up on a restaurant menu. In May, two segments of Virginia-Highland retail space went to 26th Street Partners for $17.3 million. The deal covered:
- The corner fronting Kinship Butcher & Sundry and So. Fox
- The Virginia Avenue frontage that includes Paolo's Gelato and Pielands Sub & Slice
The sale closed quietly enough that the transfer hadn't yet appeared in Fulton County property records when it was first reported.
The buyer's other holdings explain why this particular purchase is worth tracking. 26th Street Partners bought the Krog District, including Krog Street Market, Atlanta Stove Works, and SPX Alley, from Asana Partners in a deal that closed in September 2025, a sale that reportedly returned roughly 200 percent over what Asana had paid for the same properties in 2018. A firm that generated that kind of return by holding and reprogramming one intown food hall corridor is now the landlord for the strip that includes the restaurant every food writer in the Southeast is currently talking about.
The Two Stories Are One Transaction Apart
None of this means change is coming to Paolo's Gelato or Pielands Sub & Slice tomorrow. It does mean the ownership behind your daily coffee run, your gelato stop, and your new favorite wine bar is now consolidated under one investor with a track record of buying underpriced intown retail and holding it through a period of rising rents and slow tenant rotation. That's a different posture than a family-owned strip with a single landlord who's held the property for decades.
There's a second data point worth sitting with. Back in March, developer Third & Urban announced a roughly $3 million facelift for portions of North Highland, a project reported independently by Axios Atlanta. Two separate capital commitments landing on the same three-block stretch within a few months of each other isn't a coincidence of timing. It's a signal that outside money has decided this corridor is worth renovating, not just renting.
For a resident, the practical read is this: the businesses that have been here the longest, the ones Frangos credited with building neighborhood rituals like Winterfest and Porchfest, are now operating inside buildings owned by firms whose business model depends on eventually adjusting the mix. That doesn't mean an imminent overhaul. It means the next lease renewal cycle on this strip is worth paying attention to in a way it wasn't twelve months ago.
What Hasn't Moved
Not everything on this stretch is in flux. Kinship Butcher & Sundry, the business that helped seed both So. Fox and the current ownership story, is still running its butcher counter and coffee line out of the original space, the one that draws a line for breakfast sandwiches most weekend mornings. The Virginia-Highland Farmers Market, the event Farm Burger helped start, continues on its own calendar independent of who holds the deed next door.
The corner itself has looked the same for a century and completely different every decade, according to the building's own ownership history. This is simply the decade where the rebuild happened twice in the same twelve months, once on the menu and once on the deed.
If you're trying to figure out what a shift like this means for property values on your specific block, or you're weighing a move within Virginia-Highland and want someone who tracks ownership changes as closely as restaurant openings, Shanna Smith is worth a conversation. Request a private consultation to talk through what's actually happening on your street.
