Atlanta’s Best New Restaurants 2017

Photograph by Iain Bagwell

What does “fine dining” mean anymore? All over the country, you can find ambitious cooks serving masterful meals on plastic trays shoved across food hall countertops, not a tablecloth in sight. What the restaurants on this list have in common aren’t starched white linens; it’s the pure, unwavering focus on food. There’s a barbecue pitmaster raising heritage breed hogs and smoking them whole, the meat so full of flavor it’s almost better un-sauced; a Malaysian immigrant laboring over fresh-made rice noodles that are as good as what you’d get in her native country; and an Atlanta restaurant veteran who’s back in the kitchen after a four-year hiatus, blending his European bistro-style greatest hits with American steakhouse favorites to create something new along the way. It may not be traditional fine dining, but it’s some of the finest dining you can do in the city right now. —Julia Bainbridge

By Julia Bainbridge, Christiane Lauterbach, and Jennifer Zyman