Drive south on Peachtree Road past Buckhead Village and you'll pass a low, two-story building at 2964 Peachtree Road NW that has been dark for a while now. A pancake house sign came down here in 2023, and before that, for nearly two decades, this was a Brio Tuscan Grille, one of the chain locations that closed as its parent company pulled back nationally in 2017. Most people driving to dinner reservations a block north have stopped registering the building at all. It reads as empty space between somewhere you're going and somewhere you already left.
That's about to change, and the story underneath it is more interesting than a single restaurant opening.
What's Actually Moving In
James Beard Award-winning chef Linton Hopkins and his wife and business partner, Gina Hopkins, told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution this month that their company will open a bar and grill called Linton's inside that building, with their bakery-cafe The Buttery reopening in an adjoining space with its own entrance. The project is a partnership with CP Group and Cohen & Steers, who own Buckhead Center, the 170,000-square-foot, two-building office property that includes the 2964 Peachtree address. Design work is going to ASD/SKY, and the combined restaurant and bakery will run about 7,000 square feet inside the larger structure, with a patio facing Peachtree Road. CP Group's own announcement puts the opening in late spring of 2027.
Read the coverage quickly and it sounds like a straightforward comeback story: a beloved bakery returns to Buckhead. Look closer and the more accurate version is stranger, and better.
The Buttery Has Never Actually Been Here
The Buttery that's opening on Peachtree Road isn't returning to Buckhead. It's arriving in Buckhead for the first time. The original Buttery opened in October 2020 on Manchester Street in Morningside-Lenox Park, a pandemic-era bakery and specialty market that built a real following over four years before closing on August 30, 2024. It was a Morningside institution, not a Buckhead one. Nobody driving past 2964 Peachtree Road ever bought a croissant there before this week's announcement.
What's actually happening is that Hopkins & Company is picking up a name people already trust and planting it somewhere new, next to a restaurant that carries the weight of the comeback instead.
The Real Gap Is Longer Than Most People Remember
Here's the part that gets lost in the "Buttery is back" framing: Linton Hopkins hasn't had a full restaurant open on Buckhead's Peachtree Road corridor in years. He and Gina opened Restaurant Eugene there in 2004, then Holeman & Finch four years later in the same complex, the restaurant that became known nationally for a cheeseburger people lined up for. Restaurant Eugene closed in 2019. Holeman & Finch closed a year after that, and when it came back, it landed at Colony Square in Midtown in 2023, not Buckhead. The 2012 James Beard Award for Best Chef: Southeast that made Hopkins's name came out of those Buckhead years, but by the time it was won, the clock on his Buckhead footprint had already started running out.
The only piece of Hopkins & Company that stayed in the neighborhood through all of it is H&F Bottle Shop, a wine and spirits shop rather than a place to eat. So when Linton's opens in 2027, it will be the first full Hopkins & Company restaurant serving food on Buckhead's Peachtree corridor since Restaurant Eugene closed, a gap of roughly eight years. That's a longer absence than the Buttery ever had a presence to lose.
The Hopkinses never fully left the neighborhood's civic life, either. Back in 2007, they co-founded the producer-only Peachtree Road Farmers Market at the Cathedral of St. Philip, an event that grew into Georgia's largest market of its kind. That's the kind of detail that explains why a chef with restaurants scattered across Midtown and the Battery is still described, accurately, as a Buckhead figure.
What the Space Is Actually For
Hopkins has been specific about what he wants Linton's to be day to day, telling CP Group in the announcement, "We truly want to be a neighborhood restaurant." The stated use case is a weekday lunch of sandwiches and salads between meetings for the office tenants upstairs, martinis and calamari on the patio after work, a lemonade-and-cookie stop for kids after school while a parent grabs a chicken pot pie from the Buttery counter next door, and full dinners with steak and a birthday cake on the weekend. The Buttery side will have its own dedicated entrance, function as a small standalone café for coffee and pastries during the day, and also supply the kitchen at Linton's.
That's a wider range of use than most single restaurant openings promise, and it maps onto how Buckhead Center's owners have been repositioning the property since buying it in 2022.
The Building Was Already Being Rebuilt Around This
Buckhead Center wasn't looking for a tenant so much as a centerpiece. CP Group and Cohen & Steers had already completed a renovation of the property's south tower lobby before this announcement, and improvements to the motor court and exterior arrival experience are underway now, with completion expected by the end of this year. Linton's is described in CP Group's own materials as the next phase of that redevelopment, the piece meant to make two office buildings feel connected to the people who live around them rather than just the people who work inside them.
The location was also picked with real density in mind. CP Group notes that Buckhead Center sits within a half mile of more than 50 restaurants, which means Linton's isn't opening into an empty stretch so much as staking a claim in one of the most contested blocks of restaurant real estate in the neighborhood, directly across from the district that already draws Buckhead's evening foot traffic.
What This Actually Tells You
The headline write-up is that a well-loved bakery is coming back to Buckhead. The more accurate read is that a chef whose Buckhead history runs back to 2004, who has spent the years since 2019 building his reputation everywhere except this neighborhood's own main corridor, is finally bringing a full restaurant home, and an office landlord decided the fastest way to make a 170,000-square-foot commercial property feel like part of the neighborhood was to give a piece of it to a chef the neighborhood already claims as its own.
The building at 2964 Peachtree Road will look different by next spring. The sign that's been missing since the pancake house closed in 2023 will finally be replaced, this time with a name a lot of Buckhead already recognizes, even if the address itself is new to it.
Buckhead keeps rewarding people who pay attention to which addresses are quietly getting rebuilt around, not just which restaurants are opening inside them. That's the kind of pattern recognition Dorsey Alston REALTORS has built into how it reads this neighborhood for 79 years, and it's worth watching this particular corner of Peachtree Road as the rest of Linton's takes shape.
