What's New in Dunwoody Village This Summer 2026
Walk the courtyard behind Bar{n} on a Thursday evening and count the logos. Bar{n} Booze and Bites. Morty's Meat Supply. Message In a Bottle. Good Vibes Ice Cream. As of April, {S}table Comfort Food {n} Cocktails. Five storefronts, five signs, one operator. Dunwoody Village stopped being a shopping center with restaurants in it sometime in the last eighteen months. It became a hospitality district with a house style, and most residents have not yet clocked how completely that has happened.
The headline in most local roundups this spring was {S}table. Southern restaurant {S}table Comfort Food {n} Cocktails, backed by DASH Hospitality Group, opened April 9 at Dunwoody Village, replacing Steak & Grace, which closed in January after less than a year in business. Chef Camron Woods runs the kitchen. The menu leans on buttermilk fried chicken, Georgia mountain trout, and a meat-and-two.
Read past the menu and something more structural comes into focus. The buyer was not a new outside restaurateur. DASH Hospitality Group founder David Abes scooped up the space to open {S}table Comfort Food {n} Cocktails, adding to his collection of restaurants at "Funwoody" Village. Abes also owns Bar{n} Booze and Bites, Morty's Meat Supply, Message In a Bottle, and Good Vibes Ice Cream. The decision was practical rather than romantic. "It's the same landlord [Regency Centers] as my other restaurants, so it made things a lot easier and streamlined the process," Abes said.
Here is what that means for anyone who lives within walking distance. When one operator holds the lease on five contiguous storefronts under one landlord, programming stops being a coincidence of tenants and starts being a schedule. The courtyard hums on the nights the operator wants it to hum.
| Storefront | Concept | Role in the courtyard |
|---|---|---|
| Bar{n} Booze and Bites | Full-service bar and bites | Late-evening anchor |
| Morty's Meat Supply | Smokehouse, now with Smokehouse Stage | Weekend entertainment |
| Message In a Bottle | Bottle shop and bar | Pre-dinner drift-in |
| Good Vibes Ice Cream | Family dessert | After-dinner draw |
| {S}table | Southern comfort, dinner only | Reservation dinner |
That is not a food court. That is a shift schedule.
If you have not been to the courtyard since winter, you missed the change that alters how the block feels at night. Morty's launched a dueling piano bar, opening on March 6, 2026. The concept brings high-energy, sing-along performances. To accommodate the new programming, Morty's expanded its building to create the Smokehouse Stage. Here, the Atlanta Dueling Pianos deliver their performances.
The experience is reservation-driven, with guests able to sing and dance along. The practical read for a homeowner three streets away is not the music itself but the traffic profile. Reservation-only, ticketed-feel programming pulls a different crowd on a different clock than a walk-in bar. Expect fuller parking on show nights and quieter Sundays. If you have been trying to time the courtyard, that is the pattern to plan around.
The courtyard is not the only piece of Dunwoody Village that changed hands recently. Two miles up Chamblee Dunwoody Road, The Shops of Dunwoody is filling in under new ownership. JLL leasing officials announced The Shops of Dunwoody will soon be home to Tenku Sushi, Sweat440, Jetset Pilates, and Beyond Juicery + Eatery. The signings, totaling 8,600 square feet, come after Charlotte-based Asana Partners, the former owners of Krog District along the Atlanta Beltline, bought The Shops of Dunwoody in March last year.
The four incoming names by function:
The tenants are expected to open through the summer and fall of 2026. The mix is deliberate. Two fitness studios that drive weekday morning and lunchtime foot traffic. One daytime eatery. One dinner restaurant. Together they cover the hours the courtyard blocks do not, which is the tell that these two centers are being programmed against each other rather than in competition.
The existing tenant roster at The Shops already carries weight. Other tenants at the shopping district today include Summit Coffee, Dunwoody Tavern, Nai Thai Cuisine, Vintage Pizzeria, and Porter Brew & Que Brewery. Add the four incoming and you have a full-day center running from Summit's morning espresso through Porter Brew's evening pints.
If the two anchors are being programmed as one district, the half mile of Chamblee Dunwoody Road that separates them has a problem. It is a car street with a sidewalk. That is what the Village Crossing Project is trying to fix.
Plans are for a 0.8-mile stretch from Womack Road/Ashford Center Parkway to Roberts Drive to be transformed into a safer, more pedestrian and bike-friendly path, complete with aesthetic upgrades. The specifics are more concrete than the usual streetscape brochure. Dunwoody plans major street upgrades, including an extra lane for left turns at Chamblee Dunwoody and Mount Vernon Road, one-way bike lanes on both sides, wider sidewalks with trees, lights, benches, and bus shelters.
"Village Crossing is a long-term investment in the future of Dunwoody Village," Dunwoody Public Works Director Michael Smith said, framing the project as a communal space rather than a traffic project, per the City of Dunwoody.
As of now, the city is in the early design stages. That timing matters for anyone considering a home in the streets that back up to this corridor. The upside of streetscape work is durable. The construction window is not. Buyers along Womack, Roberts, and the Ashford Center side should plan on lane shifts before they plan on benches.
One more moving piece is worth tracking because it will reshape the daily-life map for anyone living on the Ashford Dunwoody side. The Dunwoody City Council at its July 13 meeting held a public hearing about several variances and a request for a Special Land Use Permit for a proposed Ashford Dunwoody Road grocery store. Kroger is requesting four variances as it redevelops the former Walmart store at Perimeter Village, which will include a drive-thru pharmacy and a gas station.
Kroger is taking about 166,000 square feet of the Walmart footprint, and representatives from Kimco said they are negotiating a lease with another entity that would use the remaining 60,000 square feet. A reconfigured parking lot will reduce parking by about 100 spaces.
The interpretation for a resident is straightforward. The former Walmart box was a regional-draw store on a regional-draw parking field. A Kroger with a drive-thru pharmacy and a hundred fewer spaces is being scaled to serve the neighborhood, not the interstate. Whatever fills the remaining 60,000 square feet will set the tone. Watch that lease.
The point of assembling the openings in one place is that they finally add up to a plausible day without leaving the ZIP code. A workable Saturday in July 2026:
That itinerary was not available last July. Half of the stops on it did not exist or had not opened. This is the fastest the walkable core of Dunwoody has moved in a decade.
Rosetta Bakery, an Italian bakery and café, is coming with pastries, sandwiches, and coffee. Varuni Napoli will bring wood-fired Neapolitan pizzas to High Street. Van Leeuwen Ice Cream is arriving with French-style flavors. Read those names together and note what is missing. There is no big-box, no drive-thru fast food, no national casual chain in the announced pipeline. The concepts skew independent, food-forward, and pedestrian-scaled. Landlords who intended to fill this corridor with anchor tenants would not be signing a Neapolitan pizzeria and a French-style creamery next to a reformer studio. They are underwriting a walking district.
For homeowners inside a ten-minute walk of either anchor, the practical read is that the Village is being repositioned into a use pattern that historically supports value in inner-Perimeter Atlanta. For homeowners farther out on quieter streets, the same trend argues for keeping an eye on how the Village Crossing timeline lands, because the corridor between the two anchors is what turns two shopping centers into one district.
If you are thinking about listing a home near the Village and want the design and positioning read that matches how this corridor is actually changing, Darron O'Bonnon offers a design-forward market consultation that pairs a home valuation with a staging plan tuned to what today's Dunwoody buyer notices first. Book a conversation through the Dunwoody neighborhood page or the home valuation form.
Whether you're in the research phase at the beginning of your real estate search or know exactly what you're looking for, you'll benefit from having a real estate professional.