Friday, November 19, 2010

Il Mulino Says Ciao To Atlanta

New York-based Il Mulino, at 191 Peachtree in Downtown Atlanta, has closed. Having made a relatively quiet entrance into the Atlanta market when the restaurant opened in late December 2008, rumors began floating around recently they would close soon. Attending nearby Georgia State University, I never really saw the place very active but figured they did a decent enough lunch business and got enough traffic from the nearby Westin and Ritz-Carlton hotels to keep them afloat. Apparently that was not the case, and they could no longer hang on.

Twice this year, I considered adding them to the DeathWatch. It now seems that information I received about a fairly reasonable lease seems to have either been untrue or just not affordable enough for the them.

Strangely, the Il Mulino website displays the following message :

"Thank you for your interest, a new location will be opening soon."

To the everyday diner, this might make you think they plan to re-open, but without knowing with certainly what the real story is, I'm inclined to think that they are closed and will not re-open in Atlanta any time soon.

Fellow New York steakhouse BLT was added to the DeathWatch and may soon follow in the path of Il Mulino. Just down Peachtree in Midtown, two other concepts, STK and STK OUT, both from New York-based The One Group, were announced earlier this year to open this December. Having peeked in on what I imagined would be a nearly complete restaurant a few weeks ago, I was shocked to see that little, if any, work had been done on the space. I'm told that it took a lot of convincing to bring these concepts to Atlanta and I hope they have not abandoned their plans to open (at least) their STK OUT concept in Atlanta.

On this topic though, with the openings of Craft from Tom Colicchio , Market and Spice Market from chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten and the aforementioned BLT from chef Laurent Tourendel, what are your thoughts on out of state chefs setting up shop in Atlanta and banking on name recognition to become instantly popular? Feel free to include Dolce Enoteca and Geisha House, owned by a group of assorted celebrities and Straits, owned locally by Ludacris in your observations. ToNeTo Atlanta

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2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Not to be overly simplistic, but I don't care who owns it, I just want good food at an appropriate price.

Atlantan99 said...

Not to be overly simple but... AMEN!

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