Photograph by Martha Williams
In 1967, a progressive Episcopal priest named Austin Ford converted a Peoplestown Victorian with a lurid reputation into the community-building institution known as Emmaus House. The neighborhood may have been rough, but the bachelor minister’s upstairs lair was stocked with antiques, leather-bound books, fine china, and art. At Father Austin’s legendary Christmas Eve soirees, champagne flowed, and caviar was mandatory.
Though the cultured and convivial DeKalb County native died in 2018, at 89, he is remembered still as a tireless social advocate, flock tender, garden keeper, and epicurean. Thanks to his friendship with Serenbe founders Steve and Marie Nygren and their three daughters, this bourbon-loving bon vivant now has a namesake watering hole and restaurant at the bucolic 20-year-old South Fulton community.
The patron saint of Austin’s Cocktailery & Kitchen may have been an Anglophile with impeccable diction, but Serenbe’s newest food-and-drink establishment is hardly buttoned up. Push through the formidable front door—standing 11 feet tall and weighing 1,000 pounds, it recalls the portal of a European cathedral, albeit a very modern one—and you arrive at the inner sanctum: a speakeasy-like room with curvy, green-tufted banquettes and a jaw-droppingly long bar. With every detail, it’s evident this isn’t Steve Nygren’s first time at the rodeo. He’s created 41 restaurants to date, if you count the 5 at Serenbe and the 36 that made up his influential Peasant Restaurants brand (1972–1994).
A playground for Serenbe dwellers and destination diners alike, Austin’s looks for reasons to party: oyster happy hours, Saturday jazz. It offers cutely named original cocktails (the Frankly, My Dear, the Absinthe Minded) and a heady list of classics (Tom Collins, gimlet). Nearly everything touched by co-chefs Jesse Sherwood (previously at The Hill at Serenbe) and Tyler Braun (Staplehouse) demonstrates dazzling technique, from their elevated bar snacks to their dinner entrees. In particular, their vegetables shine, which is only right and proper, since Serenbe is wrapped in farmland.
Photograph by Martha Williams
For me, Austin’s really clicks as a place for drinks and nibbles, followed by larger courses if you’re still hungry. I adored the snack tray of fried olives, thin housemade potato chips seasoned with malt vinegar powder, and nuggets of cheese dappled with spice or olive oil and sea salt. I’m all in on the luscious, lobster-studded Japanese egg custard (chawanmushi) and the salmon: rare fish marinated with citrus and fermented chiles, mounted on compressed disks of crispy rice and showered with chives.
I was less taken with the beef tartare—an unconventional treatment in which the meat is dressed with salsa verde and spooned on finger-sized rectangles of toasted hash browns. Seemingly a riff on box sushi (substituting spuds for rice), it’s an interesting way to fashion tartare as a preassembled cocktail nosh, though purists may not be so amused.
How grand not to have to pore over tireless tasting notes about oysters from east and west. Austin’s single choice was elegant and on the money: tiny but mighty gems, freshly plucked from the beds of Alabama’s Murder Point farm. Slurp them with a glass of Muscadet.
Photograph by Martha Williams
Austin’s bills itself as a Jazz Age hideaway, and beverage director Cedar Meyers plays along coyly with the period-referencing Tropic of Cancer (a vodka, pineapple, lime, and vanilla syrup shout-out to Henry Miller’s scandalous novel) and the Fever Dream (a gin and St-Germain number with Grand Poppy amaro—“poppy” as in the flower, Meyers told me, right before I sipped one). The best drinks we sampled were the Crystal Negroni (a ginny, sweetly botanical Lillet- and limoncello-spiked slapper with a hint of bergamot) and the modern classic Naked and Famous (equal parts mezcal, Aperol, yellow chartreuse, and lime).
Those in want of more substantial dishes won’t be slighted. We were enraptured with a Saturday special of Wagyu New York strip from Kentucky, all pink, juicy, and charred, with grilled broccolini, confit sweet potatoes, and Georgia pecans. Who cares that the snapper was a little monochromatic? Within that pure whiteness lay pure buttery comfort.
The chefs’ imagination hardly freezes up when it comes to fall and winter veggies. Witness a humble wedge of cabbage—tender, black with char, and coddled in a Taleggio foam dotted with basil oil—and a sense-awakening porridge of rice, beets, goat cheese, walnuts, and zingy basil and lemon. Both splendid.
So what would Father Austin think of this posthumous tribute from the Nygren family? I suspect he’d sip a Front Porch Swing (built with bourbon, of course) and give the joint his blessing.
This article appears in our December 2024 issue.
Advertisement
