Drive Buford Drive past the Mall of Georgia this month and you will pass at least three construction zones for restaurants that did not exist a year ago. Drive three miles west to Main Street and the biggest change you will notice is which artist happens to have their studio door propped open that afternoon. Same city. Same zip code. Two entirely different years.
That split is not an accident of geography. It is the clearest thing to understand about Buford right now if you actually live here, because it explains why "what's new in town" depends entirely on which half of town someone means.
Two Corridors, Three Miles Apart
Buford's retail energy this year has concentrated almost entirely along the Buford Drive corridor that runs past the Mall of Georgia, a strip that has spent the past two decades absorbing national chains at a pace few Georgia suburbs can match. Historic Main Street, by contrast, sits about three miles away, tucked into the older downtown grid where Tannery Row Artist Colony has occupied the same repurposed factory building for more than a decade.
Nobody in Buford treats these as one shopping district. You choose a corridor based on what you're doing that day, dinner reservation or gallery stroll, and the two rarely overlap on the same errand. What changed in 2026 is how lopsided the growth between them has become.
What Landed Near the Mall This Year
| Opening | What it replaced | Status as of mid-2026 |
|---|---|---|
| Fogo de Chão | New construction near the Mall of Georgia | Opened April 9, Gwinnett County's first location |
| Porterhouse Grill | Former O'Charley's building on Buford Drive | Targeted an April 15 opening, its largest location at roughly 7,500 square feet and 300 seats |
| Portillo's | Former Romano's Macaroni Grill, closed since 2024 | Under construction as of July, bidding underway |
| Chick-fil-A (second Buford location) | New build near the existing Mall of Georgia store | Announced, to be run by the operator who has held the original Buford store since 2001 |
Look at that list again and notice what it is not. It is not a scrappy independent taking a chance on an unproven address. Fogo de Chão's Buford restaurant is its third in metro Atlanta, and company leadership has been public about expanding slowly, five or six locations total in the region over time, with a fourth planned for Cumberland and another under consideration for Alpharetta. Buford landed on that short list ahead of Alpharetta, which tells you something about how site selectors are ranking this corridor's foot traffic.
Porterhouse Grill's Buford location is its third overall, joining existing restaurants in Athens and Brookhaven, and the company chose to make it the biggest one it has built. Portillo's picked Buford as only its second Georgia address, after a single Kennesaw store that opened last fall and marked the chain's 100th location nationally. And the new Chick-fil-A is not a new operator testing the market. It is the same owner who has run the Mall of Georgia location since 2001 taking on a second store in the same two communities he has already spent two decades serving.
None of these are risk bets. They are proven operators following demand they have already measured, into buildings that failed for a previous generation of casual dining. The O'Charley's that Porterhouse Grill is renovating and the Macaroni Grill that Portillo's is rebuilding both closed as part of an earlier casual-dining contraction. What is filling those same slabs now sits a notch higher on price and polish, churrasco and full-service steakhouse instead of unlimited breadsticks. That is less a restaurant boom than a retail corridor aging into its second act.
A colony that has spent more than a decade turning a 130-year-old shoe factory into working studio space was never competing for the same customer as a national steakhouse chain. It didn't need to.
The One Name on Main Street
Main Street's version of growth this year is smaller and slower, and it carries a detail the mall corridor cannot match: a single family name stamped across more than a century of the same three blocks.
The building that now houses Tannery Row Artist Colony was built in 1897 as a woodworking factory turning out chairs, doors, and blinds. In 1904, Bona Allen converted it into a tannery that produced horse collars at a scale large enough to earn it a reputation as one of the largest collar factories in the world, and the nickname stuck to the whole town for a stretch: Buford was known as "The Leather City." That same Bona Allen name appears again at the edge of Main Street, where the Bona Allen Mansion still stands and now hosts private events and weddings.
Today the tannery building holds a rotating group of roughly 15 to 20 working artists, painters, sculptors, glassblowers, photographers, jewelers, and woodcarvers, with studios open to the public Tuesday through Saturday from noon to 4 p.m. It is not trying to be a destination in the way the mall corridor is. It has operated on the same modest hours and the same collaborative footing for years, adding shows and new artists at its own pace rather than chasing a grand reopening.
Main Street did add something genuinely new this year, and it fits the pattern rather than breaking it. Cuzinz The Southern Soul Bistro opened with scratch-made Southern plates, smothered turkey wings and fried catfish among them, plus live music and weekend brunch. It is independently owned, modestly scaled, and built around a neighborhood crowd rather than mall traffic. That is the difference in one sentence: the mall corridor grows by importing national brands into recycled big-box real estate, and Main Street grows by adding one more independent room to a district that already knows how to fill it.
Same Split, After Dark
The city's two entertainment options split along the identical line. The Buford Community Center's Town Park & Theatre runs free outdoor movies and community concerts alongside ticketed stage plays in its indoor auditorium, and it also houses the Buford History Museum, a civic model where admission is low or free and the audience is the neighborhood itself. The Mall of Georgia runs its own Village Amphitheater concert series on the same free, retail-adjacent logic, entertainment as an amenity rather than a ticketed product.
Out at Lake Lanier, Peachtree Pointe Amphitheater at Lanier Islands Resort operates on a different model entirely: a resort venue booking national-caliber touring acts on a terraced lawn overlooking the water. This year's late-summer lineup includes an Eagles tribute act on August 22 and a Fleetwood Mac tribute on September 6, both leading into the resort's Hot Air Balloon Festival on September 18 and 19. It is the same community-versus-resort split you see in the dining corridors, just after sundown.
A Late-Summer Week, Two Different Nights
Put it together and a real week in Buford right now looks something like this: a Tuesday dinner at one of the new steakhouse-tier spots on Buford Drive, because the tables are new and the wait is shorter than it will be once word spreads. A Saturday afternoon walk through Tannery Row's open studios, because noon to 4 is a narrow window and worth planning around. A free evening at Town Park if the movie schedule lines up, or a drive out to Lanier Islands before September 18 if a tribute act or the balloon festival is more your speed.
None of that requires choosing a side. It just requires knowing that Buford's two centers of gravity run on different economics, one imported and pricier by the year, one homegrown and steady by design, and that both are worth the drive for entirely different reasons.
If you're weighing what a neighborhood like this actually offers day to day, beyond the headlines about a new steakhouse or a construction sign on Buford Drive, that's the kind of on-the-ground reading the David Huang Group does for every corner of north Atlanta we work in. Schedule a Free Market Consultation whenever you're ready to talk specifics about this market.
