Top Chef Kevin Gillespie (Revival, Ole Reliable) opens Gunshow sister restaurant Cold Beer Tuesday, July 23, along the Eastside Beltline next to the Edgewood Avenue bridge in Old Fourth Ward. At 7,000 square feet and two stories, Cold Beer is Gillespie’s largest and most ambitious restaurant to date.
While technically a bar, Gillespie says to expect Cold Beer to function more as a “community gathering place for nonstop celebrating,” which includes a menu of food not unlike what’s offered at Gunshow (minus the rolling cart action in the dining room.)
Gillespie hired Brian Baxter (Husk-Nashville, McCrady’s) as Cold Beer’s chef de cuisine in April and promoted Gunshow beverage director Mercedes O’Brien. O’Brien now oversees the bar programs at all of Gillespie’s Red Beard restaurants.
“Mercedes has been with me for five years. She’s incredible,” Gillespie told Eater Atlanta last March. “This is a big step up in the company, and we can’t wait to turn the reins over to her for Cold Beer.”
Cold Beer’s menu includes a constantly rotating list of 15 dishes, broken up into appetizers, entrées, and desserts, accompanied by 15 corresponding cocktails.
“Like Gunshow, we’re not limiting it to Southern or traditional American,” Baxter says in the press release. “It’s about what we feel like cooking and what we feel like eating.” For example, O’Brien and Baxter preserved several bushels of strawberries for dishes and drinks on the opening menu.
The bar also features a small list of by-the-glass and bottle wines and a dozen beers, spanning “from Belgium to Kennesaw,” on tap and in cans.
One of the restaurant’s most striking design elements in the otherwise minimalist and modern dining room is a 13-foot painting of a polar bear by artist O.M. Norling. Gillespie commissioned the painting specifically for Cold Beer. The polar bear holds personal meaning for the chef, who battled renal cancer last year.
Cold Beer also features two large patios: a covered patio on the ground floor and a large patio bar upstairs on the rooftop of the restaurant. To access the roof, diners must first check in at the host stand as it’s first-come, first-served.
“With a lively, airy bar, picnic tables and European café-vibed seating, every day at Cold Beer should feel like a party,” Gillespie says. “We want to capitalize on the energy and the vibrancy of the BeltLine to create a unique culinary communal gathering place, a new favorite hangout for you and your friends.”
The inspiration behind Cold Beer’s name comes from Gillespie’s childhood memories of camping with his family. They often passed by a dive bar on the way to the campsite with big block letters reading “cold beer” on the side of the building.
Cold Beer, open for dinner and eventually weekend brunch, joins neighboring burger chain Shake Shack and the forthcoming Revelator coffee company-back wine bar Hazel Jane’s at the Edge complex.
Reservations for the dining room and the dining room bar will soon be available online. However, walk-ins are welcome. Both patios are first-come, first-served.
Take a look inside Cold Beer.
Open Tuesday - Sunday at 4 p.m.
670 DeKalb Avenue NE, Suite 101, Atlanta. coldbeeratl.com.