Hugh Acheson, the personable Georgia chef, cookbook author, Top Chef judge, and food education advocate, says that “learning to live with the constantly changing business landscape after opening” is more difficult than launching a new restaurant.
Still, the James Beard Award-winning Acheson has a knack for playing the long game. In Athens, Georgia, he opened the Southern-inspired Five & Ten in 2000, followed by the National four years later. He is also a chef and partner at Empire State South and Spiller Park Coffee in Atlanta. For Five&Ten, he says “time, dedication, and a willingness to get it done with little resources” drove him, but as his food empire continues to grow, he points to “the phonetic taste of a restaurant and the constant need to adapt” as his motivation.
Acheson’s cuisine is emblematic of a progressive, new American South, but he was raised in Canada, where he began washing dishes at the age of 15 and spent his formative years cooking in kitchens in Ottawa and Montreal. When his then-wife started graduate school at the University of Georgia, Acheson headed to Athens with her in 1996. “Being immersed in the South made me realize the importance of telling a story through food,” he says.
At By George, his French restaurant debuting at the soon-to-open, studio NICOLEHOLLIS-designed Candler Hotel in downtown Atlanta, Acheson’s food will be evocative of the Candler’s past—a 1906 Beaux-Arts structure influenced by former Coca-Cola tycoon and city mayor, Asa Griggs Candler. With its high ceilings and imposing marble columns mixed with modern elements like 1960s-era orange and white wallpaper and a communal wood table, the dining room will be at once regal and relaxing. “Restaurants are inherently places of rest and comfort, and the design has a lot to do with that,” says Acheson. “They also need to be efficient, allowing us to move around in a way that seems natural.”
With multiple F&B outlets, books, a podcast, and nonprofit Seed Life Skills (which is dedicated to empowering young people to be sustainable stewards of food and financial resources), Acheson is a renaissance man with no plans of slowing down. “When you have one restaurant, you can’t fully be there all the time,” he says, “and when you have multiple businesses, you have to grow your team to be able to thrive.”
