The place where everybody knows your name: Georgia’s rural restaurants offer old-school hospitality and try not to think too hard about the future

Independent restaurants in many small Georgia communities are not only holding their own but outperforming their counterparts in Atlanta and other metropolitan areas, according to research by John Salazar, coordinator of the hospitality and food industry management program at the University of Georgia. Salazar, also an associate professor of hospitality management, defines rural counties as counties unaligned with metropolitan statistical areas—a definition more closely linked to the USDA’s than the SBA’s. By his measure, 55 percent of Georgia counties are rural, with nearly the same proportion of food-related jobs as in urban counties—8 percent as compared with about 8.6 percent. The rural counties’ 2020 decline in hotel occupancies—which significantly affect restaurant visits—was 16.7 percent, much less than the 28.2 percent occupancy decrease for urban counties. 

Rural restaurateurs enjoy one remarkable economic advantage: far cheaper real estate prices than in Atlanta and other cities. After renting space in downtown Crawfordville for a couple of years, Flores spent $90,000 of his own savings to open up a 85-seat restaurant last November—$20,000 to buy a 4,000-square-foot downtown department store that had been shuttered for decades and $70,000 to renovate it. Property taxes are $1,200 a year. His restaurant is ringing up $900 in daily sales with a staff of two paid employees, plus him. Flores said he clears $600 a day after expenses. Sinclair pays just $3,000 a month rent for Ila’s 5,000-square-foot restaurant, or 60 cents a square foot, about half of what an urban rent would be. 

Commercial rates have remained low even as residential values rise in Madison County (pop. 30,000) because newcomers want large lots, strong public schools, and easy commutes to jobs in Athens. “You’ve got to have the buyers,” said Stanley Thomas, a 67-year-old lifelong county resident and local realtor, and less than vibrant downtowns mean low demand for retail spaces. “We don’t have the population to attract a lot of commercial spaces” since new businesses are less likely to set up shop in Madison County when Athens is nearby. 

For residents of Crawfordville and other communities, restaurants occupy a critical community space, serving as a source not just of food and entertainment but also of social connection. Without Ila, the town would be “hollow,” said Sinclair, its center a four-way stop sign on a two-lane state highway, with few other businesses. Leslie Martin, a Crawfordville resident, said Nick’s Place “has absolutely provided social connection for the community” that lacked restaurants or even a grocery store. “We had nothing,” she said. Martin, a retired chef, was so convinced of the value of Nick’s Place that she drove an hour in various directions to auctions in nearby cities to help Flores furnish the restaurant. 

Every Friday morning at 7 a.m. for the past 31 years, the Rotary Club of Madison County has been meeting in a large dining room in the back of Ila Restaurant. The building’s owner, a Rotarian, built the addition for club meetings; it’s open to any customer outside of meeting times. The morning I visited, the restaurant’s parking lot was full of pick-up trucks and sedans. About 25 Rotarians had gathered inside to dine on grits, eggs, and bacon from the front room’s breakfast buffet before they settled in with cups of coffee and sweet tea to listen to the day’s speakers. 

“This room has really become a community meeting room,” said state Sen. Frank Ginn, 59, a charter member, whose table I joined. “Do you remember watching ‘It’s a Wonderful Life?’ Well, you never know the impact you have and the good that has happened in Madison County” as a result of residents being able to meet and connect at the restaurant. 

For Morgan Barnett, 30, Ila Restaurant has been a source of unexpected friendship. A married mother of two young boys, Barnett shows up with her younger son nearly every weekday morning, after her husband goes to work and their older son to school, to have breakfast with a group of retired local men who once were strangers.

The hardships these restaurants face are also specific to their location, the flip side of that attractive isolation: They have to figure out how to market to visitors and travelers who might otherwise not discover them; how to contend with high food and delivery costs while keeping meal prices affordable for locals; and how to plan for the future in what are often graying rural economies. 

Outside coastal tourist communities, rural Georgia means two-lane roads where vistas are farmland or forests, and where even the “center of town” might not look like much to an outside eye. Restaurants there can be hard to find—and hard to sustain. Every Sunday morning at 7, Flores and an employee load his Dodge Ram truck with four empty ice chests for the nearly two-hour drive to Restaurant Depot in Buford, north of Atlanta, to stock up on a week’s supply of eggs, French fries, chicken tenders, and meat for Philly cheesesteaks. It’s too expensive to use Houston-based Sysco Corp., for food deliveries, which used to put a $1,200 dent in his monthly profits, between the $45 delivery fees* and the higher cost of food. “Sysco has great products, but they were charging for everything,” Flores said.

And then there’s the issue of succession when today’s restaurant owners retire. Salazar believes that the average age of restaurant owners is rising, like the average age of Georgia farmers is rising—57.9 years according to the last U.S. Census of Agriculture—as younger generations seek opportunities outside the family business. Sinclair’s daughter has settled with her family in suburban Atlanta, where she works as a therapist, though Sinclair is confident she can find a buyer for her business when it’s time to retire. Flores said he is not focused on the future of Nick’s Place. “As long as I have two hands, I will be here,” he said. “I’m going to die here.”

“I can’t do what I could do five years ago,” she said. “Just to help out my staff and to make it easier on everybody, I would come in at 3:30, Sunday morning, and start cooking. My other staff, regular staff would start coming in at 6. And then I could breathe after that.” As we talked in her back office, Sinclair’s cell phone kept buzzing to let her know her glucose levels were too high. 

“I have a 12-hour day,” Sinclair said. “I’d have a 12-hour day on my feet and no breaks every day.” She decided to close on Sundays because she was having to ask her husband, busy with his own insurance company, and her daughter, who lives an hour’s drive  away, to lend a hand. But Sinclair discovered that her weekly sales did not decline; loyal local customers would stop by during the week instead. 

The next step, according to Salazar, is to connect with a bigger audience, including the larger hospitality and tourism ecosystem in Georgia. “Travelers are shying away from these major urban markets, and they are looking for activities and experiences that are more conducive to social distancing,” he said. “I have been doing tourism and hospitality research for over 25 years, and very rarely have I seen an opportunity where rural tourism and agritourism have this opportunity to step into the spotlight.” 

*Clarification: After publication, a representative for Sysco Foods reached out to say that the company started waiving delivery fees in November 2020 “to help small independent restaurants like those owned by Mr. Flores.”