Seasonal Italian restaurant Füm from Miami-based, Michelin-starred restaurant group Grassfed Culture Hospitality will open Saturday in West Midtown’s Stella at Star Metals building. Later this spring, it will also debut a cocktail bar on the 17th floor called Rabbit Ears.
Füm is the hospitality group’s first concept outside of Miami. It will offer a menu of contemporary Italian food influenced by the terroir of Georgia and the surrounding Southeastern states.
Founders Josh Hackler, Pili Restrepo and Sebastián Vargas were looking for a way to expand their footprint, and they already had a relationship with Alan Morris Company, a developer that operates out of Miami and Atlanta and is behind West Midtown’s Star Metals development.
Ever since Hackler, Restrepo and Vargas founded the hospitality group in 2020, their concepts have heavily emphasized local sourcing and sustainability. Grassfed Culture’s Miami restaurants Los Félix and Krüs Kitchen both have Michelin green stars, which recognize a restaurant’s commitment to sustainable practices. Los Félix also has a Michelin star.
Georgia’s seasons and its farming culture appealed to them.
Credit: Courtesy of Juliana Diaz Muñoz
Credit: Courtesy of Juliana Diaz Muñoz
“(Atlanta’s) culture, diversity, the maturity, where the city is in terms of its gastro-economic development — it’s just in this really nice opportunity where new things I think are really welcomed,” Hackler told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
Füm is Grassfed’s first Italian concept, and the name means smoke in the Italo-Gaelic language spoken in Northern Italy before World War II, according to a news release.
“Italian food has a little space in everybody’s heart,” said Vargas, the executive chef at Grassfed Hospitality.
Vargas previously worked in Italy at Osteria Francescana, and he wanted to focus on the Italian culinary philosophy of using what’s local and what’s fresh, he said. For that reason, they won’t be using many ingredients from Italy; instead, it will mostly come from farms and producers within a 300-mile radius of the city. That’s the contemporary side of the restaurant, Vargas said.
When diners walk into Füm, they’ll be met with Füm Cafe, a coffee and pastry bar at the front. The rest of the restaurant is meant to mimic the experience of shopping in an Italian piazza, creative director Restrepo said.
There’s a pasta room that guests can peer into, where all the pasta will be made by hand. A wine table and large bar will offer Italian-inspired cocktails and low-intervention wines. There’s also a curing room where the restaurant will dry-age its own meat to produce house-made charcuterie.
Credit: Courtesy of Juliana Diaz Muñoz
Credit: Courtesy of Juliana Diaz Muñoz
The rest of the 4,700-square-foot restaurant, whose architecture and interior design was led by Arcturis/Square Feet Studio, is filled with curved spaces and a mix of high and low ceilings.
Restrepo said they wanted it to feel “cozy and intimate.” She was inspired by the human body and all of the nooks and crevices found in bones. Music will also play a central role as they plan to have a vinyl DJ playing in the evenings.
The menu is designed for sharing with sections of crudo, antipasti, pasta, mains and meat courses along with desserts.
Expect dishes like dry-aged beef tartare; strozzapreti with braised oxtail; agnolotti with smoked corn and taleggio; bone-in pork chop with smoked tomato-miso sugo; whole grilled chicken with salsa verde; and pistachio gelato.
“We’re not trying to rewrite the book or trying to make it so different and so complicated that it’s hard to identify dishes,” Vargas said.
Credit: Courtesy of Juliana Diaz Muñoz
Credit: Courtesy of Juliana Diaz Muñoz
The cocktail menu was developed by mixologist Esther Merino and includes drinks like the Muratore with Italian extra-virgin olive oil, fat-washed amaro, koji sake, Lapsang souchong tea and tequila. The wine program will focus on Italian wines and Champagne while highlighting female producers, Hackler said.
Rabbit Ears will open later in the spring on Stella by Star Metals’ 17th floor. The cocktail bar will offer sweeping skyline views of Atlanta, and the cocktail menu is inspired by the fictional character Peter Rabbit as it follows him on his journey through the garden.
The West Midtown area has faced its fair share of struggles in recent years as dozens of restaurant closures plagued the district. Hackler said they’ve been following the news, and he sees it as a symptom of an evolving neighborhood.
There are plenty of successful restaurants in the area, he added, like Miller Union, the Optimist, Avize and Marcel. Since the area struggles with foot traffic, Hackler thinks the solution to survive is to be a destination restaurant, somewhere that diners will intentionally seek out.
“If you’re a destination doing something unique, people are gonna come,” he said.
As a new hospitality group entering Atlanta, he said Grassfed Hospitality is approaching the city with “humility,” and they plan to make an effort at blending into the fabric of the city with the goal of bringing more concepts to Atlanta.
Füm and Rabbit Ears will join several other Miami-based concepts entering the Atlanta market, including Ghee Indian Kitchen in West Midtown and Mister 01 Pizza in Buckhead and Sandy Springs.
Füm will be open 5:30-10 p.m. Wednesdays, Thursdays and Sundays and 5:30-11 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays.
660 11th St. NW, Atlanta. 404-975-0969, fumatl.com
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