The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Gastropub survives, expands patio
Curious Pig in Peachtree City also opens in restaurant in Senoia.
Like Peachtree City’s 100-plus-mile network of golf cart paths, the outdoor space at one of its local gastropubs, the Curious Pig, is ginormous.
The wide, grassy front lawn hasn’t always been the draw at this establishment, opened in 2018 by chef-owner Scott Smith. But, since COVID-19 hit, it’s been prime real estate. And, as the 2021 patio season gets underway, Smith plans to make the most of it.
A massive outdoor upgrade includes: 10 more socially distanced umbrella tables, adding to the current stock of five; three fire pits, each surrounded by “plush, resort-style” lounge seats; an outdoor bar; a sound system; open-air tenting; and a landscaping makeover. Smith expects to unveil the improved space later this week.
He’d hoped to take better advantage of the patio’s potential more than a year ago, when he had the space fitted with string lights. “We never even got to use it,” he recalled. “I had all those lights installed, and then COVID happened.”
Smith shut the restaurant down in mid-march. “Let’s stop everything and take a look,” he told his wife, Amy. “Why don’t we just close the restaurant for dine-in ahead of the curve, so none of our staff gets sick, and offer $10 to-go meals?”
They did. And, it worked, with the Curious Pig selling upward of 600 meals some days. Curious Meals to Go — a concise, weekly menu of $10 ready-to-reheat dinners, preordered by Friday evenings for Tuesday pickup — continues to attract busy households looking for a value-driven, home-
style meal, made with highquality ingredients.
Smith’s style of running his operation during the four months that the dining room remained shut did more than attract a public hungry for country-fried pork steak and airline chicken made with Springer Mountain poultry. It also kept all of his staff employed, even though the dining room continues to seat far below capacity.
I first met Smith in the fall of 2019, when I visited him and his staff to learn about his approach to restaurant management, which prioritizes a nurturing workplace. Besides paying fair wages, Smith thinks that the reason he has retained his staff during the public health crisis is due to empathy. “Every night, after we closed down and cleaned, we did family meal. We would all sit down and have dinner. We did that for months.”
Smith thinks that practice was especially impactful, because of the social isolation everyone was feeling.
“That kind of family environment that we have — people don’t want to go anywhere,” he said.
He recognizes that none of it would have been possible without customers. “The community support was a very amazing security blanket for us,” he said.
Those successes enabled Smith to make another curious move in a curious year: opening a second restaurant.
His impetus: “COVID made me realize how fortunate we were, and I wanted to make sure, if there was an opportunity to offer more employment to locals, we could do that.”
Curious Kitchen & Bar debuted in downtown Senoia in December, feeding the flow of visiting “Walking Dead” fans, as well as Curious Pig regulars who want a more bar-focused experience, a change of scenery and a different menu that still offers Southern comforts.
Back home at the Curious Pig, the kitchen still is serving up crowd favorites, like tater tots with beer cheese, a pimento cheese plate with all manner of pickled produce, and the Nashville hot chicken sandwich. But, with spring in the air, an arugula salad, crab cakes and crispy trout over creamed corn risotto shake up the cooking routine.
Smith assessed the overall performance of his business in the past year: “We took a wide-based approach,” he said. “It wasn’t easy. We had to make a lot of changes to everyday operations.”
But, he concluded, “the Curious Pig weathered COVID pretty gracefully.”