Cotto Modern Italian held its grand opening at Vinings Jubilee on Thursday, September 17. The space at 2850 Paces Ferry Road now serves handmade pastas, wood-fired pizza and an Italian porterhouse steak. Walk past it on a Thursday night and you'd never guess this corner spent most of the last decade serving burgers and bourbon, or that before that it poured margaritas under neon signage.
The interesting part isn't that a restaurant changed. Restaurants change constantly. The interesting part is who made the decision and why. The same company has now run this address through three different identities, and each move has pushed the space further upmarket. That pattern, once you see it, explains more about what's actually happening at the Jubilee this year than any single opening does on its own.
Three Restaurants, One Address
Here's what's occupied that corner since 2015:
| Years | Restaurant | Style |
|---|---|---|
| Through 2015 | Noche | Latin-inspired dining and tequila bar, part of the former Here to Serve restaurant group |
| April 2016–March 2026 | Stockyard Burgers & Bones | Casual burgers, barbecue and bourbon |
| September 2026–present | Cotto Modern Italian | Upscale Italian, wine-forward, full bar program |
Stockyard closed on a Sunday at the end of March, and the space sat under renovation for nearly six months before Cotto opened its doors. That's a long runway for what looks, from the outside, like a straightforward tenant swap.
The Same Operator, Making the Call Itself
What makes this different from ordinary retail turnover is that Fork U Concepts, the Marietta-based restaurant group led by husband-and-wife team Scott and Alexis Kinsey, owned both the outgoing and incoming restaurant. Nobody evicted Stockyard. The company that ran it chose to close a working burger joint and replace it with a pricier concept from its own portfolio.
Fork U's other properties give some sense of scale. The group also operates:
- Stockyard Burgers & Bones, now down to its original Marietta Square location after closing outposts in Sandy Springs (2018) and East Cobb (2022)
- Taqueria Tsunami Latin Asian Kitchen, a nine-unit concept currently relocating its Roswell location from Holcomb Bridge Road to Canton Street
- Silla del Toro, a Spanish tapas concept with three locations
- Forno Vero in Marietta and Southern Prospect in Watkinsville
- West Park Sports Club, a new two-level sports bar that opened in Marietta Square this spring in the former Red Hare Brewing Company space
Cotto itself isn't new to Fork U. The original opened in downtown Gainesville in April 2023 and built a strong local following there. Bringing that same menu, cacio e pepe, veal piccata, lasagna bolognese, pizza with calabrese peppers, along with a cocktail list built around a barrel-aged negroni and an espresso martini, to Vinings is a bet that this stretch of Paces Ferry Road can support Gainesville-level prices in an Atlanta suburb. Co-owner Alexis Kinsey has described the approach as keeping the traditional Italian dishes true to their roots while updating a few of the details, which tracks with a restaurant group that already knows its market well enough to expand into it deliberately rather than test it cold.
The Rest of the Jubilee Has Been Trading Up Too
Cotto isn't the only sign that the center's mix has shifted. Warby Parker opened at the Jubilee this year, and lululemon marked its first full year there in July with an in-store workout event led by its local ambassador. Both are the kind of national retailers that tend to follow foot traffic rather than create it, which suggests the Jubilee's overall draw has grown enough to interest them.
Meanwhile, the restaurants that were already there have been sharpening their own offerings rather than standing still. HOBNOB Neighborhood Tavern rolled out a menu refresh that includes a new Bourbon Smokehouse Burger. SOHO ran Lobster Sundays through most of the summer. None of these are dramatic changes on their own, but taken together with the Cotto swap, they point the same direction: this shopping center is investing in itself.
What Hasn't Moved
None of this has touched the parts of Vinings Jubilee that don't depend on a lease renewal. The Farmers Market still sets up in the parking lot every Thursday afternoon, drawing more than 30 vendors selling produce, baked goods and artisan crafts. This year's season opened in March with a Strawberry Social and ran through the summer into fall, the same rhythm it's kept for years.
The Vinings Downhill 5K, a charity race benefiting children's causes, ran its usual August course with an 8 a.m. start and a post-race celebration back at the Jubilee, where local shops and restaurants offered their own deals to the runners and walkers who showed up. It's a morning built entirely around neighbors, not around whichever restaurant happens to be leasing the corner unit.
And the same Paces Mill Road that curves past Old Vinings Inn keeps going straight to Paces Mill Park, where the Chattahoochee River National Recreation Area's gravel trails begin. Cochran Shoals, a few minutes further along, offers more than three miles of level, riverside trail popular with runners, walkers and dog owners, though a parking fee or annual pass applies inside the recreation area. None of that has changed either, and it's not likely to.
Planning a Week Around It
If you're deciding where to eat this week, Cotto is currently taking reservations for dinner throughout the week and lunch on weekends, following the same schedule as its Gainesville location. HOBNOB's new burger is worth trying if you haven't been in since the refresh. Thursday afternoon is still the move if you want fresh produce before the weekend, and Saturday mornings along the river are unaffected by anything happening at the shopping center.
The version of Vinings Jubilee you're walking through this fall isn't a random collection of new signage. It's a handful of operators, some of them the same company wearing a different name, deciding this is a place worth investing more in. That's a different story than "restaurants come and go," and it's the one actually playing out on that corner.
If you're the kind of neighbor who likes knowing what's changing before it shows up on a sign, Purpose Driven Real Estate Group keeps an eye on these shifts around Vinings as part of how we stay useful to the community we work in. Send us a message if you've spotted something else new at the Jubilee worth watching.
