Credit Ben Shnider
Owner says redevelopment of Emory Village is blocking traffic to restaurant.
Saba Restaurant sent out an SOS on Facebook Wednesday morning.
The restaurant on Oxford Road made a plea for customers to brave construction and visit their Emory Village location to keep them from closing.
Emory Village is currently undergoing redevelopment.
“The road is open, the sidewalk is open, please help us stay open,” Saba said in a Facebook post Wednesday. “We understand that many of you have been discouraged with the road work in front of Saba. We are open. For us to survive this nightmare, we need your help.”
Saba could close within weeks, according to the post.
Shane Mixon, owner of the restaurant, told What Now Atlanta over the phone Wednesday sales have dropped $100,000 since January of this year.
He attributes the decline in sales to the redevelopment of Emory Village — the shopping center nearby.
“It’s been fatal,” Mixon said. “We’ve had an entire road closed off to the restaurant.” The effect construction has had on Saba’s traffic is pretty serious, he said.
“The roundabout is going to look beautiful, but the process of getting there should have been handled differently.”
Virginia-Highland – North Druid Patch has a thoughtful article about other businesses affected by the construction.
Saba Restaurant
1451 Oxford Road
Atlanta, GA 30307
The same thing happened to the restaurants on the Decatur MARTA plaza when they did the renovation. Sage was a great restaurant and suffered the same fate. The county does not care.
I think the SOS only relates to the Emory Village location of Saba, which is located at 1451 Oxford Road, Atlanta, GA 30307. The Mead Road location is in Oakhurst and shouldn’t be impacted by Emory Village road construction.
SAGE was not a great restaurant and deserved to close down. They used the MARTA plaza reconstruction as an excuse to whine about a business that was failing anyway. SAGE was replaced by Iberian Pig which is doing gangbusters business.
Yeah but the area will be a lot better once the road improvements are done…
hi ckwill– you’re absolutely right. the address has been updated.
–cjs
Most of the college kids are gone for summer, I think that has more to do with Saba than the road construction. I’m sure all the area students and full-time residents appreciate that this work is being done when school is not in, to minimize the traffic hassles.
To be fair, Vanilla, the road in front of Saba was closed and undergoing heavy construction this spring when the students were here. I think everyone agrees the roundabout will be/is great, but this project has been going on for a really long time. There’s been work relating to this project going on (off and on) since I moved to the area four years ago.
Everyone will be happy when it’s all over and I hope Saba and the other businesses can stick with it til then.
Saba is a great locally owned restaurant that is definitely worth saving. Very affordable, fresh Italian food in a family-friendly atmosphere. We’ll be headed there this week!
This is terrible news. The village is already lacking a good selection places to due to a number of empty “ghost-like” locations. We need more to open, not another to close! We need this development to get the village on the map and get new business and customers in. We will make a visit in the next week.
We visited on Friday. What a great neighborhood place. So sorry the construction has been so difficult. Losing this restaurant would be a horrible shame.