For four years, chef Demetrius Brown’s Heritage Supper Club existed in borrowed spaces: a coffee shop after hours, a restaurant dining room on its night off, wherever he could set up to tell a story through food. On Tuesday, September 10, that story finally gets a permanent address when Heritage, Brown’s new restaurant with business partner Brandon Blanchard, opens in Atlanta’s historic Summerhill neighborhood. The African, Caribbean, and Afro-American cuisine that built Brown’s reputation now has a home of its own for the first time.
From Pop-Up to Permanent
Brown launched Heritage Supper Club as a pandemic-era pop-up in 2021, and it didn’t take long to find an audience—within a year, Atlanta magazine had named it the city’s Best Food Pop-Up.
Blanchard, who had worked alongside Brown at Serenbe and later hired him to turn around the Pinewood in Decatur, became his business partner in 2022, and the two spent the next several years building toward a permanent space while running Bread & Butterfly, the Inman Park restaurant they acquired in 2023 under their Bellevue Hospitality banner.
Bread & Butterfly’s dinner service—introduced that fall—became something of a preview of what was to come, and the accolades followed: a spot on The New York Times’ national restaurant list in 2024 and a place among Atlanta’s 25 best restaurants three years running.
But a brick-and-mortar Heritage was always the goal. For Brown, the shift from pop-up to permanent restaurant meant learning to hand off a vision that had, until now, lived entirely in his head…