A longtime metro Atlanta restaurant is slated to close this weekend.
Watershed, located at 1820 Peachtree Road in Brookwood Hills, will shutter after dinner service on Saturday, Dec. 28, Eater Atlanta first reported.
The restaurant, which has been in business for 21 years, was purchased by chef Matt Marcus in April 2018.
One of Atlanta’s true legacy restaurants, Watershed was founded in Decatur in 1998 by Emily Saliers of the Indigo Girls, with Ross Jones and their business partners.
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Anne Quatrano of Bacchanalia was the opening chef, before Scott Peacock took over in 1999 and made it a nationally recognized bastion of Southern-inspired farm-to-table cooking.
Watershed left Decatur and moved to Brookwood in 2010, where Joe Truex, and then Zeb Stevenson , continued the tradition of creative cooking with nods to the likes of fried chicken and biscuits.
Stevenson and Jones left Watershed after Marcus purchased the restaurant to open Redbird in West Midtown.
"I think the universe kind of pushed me into this situation," Marcus told the AJC in 2018 regarding his purchase of Watershed. "Being born and raised in Atlanta, I carry the kind of cooking Watershed represents in my soul. My techniques are a little different, and I like to be a little more progressive, but really the products are the same."
He famously added a $350 plate of french fries with sea salt and a 750-milliliter bottle of Krug Brut Rose to the menu along with some other unconventional dishes, but the restaurant’s popular fried chicken remained.
AJC food and dining editor Ligaya Figueras gave the restaurant two out of four stars in a January 2019 review.
“Mainly, as a new act begins at the restaurant, this inquiring mind wonders whether the old Watershed and the new need to come to better terms for the dining script to play out more smoothly,” she wrote.
The AJC has reached out to Marcus for more details on the closure and information on his future plans.
--AJC food and beer writer Bob Townsend contributed to this report.
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