"Ansley Mall is a gathering place for all the neighborhoods around it. It's the perfect fit, being right on the Beltline."
That's pitmaster John Lewis, talking about the spot he picked for his first Georgia restaurant. He's not wrong, but he's also describing something that wasn't true until nine months ago. For most of the time Ansley Mall has existed, the Beltline ran directly behind it and the two never really spoke to each other. A creek and a chain-link fence sat between the Northeast Trail and the mall's back lot. If you were walking the dog or biking home from Piedmont Park, Ansley Mall was a building you passed, not a place you could reach without a car and a trip around to Piedmont Avenue.
That changed on December 1, 2025, when Selig Enterprises finally unlocked the pedestrian bridge it had built across that creek two years earlier. A week later, Lewis Barbecue opened its doors on the other side of it. The thesis here is simple and it's one most people walking that stretch of trail still haven't fully absorbed: the front door of Ansley Mall, the one on Piedmont Avenue with the Publix and the LA Fitness, is no longer the way most of the neighborhood actually gets in. The back door is.
Two years of a bridge nobody could cross
The bridge itself has an odd history worth knowing if you've ever wondered why that stretch of blue steel sat empty behind the mall for so long. Selig installed the 105-foot span in late 2023 as part of a plan to connect the mall's rear parking area to the Northeast Trail, which by that November had been fully paved between southern Buckhead and Monroe Drive. The idea was straightforward: give Beltline users a shortcut into the shopping center instead of forcing them around to the main entrance on Piedmont.
Then nothing happened. As of mid-2025, the bridge was still gated with locked chain-link fencing, leading to what one reporter at Urbanize Atlanta described as an active construction site rather than a functioning entrance. Selig wouldn't commit to a timeline. The barbecue restaurant that was supposed to anchor the Beltline-facing renovation kept slipping. If you lived in Piedmont Heights or Ansley Park and walked past that bridge on your evening loop, you'd have been forgiven for assuming it was decorative.
It wasn't. It was waiting on construction to finish behind it, and that construction turned out to be worth the wait.
What actually opened on December 8
Lewis Barbecue's Atlanta location is not a satellite outpost of a small concept. It's a space spanning more than 8,000 square feet, the company's third location after Charleston and Greenville, built with a 1,600-square-foot rooftop addition the company has called the world's first rooftop smokehouse. Six 22-foot smokers run inside it in staggered eight-hour shifts, twenty-four hours a day, which means the building is, in a very literal sense, always working. Atlanta Magazine's dining critic toured the space after opening and described the smokehouse as unlike any she'd seen, with panoramic windows looking straight down at the new bridge.
The restaurant landed at a good moment for its own reputation. Weeks before the Atlanta opening, Lewis Barbecue's Charleston location earned a Bib Gourmand distinction in the Michelin Guide's American South edition, which gave the December 8 opening in Atlanta a running start most new restaurants don't get. John Lewis told Rough Draft Atlanta he'd been scouting Atlanta locations for roughly six years before settling on Ansley Mall, and that he'd spent his last six months before opening eating at Bantam & Biddy, the mall's existing Southern restaurant, at least twice a week while he watched construction finish next door.
The layout matters for how you'd actually use it. Lewis Barbecue and its adjoining cocktail lounge, Bar Lewis, sit directly on the bridge side of the property, so you can walk off the Northeast Trail, order at a walk-up window, and eat without setting foot in the rest of the shopping center. The AJC's Beltline dining guide, published in May of this year, confirms the two spaces are both directly attached to the trail by the bridge, distinct from the covered walkway that leads into the mall's older interior.
The walk that exists now
Here's the version of the loop that wasn't possible before December 2025. Start at Winn Park, the ten-plus acre green space with the playground and small pond that most Ansley Park residents already treat as a front yard. Head east on the Northeast Trail, past the dense tree canopy and wildflower stretch that runs the length of Piedmont Park and the Atlanta Botanical Garden's back fence. Keep going and the trail delivers you straight to the bridge, and the bridge drops you at Lewis Barbecue's rooftop deck.
From there, the covered walkway that's existed at Ansley Mall for decades takes you into the rest of the property. That's where the older tenant list lives: The Cook's Warehouse for kitchen gear, Ansley Wine Merchants, Brooklyn Bagel Bakery & Deli for breakfast, Vinny's N.Y. Pizza & Grill, and Chopt Creative Salad Co. A few doors down in the adjacent Ansley Square strip, Bangkok Thai Restaurant and the Atlanta Eagle, a longtime nightclub that relocated to the shopping center about three years ago, both back directly onto the same trail corridor, according to the AJC's rundown of Beltline-adjacent businesses.
None of that retail is new. What's new is that you can now reach all of it on foot from the trail side, in an order that used to run in reverse. For years, if you wanted a bagel or a bottle of wine at Ansley Mall, you drove to the Piedmont Avenue lot and walked past the Publix and the LA Fitness to get to the smaller shops behind them. Now the barbecue restaurant is the first thing you hit, and everything else is the back half of the trip.
The front door isn't obsolete, it's just not first anymore
It's worth being precise about what did and didn't change. Ansley Mall's Piedmont Avenue entrance, with its Publix, CVS, and LA Fitness, still handles the daily errands that don't have anything to do with the Beltline. Nobody's driving to the grocery store via a pedestrian bridge. That side of the property still functions exactly as it did before, and for a lot of the neighborhood's daily traffic, that's still the front door in every sense that matters.
What shifted is who counts as a regular. Some 3,000 weekly patrons were projected to visit Lewis Barbecue when the restaurant filed its permitting paperwork, with a substantial share expected to arrive via the trail rather than by car, and the mall's own permit filings anticipated another 100 to 150 vehicles a day on top of that. That's a meaningful new population of people experiencing Ansley Mall for the first time from the back, on foot, with no memory of the Piedmont Avenue side at all. For longtime residents who've always parked at the front, that's the part worth adjusting to: the mall now has two identities running in parallel, and the newer one runs through your neighborhood's own trail.
The read for residents
If your regular loop already includes Winn Park and the Northeast Trail, the practical update is short. You can now end that walk with a plate of brisket instead of turning around at the fence you've been staring at for two years. If you haven't walked that stretch in a while, it's worth doing once just to see how differently the mall reads coming from that direction, smokehouse first, Publix last.
The bigger shift is less about any single restaurant and more about what it says regarding how this pocket of the Beltline is filling in. For the two years after Selig put that bridge in, Ansley Mall was a building the trail ran behind. Nine months in, it's a building the trail runs through, and that's the kind of change that tends to compound rather than reverse.
If you're weighing what a shift like this means for your own property, or you're just curious what your Ansley Park home might be worth in today's market, Team Rich Richardson puts together an instant home valuation that takes about two minutes and gives you a real starting number, no obligation attached.
