Walk past 110 East Clayton Street this month and you will see plywood over the ground-floor windows and a building crew moving through what used to be a bank lobby. Ask anyone downtown what is going in and you will get the same answer: a steakhouse. Ask why a steakhouse is moving into a building with vault doors somewhere behind that plywood, and most people will just shrug. It is worth a longer answer, because the same thing happened this year on the other side of downtown, at another old bank, with another steakhouse. Two of them, in one year, both choosing buildings that used to hold money instead of tables. That is not a coincidence. It is a pattern that tells you something real about what downtown Athens wants right now, and it has nothing to do with a menu.
The Bank That Became a Hotel That's Becoming a Steakhouse
The building at 110 East Clayton has already lived several lives. It was built by William S. Holman as an office building in 1913, on ground that had held Emmanuel Episcopal Church until 1892. In the 1920s, Holman reimagined it as a hotel, and for decades it was known simply as the Holman Hotel, one of the tallest buildings in the city. That did not last. In the 1960s, Citizens & Southern National Bank bought the building and turned it back into offices. C&S became NationsBank. NationsBank became Bank of America. For most of the last sixty years, the building's ground floor did what bank ground floors do: teller windows, a vault, not much foot traffic after five o'clock.
That changes this fall. Indigo Road Hospitality Group, working with Thoreau Capital, is opening Oak Steakhouse Athens on the ground floor, with a members-only supper club called 1892 on the floor above it. The name is not decorative. It marks the year Georgia played its first football game, which means the club sits inside a building whose own history runs almost exactly parallel to the university's. Indigo Road is not new to Athens. The group already runs Osteria Olio downtown, so this is a second bet on the same city, not a first toe in the water.
This is the ritual that Downtown Athens has needed: a steak dinner in a timeless setting.
That is how one of the venture's partners described the opening. It is a specific kind of promise. A steakhouse is not a place you duck into on a Tuesday between errands. It is a place built around an evening you planned, which is exactly the kind of room a bank building already has the bones for: high ceilings, thick walls, a floor plan built for weight and permanence rather than turnover.
A Second Vault, A Second Steakhouse
The Holman building is not the only former bank in Athens getting a steak knife this year. On the corner of Prince Avenue and Hawthorne, in the space that used to house a Synovus Bank branch, a new restaurant called Ghavi's The Steak Place opened under local owner Bahman. Different neighborhood, different price point, same instinct. When a bank moves out of a building built to hold a vault and a line of tellers, the next tenant that wants that kind of room, tall, solid, built to feel permanent, is increasingly a steakhouse rather than a boutique or a coffee shop.
Two steakhouses opening in former bank buildings in the same calendar year is not something you would guess from a restaurant review. It shows up only if you are paying attention to which buildings are changing hands and what moves in after, which is exactly the kind of local reading that a menu roundup will never give you.
Everything Else That Changed Downtown This Year
The bank-to-steakhouse pattern sits inside a much busier year for downtown. Some of it is opening, some of it is closing, and reading the two lists side by side tells you more than either one alone.
| Opened in 2026 | Closed or transitioning |
|---|---|
| Nové Mesto, 625 Barber St. (April 1) | Buvez (closed late 2025, became Dead Beat Club Feb. 13, 2026) |
| Rec Room Books, 297½ E. Broad St., under Jittery Joe's (Jan. 30) | Birdie's on Prince Avenue |
| Pompeii, downtown, replacing DePalma's (April 3) | Weaver D's building, 1016 E. Broad St. |
| Ghavi's The Steak Place, Prince & Hawthorne | Lindsey's Culinary Market |
| Oak Steakhouse Athens, 110 E. Clayton St. (early fall) |
Nové Mesto is the opening people are still talking about. It was founded by Jon Andrews, Lauren Owens, Katie Gasperec and T Silva, the same team behind Hi-Lo Lounge, which they started in 2013. This was not a new operator testing the market. It was a group with more than a decade in Athens finally acting on an expansion they had been sitting on since before the pandemic. The bar-forward Czech and Bohemian lagerhaus, drawing on Gasperec's own Czech heritage, sold out its entire food menu in its first week open. A few blocks away, the old DePalma's space downtown became Pompeii, a casual Italian spot that opened for dinner service on April 3.
The closing side of the ledger is quieter but just as telling. Weaver D's, the East Broad Street institution known for its lime-green building, had already lost that paint by spring 2026, even before its longtime owner, Dexter Weaver, made any retirement plans official. Birdie's, the Prince Avenue cheese shop, closed in December 2025. Lindsey Payne closed her downtown spot, Lindsey's Culinary Market, as well. And at Hendershot's, the coffee shop that has anchored its corner for fifteen years, owner Seth Hendershot took a walk with his wife in November 2025 to weigh whether the business still fit into their future, a conversation that speaks to how many longtime operators are quietly recalculating right now, even as new ones move in next door.
The Weeknight Bet
None of this is only about what is on the menu. It is also about when people are expected to show up. Restaurant Week this year added something it has not historically had: a three-hour retail-and-dining window built onto a Thursday, rather than treating the week as a dinner-only event. That is a bet that downtown's weeknight foot traffic is now worth building programming around, not just its Friday and Saturday nights. Nové Mesto's own hours back that up. It opens at 4 p.m. Wednesday through Friday and runs until midnight, which only makes sense if the operators expect a real midweek crowd to walk through the door before the weekend even starts.
What the Old Banks Are Really Telling Us
Put it together and the story is not just that Athens is getting two new steakhouses. It is that the buildings choosing to become steakhouses are the ones that were built to hold weight, literally and financially. A bank vault does not become a wine room by accident. High ceilings and thick walls do not get repurposed into private dining rooms because a restaurant group liked the location. They get repurposed because the room already does half the work a steakhouse needs done: it already feels like somewhere worth dressing up for.
Oak Steakhouse's early fall opening lines up with the start of football season, and the supper club upstairs takes its name from the year Georgia played its first game. That is not a subtle detail. It means the building's next chapter is timed to the same rhythm that has defined the city since long before it was a bank at all. For anyone who already calls Athens home, that is worth knowing before the ribbon gets cut, not after.
If you are watching downtown change from a home you already own here, or wondering what a shift like this means for a property you are thinking about buying or selling nearby, the team at Holly Purcell Group knows this market building by building. Contact us.
