"The same care and attention you'd see in a fine-dining kitchen." That's how chef Todd Richards describes what he's doing with barbecue at his new spot on Jonesboro Road. It sounds like a chef quote you'd skim past. It's actually the best one-line explanation for why McDonough now has two places to eat dinner instead of one, and why most residents are still only checking the first.
For as long as anyone can remember, "going out to eat in McDonough" has meant one thing: parking near the courthouse and picking a spot on the Square. That's still true on a Friday night. What's changed is that it's no longer the whole story. A mile down Jonesboro Road, a corridor that used to be drive-through-only real estate is now home to a James Beard semifinalist's barbecue room and a fast-growing chicken chain's newest Georgia location. If you've only been eating inside the loop around the courthouse, you've missed roughly half of what opened in your own city this year.
What Actually Landed on Jonesboro Road
In March 2026, Todd Richards opened Que-Riosity at 1931 Jonesboro Road. Richards isn't a first-time operator testing a concept. He's a self-taught chef with a 25-year career and four James Beard semifinalist nods, and he currently serves as executive chef at Waldorf Astoria Atlanta Buckhead. Que-Riosity is his take on Southern barbecue built around Black pitmaster traditions, served in a room designed to feel closer to fine dining than a smokehouse, open Thursday through Monday from 3 p.m. to 10 p.m.
That's the kind of opening that tells you something about a stretch of road, not just a menu. A chef with that resume doesn't pick a location by accident.
Neither does a franchise. In February 2026, Super Chix signed a lease for a 2,500-square-foot space at 982 Jonesboro Road, Suite 200. The location belongs to Missy Moon, a franchisee who already operates several Super Chix locations around metro Atlanta. Franchise groups like this pick markets by running the numbers against the strongest suburbs in the region. McDonough making that list is the quiet part of the story. It means the city is now getting compared, on paper, to places like Dunwoody, Peachtree City, and Marietta when a growing chain decides where its next location goes.
Neither business owner sat down at a table and said "let's build a second dining district together." Richards followed his own concept. Moon followed her company's expansion math. But when the same corridor pulls both a chef of that caliber and a franchise operator making that comparison in the same six months, it stops looking like coincidence and starts looking like a pattern the rest of the city is catching up to.
The Square Didn't Shrink, It Found a Different Job
None of this means the Square is losing ground. It still has the patio seating, the walk-from-dinner-to-drinks convenience, and the names most residents list first when someone asks where to eat in town.
Pandora on the Square, helmed by chef Carlos Brown, is doing the kind of Lowcountry-meets-Southern fine dining that a fast-casual corridor isn't built for, with lunch Tuesday through Friday, weekend brunch, and dinner service that runs late Friday through Sunday. Starshines is running a modern farm-to-table menu with indoor and outdoor seating right on the Square. Crust & Craft is the counterweight to both, the table you can walk into on a Thursday at 8 p.m. without a reservation, built around pizza, beer, and cocktails.
And then there's the piece that doesn't show up on a restaurant list at all. Story on the Square, at 19 Griffin Street, has grown into a small events venue that runs alongside the food scene rather than competing with it. It's hosted book clubs, storytimes, craft evenings, and beer tastings, including one built around Fall Line Brewing Co. with a guided flight of five selected beers. That kind of weeknight programming is what turns a square from a place people visit into a place people return to on a Tuesday. It's the same mechanism that helped rebuild foot traffic in other Georgia downtowns over the past decade, just running at McDonough's own scale.
So the honest read isn't that Jonesboro Road is winning and the Square is losing. It's that the two areas are starting to specialize. The Square is where you go for an occasion. Jonesboro Road is becoming where you go on a Tuesday when you don't want to cook and don't want to make a reservation.
What This Means for Your Actual Week
If you live in McDonough, the practical upside here is simple: you now have more range within a five-minute drive than you did eighteen months ago, and it's split cleanly enough that you can plan around it.
A few ways that plays out in a real week:
- Weeknight, low effort: Jonesboro Road is your move. Super Chix's new location gives the corridor a fast, reliable option that didn't exist there before, and it sits close enough to Que-Riosity that a weeknight barbecue plate is now a real option instead of a drive across town.
- Date night or a visiting relative: the Square still wins. Pandora on the Square or Starshines gives you the sit-down experience, and you can walk to dessert or a drink after without moving your car.
- A weeknight that needs a reason to leave the house: check what's on at Story on the Square before you default to the same restaurant. A tasting or a craft evening on a Tuesday is the kind of thing that's easy to miss if you're not already looking at 19 Griffin Street.
This Weekend on the Square
If you want a reason to test that route this week, the city has one built in. The McDonough Main Street Market on the Square runs Saturday, September 26, put on by the City of McDonough as part of its ongoing Main Street programming. It's the kind of event that's easy to treat as background noise if you've lived here a while and seen a dozen versions of it. It's also a low-effort way to walk the Square, see what's changed since your last visit, and decide for yourself whether Crust & Craft or Starshines gets your Saturday night after the market wraps.
Pair that with a Jonesboro Road dinner sometime the following week and you've effectively tested both halves of the city's current dining map without having to think too hard about it.
The Part Worth Remembering
McDonough didn't get a master plan for two dining districts. It got a chef who picked a location based on his own concept, a franchisee who picked a location based on her company's growth math, and a Main Street events calendar that's been quietly building weeknight traffic on the Square for longer than most people have noticed. None of those three decisions were coordinated. Together, they've turned "where should we eat" into a real choice instead of a habit.
That's worth knowing not because it changes anything about your address, but because it changes what a normal week here actually looks like now. The city you're living in has more range than the one you moved into, even if you moved in three years ago. Read that Main Street calendar, notice which of these seven names you haven't tried yet, and put at least one of them on the calendar this month.
If you're the kind of person who likes tracking what's changing in your own neighborhood before everyone else catches on, that instinct is useful for more than dinner plans. The Legacy Real Estate Group keeps a close eye on what's shifting across McDonough and the rest of Henry County, from new construction to the small openings that change how a place feels to live in. If you're ever curious what any of that means for your own home's value, our instant valuation tool is a quick, no-pressure way to find out.
