Restaurant openings may dominate dining news headlines, but zoom out a bit and you’ll notice long-standing concepts with a cultivated audience quietly staying the course. These iconic restaurants anchor the towns and cities they serve without relying on chef-driven menus or culinary trends, and across the South, they are being taken over by new owners—not to change them, not to modernize them, but to preserve them just as they are.
On the surface, saving generational restaurants makes for a heartfelt story, and there is a good dose of nostalgia involved, but it’s equally true that a known commodity can be a good investment. This is where local restaurant groups can offer a palatable succession plan. Three such landmarks include Napoleon House in New Orleans, H&H Restaurant in Macon, Georgia, and Venus Pie Pizzeria in Spartanburg, South Carolina. Their stories are as unique as the towns they serve.
In the French Quarter, Ralph Brennan stepped in to secure not only the American birthplace of the Pimm’s Cup but also a pair of buildings dating back to the 1700s. Napoleon House was once the home of Mayor Nicholas Girod, and later a sailors’ tavern and a corner store, before it became New Orleans’ celebrated spot for a toasted muffuletta sandwich.
The Impastato family was ready to sell the restaurant they had run for a century but wanted the brand to live on. That was 10 years ago, and Brennan says it’s a credit to his team that few people have noticed the transition. “We changed very little, and all the art and photos are on loan from the family indefinitely.”
The restaurant group is accus- tomed to the challenges of an antique building at their flagship restaurant, Brennan’s. At Napoleon House, they upgraded the HVAC and re- wired the back-of-house. To this day, staff carefully clean around the 200-plus-year- old chipped-paint walls, and shoring up the structures is a constant expense.
“You see people buy historic buildings and change them a lot. I wasn’t interested in that,” Brennan says. “It’s like the muffuletta. Before we took over, we ate a lot of them to make sure we knew what we were getting into. The heat makes a huge difference, with the melted cheese and the olive salad. We have that recipe. I feel so lucky. We even have the same mixing bowl to make the olive salad by hand.”
Georgia icon H&H Restaurant closed its doors in 2013 before current owner Wes Griffith could connect with its legendary surviving founder, “Mama” Louise Hudson. Griffith’s Moonhanger Group is best known for Dovetail, a polished date-night concept. Months after the closure, the idea of Macon without H&H didn’t sit right with him, and he reached out to the owner of
the building to initiate a conversation.
For more than half a century, the restaurant has been a pilgrimage for Southern rock devotees, its walls covered in memorabilia. Hudson fed The Allman Brothers and later cooked for them on tour. In between, she served fried chicken, H&H’s signature dish, and other steaming plates of comfort food to Lynyrd Skynyrd, The Marshall Tucker Band, and other Capricorn Records musicians.
Moonhanger Group reopened H&H in cooperation with Hudson in 2014. Griffith says the absence of such an institution would have left a hole in Macon’s cultural fabric. “H&H is a testament to a lot of things—to Black excellence, to great food, to Macon’s music culture, to early race relations. It wouldn’t be forgotten, but it’s not the same if you can’t go there and keep experiencing it.”
In Spartanburg, restaurateur Kenneth Cribb grew up with Venus Pie Pizzeria as a prominent player in his childhood highlight reel. He remembers hunting for coins with his friends to bike into town for a giant slice. When he heard the iconic pizzeria might be for sale, he jumped at the chance to keep it in its historic location.
With Cribb’s help, Hub City Hospitality took over Venus Pie in June 2025. Cribb has built concepts from scratch with his partners, including four locations of Willy Taco, but he never expected to operate what’s considered a gateway business to downtown. “The fear was that we were going to change it,” says Cribb, “and we did, in lots of small ways: We updated the bathrooms and changed out the ceiling tiles and added some six-person booths for families to sit together.”
The books looked good when Hub City bought it, and the investment has already begun to pay off. They attribute the continued success to the staff, 90 percent of whom stayed on. “Venus Pie is part of our community’s DNA,” says Cribb. “Restaurants are places where we go to enjoy life over food and beverage, and if it’s an experience you can’t get anywhere else, then keeping these concepts going is an act of historical preservation.”
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