Eric Di Nardo has wanted to open an Italian wine bar for nearly two decades, and now the wait is over. His new spot, Sagra, has soft-opened on Gresham Avenue in East Atlanta Village, tucked behind Banshee and across from Octopus Bar, pouring wine and serving cicchetti while the restaurant awaits its full liquor license.
Di Nardo is Sagra's chef and sommelier, and according to Atlanta Magazine, he handles the cooking, the wine pouring, and the storytelling himself. He lived in Verona for four years, minored in Italian at the University of Georgia, and has worked in Italy, Brazil, Boston, and Washington, D.C. He also has an Italian wife, who the magazine's Carly Cooper reports served as a sounding board through the years-long process of bringing Sagra to life. “I'm Italian in my spirit,” Di Nardo told the outlet.
Before striking out on his own, Di Nardo worked as sommelier at Bacchanalia, a restaurant that has been operating since 1993. Di Nardo has said that his time there gave him perspective on restaurant longevity, a lesson he's now applying half a mile from his own front door — he bought a house in East Atlanta Village and moved back to Atlanta in 2021.
Behind the Bar and Through the Kitchen
Sagra takes its name from the Italian word for a local festival, often centered on a harvest or on local wine, and the concept borrows from that tradition as well as from Venetian osterias, the casual neighborhood haunts historically built around wine and small snacks known as cicchetti. Business Debut has described the concept as one explicitly modeled on that osteria culture of pairing seasonal bites with regional wines. The pizza program follows the same spirit: Di Nardo, who made pizza in Italy, plans to rotate four varieties at a time and change them seasonally, with early ideas including an amatriciana-inspired pie topped with guanciale, red onion, pecorino, and red sauce. The pizzas are meant to be shared.
The rest of the menu leans into the same casual-but-considered approach. Sagra serves anchovies with burrata, zucchini marinated with mint, vinegar, and lemon, focaccia, and baccalà mantecato, a whipped salt cod spread, alongside charcuterie supplied by The Spotted Trotter, the Reynoldstown charcuterie house that opened in 2009 and is owned by butcher Kevin Ouzts, specializing in pasture-raised, humanely sourced meats and helping pioneer the New American charcuterie movement in metro Atlanta.
A Wine List Organized by Grape, Not Geography
Wine is the real focus at Sagra, with a list of roughly 100 bottle selections that Di Nardo plans to organize by Italian grape variety rather than strictly by region — a structure meant to make an intimidating category more approachable for casual drinkers. The bar will also pour wines on draft and by the glass. A small cocktail program will round things out with four or five batched drinks, including a negroni, though Di Nardo has said a cocktail program in Italy isn't exclusively Italian, so the list won't be either. The beverage menu also includes local beer and nonalcoholic options.
A small retail license would let guests take bottles of wine home, a common arrangement under city of Atlanta code regulations aligned with Georgia law, which allow restaurants holding on-premises consumption licenses to obtain separate retail permits for packaged sales, according to the Georgia Restaurant Association. In the meantime, Sagra is operating BYOB while its liquor license remains pending, having soft-opened service during the week of September 4.
Inside the 2,200-Square-Foot Space
The 2,200-square-foot space features a dark hardwood floor, exposed concrete, stucco walls, and white stamped-metal ceilings. The bar itself has a tiled top, seats 10 to 12 people, and looks toward an electric pizza oven. Sagra also has an eight- to 10-person tasting room that can double as private space for events, plus a dining room offering table service and a shaded back patio that seats 10 to 20. Reservations are accepted for the tasting room only. The venue's eventual layout has dining room seating for around 50. Di Nardo aims for Sagra to feel like a casual, come-as-you-are neighborhood spot, per Atlanta Magazine, with an operating schedule that per Business Debut runs 5 p.m. to 10 p.m. Monday, Wednesday, and Thursday, 5 p.m. to midnight Friday, 1 p.m. to midnight Saturday, and 1 p.m. to 9 p.m. Sunday, with Tuesdays off.
Part of a Wider East Atlanta Village Restaurant Wave
Sagra's arrival fits into a broader restaurant revival taking shape in East Atlanta Village after a stretch of notable closures, including the 2022 shuttering of the 20-year neighborhood staple Happy Donuts and the abrupt February 2024 shutdown of Qommunity Food Hall, as the Atlanta Journal-Constitution has reported. The same account describes the neighborhood's changing restaurant landscape.
East Atlanta Village has long been known for late-night bars and music venues, while its restaurant scene is shifting toward a more daytime-to-evening dining scene. Its broader neighborhood planning history is outside the scope of this account.
