Bon Ton, the pink-painted Viet-Cajun seafood restaurant tucked near Mary Mac's Tea Room in Midtown, is closing its doors after nearly a decade. The owners announced on social media that the restaurant's final day of service will be September 30, and they plan to spend the last month open as a monthlong victory lap.
The closure marks the end of a run that began in January 2017, when Bon Ton opened as a collaboration between Big Citizen co-founders Darren Carr and Eric Simpkins and Hieu Pham, owner of the Buford Highway Viet-Cajun spot Crawfish Shack Seafood, according to Rough Draft Atlanta. Owners have said they set out to serve Viet-Cajun food, pour strong drinks and build what they called a welcoming haven, as reported by WSB-TV. The restaurant built its reputation on Cajun-Vietnamese seafood boils served inside its iconic pink building on Myrtle Street.
A Second Closure Upstairs
Bon Ton isn't the only concept vanishing from the building. The Waiting Room, the upstairs cocktail lounge that opened on the second floor around 2023, closed during the first week of September after three years in business, per the same Rough Draft Atlanta report. With both concepts now shuttered, Big Citizen no longer operates any active dining or drinking establishments anywhere in Atlanta.
That marks a full wind-down for the hospitality group. Big Citizen had already closed the 10-year-old Midtown cocktail bar The Lawrence in early 2023 and the retro diner Wonderkid in late 2022, the outlet's reporting notes. The Lawrence's former Juniper Street space was later taken over by La Santa Tacos & Bar, a Mexico City-style concept led by mixologist Jesus Perez, according to AJC.com — a sign of how quickly Midtown's dining corridor recycles its storefronts.
The Building's Deeper History
The address at 674 Myrtle Street NE carries its own legacy. It previously housed Top Flr, a landmark Midtown small-plates lounge co-owned by Darren Carr that ran for eight years before closing in November 2015, AJC.com reported at the time. Commercial listings later showed the two-level, 3,500-square-foot property was quietly put on the market in December 2023 for $595,000, with lease renewal options built in for a buyer, according to Tomorrow's News Today - Atlanta — years before Bon Ton's closure was ever announced.
Bon Ton's identity was never just about the food. Interior designers Christopher Knowles and Jacob Anderson built an elaborate fictional backstory around an invented Vietnamese immigrant named Hoa Nguyen, even as the real Viet-Cajun menu drew from Hieu Pham's own family history — his father, also named Hoa, fled Vietnam by boat in 1980 before settling in Atlanta, according to Creative Loafing.
Critical Acclaim and a Bigger Culinary Story
The restaurant earned real recognition along the way. Atlanta Magazine named Bon Ton to its list of the 75 Best Restaurants in Atlanta in May 2019, singling out dishes like Nashville hot oyster rolls with XO sauce and oyster dirty fried rice as standouts that fit Midtown's eccentric dining culture.
Bon Ton's menu also tapped into a broader culinary movement. Viet-Cajun cuisine took shape along the U.S. Gulf Coast after Vietnamese refugees resettled there following 1975, adapting Louisiana seafood boils with Southeast Asian aromatics like lemongrass, ginger, garlic and citrus butter, per CBS News. That fusion, born in coastal Texas and Louisiana, eventually spread into cities like Atlanta, where Bon Ton became one of its most visible local ambassadors.
Hoodline previously spotlighted Bon Ton back in 2019, when it was riding a wave of buzz as one of Midtown's buzziest seafood spots on Yelp, and again for its rising review traction and Cajun-Creole brunch menu. Now, with the final countdown to September 30 underway, regulars have a few remaining weeks to get one last taste before the pink building on Myrtle Street goes dark for good.
