Damn the man! Save Little’s!

This is the Christmas miracle that Atlanta needs



Every neighborhood needs a good corner store, a place to grab a sandwich or a six pack of beer or a dozen eggs. In recent years, Creative Loafing has doted on no other corner store as much as the revived Little’s Food Store in Cabbagetown, simply because they’ve done everything a corner store should do right.

Brad Kaplan raved about their small burgers in a review, writing, “The ‘little burgers’ sing out like superb little sampled beats from the past - a bit like Krystal’s slightly heftier and much better looking cousin - with those achingly soft buns, charred-crisp-around-the-edges thin beef patties, a healthy whomp of yellow mustard, the requisite pickle slices, and a tangle of thin onion slices blasted to the pinnacle of luscious limpness.” In a story about the mysterious origin of Cabbagetown’s name, I talked with Leon Little, whose family opened Little Grocery in 1929, and Brad Cunard, who owns the store with his wife Nina today. We named them the best hangover cure for neighborhood that loves a good drink.

This is place that has managed to preserve some of that neighborhood’s history while evolving to meet the needs of a changing neighborhood. That’s no small feat in Atlanta, where new development seems to constantly pave over history. So, when the word went around CL’s newsroom that Little’s would be closing at the end of the year, we felt a huge sense of defeat. The building they’re in is still owned by the Little family, who aren’t big developers with the money and resources to patch up an aging building. Apparently, the strain of those much needed repairs could spell the end of Little’s.

A few enterprising neighbors have decided to not let this happen without a fight. Volunteers have rallied to put together a fundraising campaign that could save the store, which could be the kind of Christmas miracle we’d hope for Atlanta. Damn the man. Save Little’s!