K&K Soul Food Marks 58 Years as Bankhead Resets Around It

The line at 881 Donald Lee Hollowell Parkway NW moves the way it did when the address sat on Bankhead Highway and the restaurant on it answered to a different name. K&K Soul Food has been feeding Atlanta’s Westside since 1968, when Kimario Smith’s great-grandmother opened the original Bankhead Restaurant inside a house, slid it down the street to a pool hall, and finally settled it at the current storefront in 1980. Smith, who took the kitchen over while still in college, told CBS News Atlanta this week that he is now eyeing his own son, also in college, as the fourth generation behind the counter.

That handoff would put the family in its 58th year on the same west-side corridor that, two miles east, is being reshaped by a $44 million city park, a now-paused Microsoft land deal valued near $150 million, and home sales that have run from $49,000 to north of $400,000 in roughly five years.

The Family Chain From House to Pool Hall to Storefront

The original Bankhead Restaurant opened the year Atlanta watched Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. eulogize a movement he would not see finished, in a converted house just off the main thoroughfare carrying the same name. It then jumped up the block into a former pool hall that Atlanta Magazine has described as having two bar stools and a small window to pass plates through, before settling at the present Donald Lee Hollowell Parkway address in 1980.

It started in a house, and then it moved up the street where it was a pool hall, and then it went from there to here in 1980.

That is Smith’s own account of the early geography, given to CBS News Atlanta. His grandmother retired in 1992 and helped him spin up the K&K branding when he was in school, the operation that still carries the name today. Atlanta Magazine has reported that Smith works alongside co-owner Dorothy Davis, with the family carrying the kitchen across four ownership turns and three changes of address.

From Bankhead Highway to Donald Lee Hollowell Parkway

The street itself has been a moving target. It was renamed in 1998 from Bankhead Highway to honor the civil rights attorney Donald Lee Hollowell, who defended King during the Albany Movement, won the 1961 case that integrated the University of Georgia, and was appointed by President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1966 as the first Black regional director of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC, the federal agency that enforces workplace anti-discrimination law) for the Southeast.

The rebrand was institutional. Conversation has been slower. The Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority (MARTA, the city’s public rail and bus operator) still calls the rapid-transit stop a block from the restaurant Bankhead Station, and most longtime residents still call the neighborhood Bankhead. The Westside Future Fund, the nonprofit guiding the corridor’s redevelopment, describes the parkway as having borne the brunt of disinvestment until recent revitalization efforts began landing.

The Atlanta Cohort Still Cooking

K&K sits inside a small Atlanta cohort of Black-owned soul food rooms with half a century or more on the same block. Paschal’s, which the brothers Robert and James Paschal opened in 1947 at 837 West Hunter Street (now Martin Luther King Jr. Drive), became the unofficial headquarters of the Civil Rights Movement and was relocated to a new west-side site near Castleberry Hill in 2002. The Busy Bee Cafe, founded the same year by Lucy Jackson and currently owned by Tracy Gates since 1987, was named a James Beard America’s Classics honoree in 2022.

Together with K&K, those two rooms make up the working spine of pre-1970 Black-owned Atlanta soul food. None has changed hands outside the founding family or a single subsequent buyer. All three sit on streets renamed for civil rights figures. The genre overlaps with a broader Southern tradition covered in our look at Georgia’s meat-and-three icons, where a single protein plus a chosen trio of sides has held its grip across decades of menu fashion.

The Westside Math the Restaurant Sits Inside

The neighborhood around the cafeteria line has been doing a different kind of math. Two pieces of capital have rewritten the parkway’s economics since 2021.

The Park

Westside Park, the city’s largest greenspace, opened its first phase in the summer of 2021 on the reclaimed Bellwood Quarry site. The build cost roughly $44 million across 280 acres and stitched into the Atlanta BeltLine network of trails. The opening immediately changed the demographic of who was looking at a house in Grove Park and Bankhead.

The Tech Campus

Microsoft followed in early 2021 with the purchase of 90 adjacent acres for a planned innovation campus, in a deal valued at roughly $150 million. The company paused the project in 2023 and, according to Urbanize Atlanta’s reporting on the Quarry Yards site, has since moved to gift a meaningful portion of the property to the City of Atlanta. The campus that was supposed to land has not.

The House Numbers

What did land is residential price compression. Canopy Atlanta documented a three-bedroom home on South Eugenia Place selling for $49,000 in 2018, then re-listing for $339,000 three years later, a roughly 593 percent jump. After the park opened, comparable three-bedrooms in the area began clearing the $400,000 to $500,000 range, according to the same reporting. Around the corridor, the pressure points stack:

• A $44 million park opened on a five-year horizon, drawing weekend traffic from outside the ZIP code.
• A 90-acre tech-campus purchase that priced surrounding land, then paused without delivering jobs.
• A near-six-fold jump in single-family resale prices on at least one documented street.
• A nonprofit-led revitalization program that openly aims to retain legacy residents but lacks rent control as a tool.

The visible result, for an operator like Smith, is a customer base that is partly the same people who came in 1980 and partly weekend arrivals from neighborhoods that did not exist in their current form five years ago.

What’s on the Plate, Who’s at the Counter

The menu has not chased the new demographic. K&K still runs a cafeteria line that opens early, with breakfast plates of fatback, sausage, grits and biscuits priced under $5, and a lunch board that leans on pig’s feet, oxtails, chicken gizzards, pork chops and turkey, plus collard greens, mac and cheese, sweet potatoes, boiled okra and squash casserole.

Smith is willing to bench-press the specialty against anybody.

I’ll put our turkey wings up against anybody in the city. Turkey wings and broccoli casserole.

That came from Smith in the same CBS News Atlanta segment. His customer base is parked behind him in the line: bus drivers, corrections officers, blue-collar workers, students from the nearby hairstyling school, and older residents whose families have lived inside the parkway’s catchment for generations. Dayuana Turner, a regular at the register, told CBS she has eaten there at least 15 years and probably longer. “The food is always good, it’s always fresh, it’s always affordable, and the environment is always welcoming and friendly,” she said. “We don’t see too many of our pillar restaurants still in existence.”

The Question Behind the Cash Register

The succession question is the one Smith is letting sit. His son is in college now, in roughly the same window Smith himself was when he picked up the operation from his grandmother. The family has already done that handoff three times without losing the family recipes or the address.

What is different this round is the street. A fourth-generation operator inheriting K&K in the early 2030s will inherit a Westside that, on current trajectory, has a finished Microsoft-adjacent district to its west, denser Beltline connectivity to its south, and a residential price floor several multiples higher than the one Smith’s grandmother worked under. Whether the line at the register still looks like Turner’s description depends on whether the legacy customers can still afford to live in walking range of it.

For now, the answer to the secret-of-success question is the one Smith gave on camera, the one most legacy operators give and most data sets cannot capture. “We owe it all to the community,” he said. “We couldn’t do it without the customers.” By Saturday lunch, that community will be back at the register, paying for plates and trading life updates the way it has since 1968. The fourth-generation answer lands on a longer clock.