Alabama-headquartered Revelator Coffee has permanently closed its Lenox Square and Phipps Plaza locations, a source with first-hand knowledge of the shutters confirmed with What Now Atlanta (WNA) Wednesday. Revelator: Coffee & Ice Cream and Revelator: Sweet Tooth, respectively, were both short-term leases and “kind of an experiment with the landlord to see if local operators could work in big malls,” they said.
News of the Buckhead Revelators closing arrives as the company has also permanently shuttered its Octane Coffee on the Westside. Revelator acquired Octane four years ago. The Westside outpost had been in business for 17 years and was the last location for the Atlanta-born coffee shop.
Both Buckhead Revelators were doing “okay” pre-pandemic, but the company didn’t feel keeping the stores open “made sense in this environment,” according to our source. “At a more macro-level, it’s a bad time to be a small food retail business, and we expect that it will be for at least a few more years,” the source said. “Take-out/delivery/outdoor seating isn’t really sustainable business models for 80 percent of food businesses.”
Revelator’s location at 101 Marietta has been closed (along with the office building itself) since late-March. The company has not yet made any permanent decisions regarding that location and likely won’t until at least early-2021.
Josh Owen, president of Revelator, on Wednesday, declined to comment when reached by WNA.
