Saturday mornings at the Chastain Park Tennis Center used to end with players packing up their bags and driving somewhere else for coffee. Not anymore. A new counter called Grab A Cup opened this summer inside Agape Tennis Academy, right at the tennis center, and it has become the pit stop nobody planned around and everybody now uses: espresso, matcha, cold foam, smoothies, tea, all without leaving the courts.
That single counter would be a small, forgettable addition on its own. What makes it worth writing about is what else has landed within a few blocks of it in the same twelve months, and what's still being poured in concrete a short walk away. Three new spots. One trail segment under active construction. Together they add up to something that wasn't true in Buckhead a year ago: you can now spend a full day in this pocket of the neighborhood, morning to night, without getting in a car.
A Coffee Counter Built for Between Sets
Grab A Cup sits at 290 Chastain Park Ave NW, tucked inside the tennis center rather than fronting a street, which is part of why it's easy to miss if you're not already at the courts. It's a natural stop for the tennis and pickleball crowd looking to refuel between sets, and it fills a gap that simply didn't have a local answer before this summer. If you were playing at Chastain and wanted a proper espresso, your options were a drive, not a walk.
The Creamery That Already Feels Like It Was Always There
A few minutes down West Wieuca Road, Chastain Creamery opened on January 19 at 164 West Wieuca Road NE, in a small strip center anchored by Tuxedo Pharmacy. The shop serves three dozen handmade flavors along with dairy-free and sugar-free options and a coffee menu of its own, and it has settled into the kind of role a neighborhood ice cream shop plays when it's done right: a stop after a tennis match, a stop after a walk, a stop that doesn't require an occasion.
Between Grab A Cup and Chastain Creamery, the tennis center to Wieuca corridor now has both ends of a coffee run covered, plus dessert, inside a stretch that used to be mostly residential streets and park frontage.
A Nightcap Two Miles South, in the Village
The Chastain corridor handles morning and afternoon. Buckhead Village handles the evening. Y Hospitality's newest concept, Y BAR, opened this year in the former Storico Vino and Pachengo spaces, a short walk from the same group's Yeppa & Co. on Buckhead Avenue. The Rimini-inspired bar has quickly become one of the Village's more talked-about additions, open Tuesday through Thursday starting at 5 p.m., and it gives the Village a nightcap option that didn't exist in that exact spot a year ago.
Here's the shape of what's opened within roughly the same stretch of 2026:
| What's new | What it is | Where |
|---|---|---|
| Grab A Cup | Espresso, matcha, and smoothie counter inside Agape Tennis Academy | Chastain Park Tennis Center |
| Chastain Creamery | Handmade ice cream, dairy-free and sugar-free options, coffee | 164 West Wieuca Road NE |
| Y BAR | Rimini-inspired cocktail bar from Y Hospitality | Buckhead Village, near Yeppa & Co. |
The Trail Piece Nobody's Walked Yet
Here's the part that makes the timing interesting instead of just convenient. All three of these openings landed while the next stretch of PATH400 is still being built, not after it.
The stretch between Wieuca Road and Loridans Drive, with its 80-foot bridge over Mountain Way Common, opened last September and gave Buckhead nearly three contiguous miles of greenway. That segment is finished and it's the one most people already know about. What's happening right now is the next piece north of it, the section pushing toward the Atlanta-Sandy Springs city line. According to Livable Buckhead's own summer update, crews are actively pouring concrete on that stretch, and residents should expect to see real progress through the fall as work continues on:
- final grading along the new corridor
- additional concrete work
- handrail installation
- site prep for landscaping, with planting held for cooler weather
Construction on the Atlanta portion is expected to wrap in the first quarter of 2027, though the public opening date depends on inspections and final landscaping.
A few hundred yards from that work zone, Mountain Way Common is getting its own build-out. A $160,000 Park Pride grant in February unlocked Moving Atlanta Forward bond funding for a roughly $450,000 first phase centered on the Creekside Connection Trail, a five-foot-wide crushed-slate loop that will tie together entrances at PATH400, North Ivy Road, and Mountain Way, with creek-access points along Little Nancy Creek for kids and dogs. Construction began in late spring, which means most of this summer was crew activity rather than a finished loop. The payoff, per Livable Buckhead, comes after that.
Put plainly: the coffee, the ice cream, and the bar all showed up before the sidewalk under them was finished pouring. That's not the usual order. Trail segments generally get built, then businesses follow the foot traffic. Here, three small operators bet on this stretch of Buckhead while the concrete was still wet a few blocks away.
October's Calendar Fills In Too
The Village end of this loop has its own reason to be busy this fall. Buckhead Theatre, at 3110 Roswell Road, has a stacked October lineup: Celtic Thunder on October 8, Bethel Music's 2026 tour on October 9, Ryan Beatty's Arms Over Armor tour on October 12, Chelsea Wolfe's The Dark world tour on October 13, and Kelela's new avatar live on October 15. The theater sits inside Buckhead Village, close enough to Y BAR and Yeppa & Co. that a show and a nightcap are the same trip rather than two errands.
A Day That Didn't Used to Work
None of this required a single new road or a rezoning fight. It required a tennis academy leasing a corner to a coffee vendor, a strip center swapping a pewter and silver shop for an ice cream counter, a hospitality group filling a vacant restaurant space with a bar, and a trail crew pouring concrete on schedule. Individually, each of those is a small local story. Together, they describe a stretch of Buckhead, from the Chastain Park courts down through Wieuca and into the Village, where a resident can now start the day with an espresso at the tennis center, end the afternoon with ice cream a few blocks away, and close the night with a show and a drink in the Village, all without moving the car once. That specific version of the day did not exist twelve months ago.
If you've been watching this corner of Buckhead fill in and you're curious what it might mean for your own street, the Katie McGuirk Team keeps close tabs on exactly this kind of change. Reach out any time you want to talk through what's happening near your front door.
