Antoinette Rosenberg’s Gather’d opens at Buckhead Court
The 4 P.M. thought of “What’s for dinner?” is a conundrum Antoinette Rosenberg, mother of three, knows all too well. After graduating from Emory University’s Goizueta Business School and moving to Minneapolis to work for General Mills, she became a mother of three and began dreading making dinner nightly.
“I think it’s such a joy to share a beautiful meal,” she says. “There’s something that feels a little poetic about going to pick up steaks with your partner and cooking. However, as soon as you have kids, it becomes a chore.” She laments the mental labor required to get food on the table: deciding what to make, having to go get it, hoping the store even has it, and then going home to cook—plus, the dishes. “It feels so heavy, like such a burden,” she says. Conventional advice says to plan better, such as meal prepping on Sunday or keeping meticulous meal planning spreadsheets, but those weren’t tactics that would work for Rosenberg and her family.
Her retail store, Gather’d, which opened in October at Buckhead Court on Roswell Road, aims to remove the obstacles that prevent people from getting healthy and delicious meals on the table. Each week, Rosenberg and her chef, Alex Garcia, conceptualize a menu based on shortcuts and how people are eating that season, plus what items are available in store. Garcia then prepares the shortcuts to make dinner a seamless experience, using seasonal produce from local farmers via Fresh Harvest.
The idea is for customers to pick up a menu and choose one of six “light cooking” or “heat and assemble” meals. Then, they gather the ingredients needed to make it from the retail store, such as shortcut items like precooked sliced bistro steak, housemade pesto, and ready-made Italian vinaigrette for salad. The items at Gather’d can be mixed and matched in over 75 different meal variations. There are also grab-and-go options like family-sized casseroles and chicken salad, and pantry staples like Italian imported pasta and artisanal jams. Shoppers can also pick up indulgent items such as chocolate chip cookies baked fresh by Garcia, as well as iced tea and coffee from the coffee bar.
The meals are simple but elegant and elevated, using the finest and freshest ingredients, such as Alon’s focaccia for a salmon B.L.T. “It all has to be easy,” Rosenberg says. “The most we’re going to ask someone to do is boil water for pasta.”
Every item sold is the very best in its category, or it serves a purpose to make things easier on the consumer. Rosenberg offers the example of a cake mix. “I don’t bake often, but when I do, I want it to feel special,” she says. (She stocks Hayden Flour Mills Confetti Cake Mix, a collab between the brand and food darling Molly Yeh.) A selection of locally loved places, like Flour + Time Bakery, Dips, Bocado, and Capella Cheese, are on Gather’d shelves. The same philosophy applies to wine, where Rosenberg worked with Side Saddle’s Jett Kolarik to curate the selection, including natural wines. Her favorites include D2 by DeLille Cellars from Washington’s Columbia Valley and Chateau de Parenchere Bordeaux L’Equilibriste, a sulfite-free French wine. All are offered in a welcoming space designed by Buckhead-based Lauren Elaine Interiors.
Buckhead Court was strategic for Rosenberg. After living in Seattle, where she operated a grocery tech start-up, she and her family found a house in Chastain Park in 2023. Superica quickly became a weekly fixture in their rotation. “I’m from Texas and I love Mexican food, and we made Fridays at Superica our family tradition,” she says. When she and her broker began looking for space, she was insistent on being close to where she had found her own community. “This is my center,” she says. “It was as simple as that. I’m here at [Buckhead Court] all the time, and I assume everyone else in the neighborhood is, too.”
The feedback for Gather’d has been extremely positive so far. Rosenberg did a soft opening at the beginning of October that was such a success, she had to reconfigure a few operational issues. “Everything we make is in small batches, so we wanted to make sure that we were prepared for a slightly higher demand than we had originally planned for,” she says. The market officially opened on October 25th.
She’s proud that she is helping lift the burden of what’s for dinner and is making food a point of connection for the community. “I wanted a place people could go and could feel taken care of,” she says. “Plus, people are excited not to have to cook.”
