Jamey Shirah transformed Buckhead’s beloved Ivy into something entirely new—and intentionally hard to categorize.
The building at 3717 Roswell Road has lived several very different lives. For a quarter century it was Carbo’s Cafe, an Italian steakhouse and piano bar where Buckhead’s dressed-up set lingered over legendary Grand Marnier soufflés. Then came The Ivy in 2010, which swapped the grand piano for 28 flat-screen TVs and a 300-inch outdoor screen, becoming a college football mecca fueled by bottomless mimosas and late-night revelry. Now, with the debut of Luella—a fine dining restaurant from Buckhead resident Jamey Shirah—the space has come full circle. The twist? Shirah is the same man who turned it into a sports bar in the first place.
Shirah, the CEO of Revival Restaurant Group, grew up in the hospitality industry. His family owned Shirahland, an Orvis-endorsed quail hunting lodge in Newton, Georgia. “I spent my childhood washing sheets and doing dishes alongside my brother Benjie,” he says. The two later co-founded the restaurant group.
His entry into the industry came after a wrong turn at the University of Georgia. “I lost my HOPE scholarship my freshman year, and I began bartending to pay for school after my dad said, ‘Good luck,'” he remembers. He graduated in 2010 with a degree in economics from Terry College of Business. “I was very much done with school. After a few interviews where everyone asked me when I wanted to start my MBA, I knew I needed to do something differently,” he says. That different thing was The Ivy.
The Ivy
The Ivy maintained its status as one of Buckhead’s most beloved bars as Revival Restaurant Group began expanding, mostly in the Birmingham area. The Alabama-based concepts, such as The Southern, an elevated Southern restaurant, and Uptown Cantina, a fresh-Mex option, might seem incongruous, but not to Shirah, who says his personal interests and curiosity guide him.
“If you want to be successful at anything, you have to work hard and give so much time and energy, which means I really want to enjoy my concepts,” he says. As The Ivy got older, so did its customer base, including Shirah himself. “I don’t spend a lot of time in sports bars now that I’m married and have kids,” he quips. Fine dining’s precision excited him, and Luella was a natural extension of a smaller concept the group had been testing in Mountain Brook, Ala., called Little Betty. “It was just time to move on to our next phase of life,” he says.
Luella
Luella, which is named for Jamey and Benjie’s daughters Lucille and Eleanor, opened right before Thanksgiving in The Ivy’s former home on Roswell Road. It is what Shirah calls an Italian steakhouse with Japanese influences and admittedly seems culinarily scattered at first glance. Shirah prefers it that way. “It’s hard to put the menu in a box. Variety is the spice of life, and I love having options,” he says. “You can go light one night and have some oysters and sushi, or you can go in for the big 36-ounce bone-in tomahawk ribeye with mashed potatoes and a bottle of Bordeaux,” he says. “People won’t feel like they’re having the same culinary experience every time they come in; they can have different journeys based on the way they feel. We want our regulars to have variety.”
One constant will be the moody design of the restaurant. Done by Buckhead resident Helen Hanavich of Helen Hanavich Interior Design, it’s physically transporting. “People keep coming up to me and saying they felt like they were on vacation, like they were in another city,” says Shirah. “That’s what we want, for people to feel transported.”
Other pursuits
Shirah’s focus on choice is something he infuses into his other business, Wellhaus Club, a wellness destination on East Paces Ferry that is based on a credit system. If a client is into red light therapy one day and compression therapy the next, they can switch things up without having to visit multiple businesses.
His refusal to pigeonhole Luella is reflective of his personality. “I love experiencing things; I always zig where people zag,” he says. “I’m a paragliding pilot, I do jiu-jitsu, I hunt, I fish, I travel, I hike, I’m a father, I have a family. I look to where I’d like to have a business and what I’d like to create, and I do it,” he says. “I just want to give people the best experience possible, wherever they are, and make them feel comfortable.”
