For nearly two decades, Rich Clark’s name has been shorthand for seafood in Atlanta. Since he and longtime friend Jon Schwenk opened the first C&S Oyster Bar in 2007, Clark has built a following on oysters, crab, and unfussy coastal cooking, first in Vinings, then Sandy Springs in 2020, then Brookhaven in 2023, with the original relocating to a bigger space at Galleria on the Park in 2025. Along the way, Clark also owned and later sold Hugo’s Oyster Bar.
Seafood, in other words, is his whole schtick. Which made it something of a surprise—though not to Clark and executive chef Zan Malik—when he announced in 2024 that his next project would be a steakhouse.
“A steakhouse has always been in the back of my mind,” Clark said in the run-up to opening. “I never wanted to force it; I was waiting for the right space and the right moment to do it justice. When this opportunity came along, it just clicked and felt like the natural next step.”
Clark’s Steakhouse opened April 23, on the ground floor of the 2827 Peachtree Building in Buckhead’s Garden Hills neighborhood next to Fellini’s. It’s a deliberate swing into the most competitive category in town: Buckhead alone counts nearly a dozen steakhouses, new and old, jockeying for the same well-heeled crowd.
On paper, it’s also a strange move for an operator who’s spent his career selling upscale casual seafood-forward, come-as-you-are dining rather than the wood-paneled formality of a classic chophouse. Clark doesn’t see it as a stretch so much as a homecoming to an idea he’d been circling for years.
“The steakhouse is a uniquely American concept. It’s quality-driven, elevated dining,” he said of the project, describing the goal as bringing together the structure of a New York steakhouse with the warmth of the South.
A Calculated Jump
Nothing about the switch from surf to turf was rushed.
“We really took our time with this, traveling to places like Texas, New York, Charleston, and London, seeing what resonated and what didn’t,” Clark said. “At the end of the day, we wanted to build a steakhouse that feels elevated and transportive, like you’ve stepped out of Atlanta for the night.”
Part of that scouting trip was pointedly technical: sourcing a custom live-fire grill, built by J&R Manufacturing in Mesquite, Texas that became the engine behind the restaurant’s identity.
Malik and the team also visited chef Rob McDaniel’s live-fire setup at Helen in Birmingham, borrowing the idea of flat grates instead of the diamond-marked kind, so steaks come off charred rather than striped, with a pulley system to raise or lower the grates depending on how hot the coals are running.
That attention to detail carried into the room and the glass alike. The wine program—curated by sommelier Alexa Robertson—runs 550 bottles deep, anchored by a significant focus on Bordeaux with a deep Italian selection.
The dining room itself favors dark red velvet and gold accents, rich wood millwork and gas lanterns. Framed portraits of influential Atlantans, including Martin Luther King Jr., Ted Turner, John Portman, and Andrew Young, line the walls. Clark has been explicit that the steakhouse shouldn’t overlap with C&S.
“C&S is its own brand. We’re extremely proud of it, but this is a whole different thing,” he said.
Still, he can’t quite leave seafood behind, and he doesn’t try to. Salmon Wellington, blackened red snapper, branzino, and Chilean sea bass all share menu space with the dry-aged steaks that give the restaurant its name, alongside a raw bar stocked with rotating oysters and Royal Red shrimp.
The Chef Behind the Fire
Clark cast the vision, but executive chef Zan Malik is the one translating it over live coals every night. Malik’s path to Clark’s winds through some of Atlanta’s most demanding kitchens. He came up through Buckhead’s Portofino under chef Andre Brookings—a mentor he calls one of the most formative relationships of his career, having shaken hands on a five-year commitment to learn from him—before working under Anne Quatrano at Michelin-starred Bacchanalia, running the kitchen at Kyma, and later opening as executive chef of Hugo’s Oyster Bar for Clark and Schwenk. He eventually returned to the C&S family as opening chef of the Brookhaven location before being pulled onto the Clark’s Steakhouse concept full-time in the run-up to its 2026 opening.
That resume taught him the value of restraint. “Less than five ingredients [on the plate] is what I believe in, so it can just be simple, bold flavors that stand out,” he said. “You don’t want to go way over complicated because then people get lost.”
A Different Kind of Southern Steakhouse
Ask Malik what separates Clark’s from the wave of chophouses circling it, and he’ll point to live-fire cooking first—still a rarity among Atlanta steakhouses—and then to the craft in the smaller details. Building the menu at Clark’s meant keeping live fire as a core ingredient. Every steak—including the restaurant’s signature bone-in “lollipop” ribeye from Meats by Linz—is cooked over hickory and oak, brushed with an herb-infused oil of rosemary, thyme, shallot, and garlic three separate times during cooking.
“I feel like a fire, a steak that’s been touched from fire, I feel like it has personality,” Malik said. “Even the juice in the meat tastes like the fire.”
That same fire touches the vegetables and sides, too. You might find a succotash of butter beans, lady peas, and hickory-charred corn; grilled cabbage rubbed with smoked fennel seed; or mushrooms cooked directly over the flame.
In rounding out the menu, Malik describes chasing a balance between Southern spirit and French technique: refined rather than rustic in the tradition of Miller Union and the shuttered Revival. He serves black-eyed pea hummus and she-crab soup crafted from house-made stock. The potato puree, made with buttery Yukon Gold spuds, runs a one-to-one ratio of butter to potato, cut slightly with cream.
“There’s a way to refine Southern [food],” he said. “It’s like taking the freshest ingredients that you can find locally and doing a spin on them.”
It’s a philosophy that mirrors Clark’s original bet: that a steakhouse can borrow the bones of a New York classic and still feel unmistakably like Atlanta: heavy on hospitality, unafraid of seafood, and willing to let a chef bring his own detours to the menu.
For Malik, whose mother is Dominican and father Pakistani, that instinct for blending traditions goes back to childhood dinners that swung from butter chicken to arroz con gandules. “I felt like I was traveling the world,” he said of those meals. “Every ingredient, every plate has its own purpose.”
As it turns out, the most competitive category in town still has room for a personal story—even one that starts, like Clark’s, with a lifetime of oysters.
Clark’s Steakhouse, 2827 Peachtree Rd. NW Ste. 110, Atlanta, clarkssteak.com
