Planting deep restaurant roots.
Jamey Shirah grew up in Hopeful, a small farming community in south Georgia. There, on 1,000 acres, he learned lessons about patience, hard work and follow- through—lessons, it turns out, that translate remarkably well to the restaurant business. Today, Shirah is the CEO of Revival Restaurant Group, an Atlanta-based hospitality company with six concepts under its umbrella, including Luella and the Family Dog in Atlanta, and Little Betty Steak Bar, Sea Bar, Uptown Cantina and Southern Kitchen and Bar in Birmingham, Alabama. The company also operates a construction company, a firewood company and a wellness brand. Needless to say, Shirah has never been one to let good ground go to waste.
Shirah didn’t plan to go into the restaurant business. After losing his HOPE Scholarship during his first semester at the University of Georgia, his father delivered a simple message: “Figure it out.” Shirah did, staying enrolled at UGA while making extra cash to cover tuition. He started at the door of Bourbon Street bar in Athens, serving as security and handling trash detail before moving over to City Bar and working his way up to bartending and managing. The partners he met in those years became the same ones who in 2010 helped him open The Ivy, a Buckhead sports bar that became a go-to destination for twenty-somethings. “One of our philosophies has always been to build concepts that we enjoy and want to be in. If you align your passions with your talents, and then align those with a need in the marketplace, you have a much higher chance of being successful,” Shirah says.
For 15 years, The Ivy was the anchor of Revival’s portfolio, serving as the blueprint for similar concepts in Nashville and Birmingham. But as the Buckhead demographics shifted and the college crowd aged out, Shirah recognized it was time to evolve. “As we grew up, so did our taste, our expectations and our company,” he says. He started eyeing fine dining.
Like any good farmer, he knew the soil had to be right before anything could grow. Revival tested its fine dining concept in Mountain Brook, Alabama, before bringing it to Atlanta, ultimately culminating in the opening of Luella, which earned three of four stars from The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, in November 2025.
Shirah is as deliberate about how he builds and leads his teams as he is about how he chooses new concepts. “As a CEO, I have two very important jobs. One is to hire really good people and put together really high-performance teams. The second is to open more concepts to give those people opportunities to grow,” he says.
He is equally direct about mistakes, which he treats not as failures but as data. Revival uses what Shirah calls PCI, a process of constant improvement, to identify issues and implement changes quickly. He reads every review and takes the feedback seriously but not personally. “You’ve got to have thick skin, but you can’t be calloused,” he says. Every mistake is a chance to be better next time.
When the subject of potential Michelin stars comes up, he does not dismiss the idea, but he refuses to make it the destination. The journey is the point. He has practiced jiu-jitsu for nearly a decade, and the discipline has shaped how he thinks about goals and outcomes across every part of his life. “We don’t expect perfection, but we expect the pursuit of perfection,” he says. With a 20-year lease on most of his concepts and no shortage of ideas for what comes next, Shirah is not planning for the short term. He is planting roots for the long haul.
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