Michel Arnette Now Has Five Restaurants in Brookhaven, and They Split Cleanly Across Two Streets

"We feel like we have a bit of a trifecta." That's how restaurateur Michel Arnette described the cluster of concepts he now runs out of a single stretch of Apple Valley Road, in the run-up to Siren's opening on August 18. If you live in Brookhaven and have eaten well more than once in the last decade, there's a good chance you've already spent money at one of his restaurants without connecting the dots. Haven. Valenza. Vero Pizzeria. Arnette's Chop Shop. And now Siren. Five kitchens, one owner, and a pattern that tells you more about how to plan a Brookhaven night out than any single review ever could.

The pattern is this: Arnette's restaurants aren't scattered randomly through the neighborhood. They sit on two specific streets, and each street has its own personality. Knowing which one you're headed to changes what kind of night you should expect before you've looked at a menu.

Dresden Drive: where it started, and where you can still just show up

Haven opened on Dresden Drive in the early 2000s, close enough to Arnette's own house that he told his old boss, Buckhead Life Restaurant Group founder Pano Karatassos, that he was leaving corporate hospitality to open a place around the corner from where he lived. Valenza and Vero Pizzeria followed, both within easy walking distance. This is the neighborhood cluster in the literal sense: the target audience when Arnette opened Haven was his own neighbors, and the restaurants still read that way. Haven's executive chef, Stephen Herman, spent 15 years there before shifting most of his attention to Arnette's Chop Shop. Around the time Haven marked its 20th year, Herman moved back to run its kitchen and retooled the menu toward its original Southern-American, farm-to-table identity.

If you're deciding where to eat on Dresden Drive, you're deciding between a Tuscan-village-inspired Italian spot at Valenza, a Neapolitan pizzeria at Vero, and a Southern kitchen at Haven that spent a year re-finding its farm-to-table roots. None of it requires the kind of advance planning a special-occasion dinner does. This is the cluster built for a Tuesday.

Apple Valley Road: where the reservations live

Apple Valley Road is a different animal. Arnette's Chop Shop opened there in May 2018, a two-story steakhouse with a custom wood-burning hearth and a wall of individual leather-lined lockers members call the Knife Club, where regulars keep personal blades for use at the table. It's the kind of detail that signals the shift in register: Dresden Drive is neighborhood dining, Apple Valley Road is destination dining, even though both are still technically inside Brookhaven's borders.

In 2024, Arnette added The Associate, a private members' club, in the same building. And now Siren has opened two doors down, carved directly into what used to be the club's dining room.

That last detail is worth sitting with, because it's not the story you'd expect. Arnette originally planned to open a seafood restaurant in a windowless space behind the Chop Shop. Instead of building it then, he opened The Associate first. Two years later, he went back to the original idea and reclaimed part of the club's space to finally build the seafood concept he'd shelved. "We thought, let's recapture part of that space," he said. The result is a restaurant literally built inside the footprint of a plan he changed his mind about twice.

What Siren actually is

Siren focuses on raw-bar selections, oysters, crudo, and wood-fired seafood, with entrees like swordfish, scallops, and Georgia trout cooked over oak and Japanese binchotan charcoal on a custom grill built by East Point's Grills by Demant. The wine list is led by sommelier Andrew LeClair, and the cocktail program includes both spirit-forward classics and zero-proof options.

The chef pairing is its own small piece of local knowledge worth knowing. Rather than bringing in an outside chef, Arnette named Stephen Herman of Arnette's Chop Shop and Matt Swickerath of Valenza as co-executive chefs of Siren. Both were already running kitchens two doors and one street away, respectively, before taking this on together. It's a promotion from within the same small group, not a new hire from outside it.

Siren is open for dinner Tuesday through Saturday, 5 to 10 p.m., with reservations available through OpenTable. Guests enter through the steakhouse's front door and walk down a hallway to reach it, which means the easiest way to find Siren for the first time is to walk into Arnette's Chop Shop and ask.

The two streets, side by side

Why this matters if you already live here

None of this is a chain in the corporate sense. There's no franchise agreement, no private equity rollup, no national parent company. It's one operator who moved into Brookhaven in 1998, opened a restaurant near his house because he thought the neighborhood needed one, and has spent the years since building outward one storefront at a time, always within walking distance of where he started. Five restaurants in, the geography still tells the story: the original street stayed casual, and the newer street became the place he builds the ambitious ideas, sometimes changing his mind about what those ideas should be before he commits.

For residents, that means the choice between Dresden Drive and Apple Valley Road isn't really a choice between restaurants. It's a choice between two different kinds of evenings, run by the same person, a few blocks apart.

If you're weighing whether Brookhaven's two-street dining scene is the kind of daily texture you want as a permanent backdrop rather than an occasional visit, the Jenny Doyle Group knows this neighborhood block by block, not just by median price. Schedule a Private Consultation when you're ready to talk about what living inside walking distance of it actually looks like.