The ATL Breakfast Club
Hello Kind and Curious Leader,
When I moved to Atlanta, I knew the airport better than the city. I had connected through Hartsfield a hundred times and rarely left the terminal. Then I made it home, and I learned something the conference circuit never puts on a slide. The people who look the most connected are often the loneliest in the room. I had spent a career walking into spaces full of people who knew my name. I had also landed in a new city, after the worst of Covid, where I did not know a soul outside of work. Both of those things were true at the same time.
So I had a choice. I could wait for a social life to assemble itself around me, the way it does when you are twenty-five and everyone is new. Or I could build one on purpose. Friendship in your fifties does not happen by accident. Nobody organizes it for you.
In January 2022, my friend Kim and I started a club with two members and one rule that mattered more than the rest. Just us.
We called it the ATL Breakfast Club.
Kim is a retail and executive search C-Suite veteran, which is a polite way of saying she has spent her entire career reading people for a living and telling the truth about what she sees. She advises me on every meaningful professional decision I make, and she does it without an agenda, because she is my friend first and my counsel second. A lot of that advising happens over eggs.
Off the clock. No deck, no calendar invite, no one performing.
Earlier this year I was weighing a return to an operational CEO seat. It was flattering, it was familiar, and it would have pulled me straight back into the life I had stepped out of on purpose. Kim did not tell me what to do. She told me to tread carefully, then handed me a set of questions to answer honestly before I said yes to anyone. The sharpest one: What is the capital available to create my vision for the company? They were the questions I had been avoiding. That is what she does. She asks the thing I am hoping nobody asks.
It goes deeper than work. Kim and I are both the far-away child of a mother slipping into dementia, the sibling who is not there for the daily hard parts and carries the guilt of it from another city. We compare notes constantly. There is no real advice for that. There is just someone across the table living the same thing who will not pretend it is fine. And, yes, we can make each other laugh about our many missteps and odd adventures on this journey.
I care about this friendship deeply, so we protected it with structure. The things that matter to us, we do not leave to chance.
Here is how the club works.
We meet at least twice a month, at 8:30 in the morning. Early enough that it does not compete with the workday, regular enough that it never slips into someday.
We go somewhere new every single time. No defaulting to the place we already love.
We trade off the check. No scorekeeping, no awkward math, no one playing host.
We keep a running list, so we only repeat a restaurant on purpose, never out of laziness.
We go where we would not normally go. Little Five Points, Cabbagetown, Reynoldstown. Parts of the city I would never have learned from inside my own routine.
The hardest rule to hold is the one that is not on the list. No spouses. No colleagues. No one we are trying to impress or include. It sounds exclusive, and it is, on purpose. Two people can tell each other the truth in a way a table of six never can. The moment you add an audience, everybody starts managing the room instead of being in it. The club only works because it stays small enough for honesty.
Three and a half years and a lot of grits later, here are the five stars we keep coming back to.
Buttermilk Kitchen. Classic Southern charm, and the food earns the line out the door.
Brothers Breakfast Cafe. History, the brothers themselves, and my favorite grits in the city.
Bomb Biscuit. The best biscuit sandwiches we have found, full stop.
Petit Chou. Proof that breakfast can be French, fun, and worth the drive.
Little Sparrow. Weekend brunch only, but good enough that we plan the weekend around it.
Honorable mention goes to Egg Slut. If you knew the original, the first Atlanta outpost is worth the pilgrimage.
A word for the ones we lost. R Thomas, Another Broken Egg, and Java Jive all made our list and then closed before we could go back enough times. A city this alive is always rewriting itself, and part of loving a place is learning to hold its impermanence without flinching. We raise a coffee cup to all three.
Here is what the ATL Breakfast Club has taught me, and it is the part that travels far past breakfast. Connection is not a feeling you wait for. It is a structure you build and then defend. The standing time. The rotating check. The rule that keeps the table small enough for the truth.
I have read most of the books on leadership and belonging, and almost none of them say the quiet thing out loud: the relationships that hold you up are the ones you were deliberate about.
If there is a person in your life worth knowing better, do not wait for the calendar to clear.
Pick a morning. Pick a place.
Show up. That is the whole assignment.
In Community and Conversation,
Jim
