Thomas Square Has Restaurants to Spare. It Just Got Its First Place to Linger.

Walk into First City Brewing on a Thursday evening in June and you will not find a stool. Forty-eight seats fill fast in a taproom that measures 1,380 square feet, tucked into the old Sweet Patricia's Italian Bakery storefront on Habersham Street, directly across from Cotton & Rye. The room holds a maximum of sixty people, and on the night the Thomas Square Neighborhood Association held its happy hour there on June 29, it came close to hitting that number, fueled by free pizza from Vinnie Van Gogos and seven beers made in house.

That crowd is the story. Not the beer list, not the build-out, but the fact that a neighborhood already dense with places to eat had to wait until May 2026 for a place built specifically to sit and stay.

The Corridor's Real Shortage

Thomas Square has never lacked for food. Cotton & Rye anchors one end of the strip. The Vault serves Asian-inspired plates out of a converted bank building. Foxy Loxy Cafe, Bull Street Taco, Al Salaam Deli, Green Truck Pub, and Blowin' Smoke fill in the blocks between. A few minutes south on De Soto Avenue, Starland Yard packs a full bar and three built-in kitchens, Pizzeria Vittoria, Nixtate, and Uncle June's, alongside rotating food trucks, into a single open-air lot.

What the corridor hasn't had much of is a bar built around staying, not turning tables. Two Tides Brewing, which marked its eighth year in business this spring, has been the closest thing to that model in the wider Starland area. Everything else along Bull Street runs on a restaurant's rhythm: seat, serve, clear, repeat.

E.J. McLean, who opened First City Brewing with his wife Lindsay Birch-McLean after she'd already lived in Savannah once before and knew the turf, put the gap plainly when the brewery was getting ready to open. He and Lindsay had noticed something residents had said out loud for years without anyone doing much about it.

"I think what we noticed is just, for the amount of patrons, there are very few breweries here."

That's a specific claim about supply, not vibe, and it lines up with what a longtime resident already senses walking the corridor: plenty of kitchens, not many taps meant to hold you past one round.

Forty-Eight Seats, On Purpose

First City Brewing did not try to solve that gap by going big. The founders modeled the space on a small taproom Lindsay's father favored in Michigan, the kind with an outdoor hangout area, fire pits, and picnic tables that make people want to stay awhile rather than a beer hall built for volume. The Habersham Street location keeps that scale. Seven beers on tap, a taproom sized for neighbors rather than tour buses, and a founding promise that shows up in how the owners talk about the place.

"We grew up in the '80s and want to get a kind of 'Cheers' feeling in our own space."

The opening promotion backed that up in a small, specific way. The first 100 beers sold came with a Savannah-style pincho, a nod to the way bars in San Sebastián serve a bite alongside a drink. Food partnerships followed the same neighborhood logic instead of an outside vendor contract: Savannah Scone Company handles Fridays, Hey Honey Boards and Balloons covers Saturdays, and guests are welcome to bring in delivery the rest of the week. A Mug Club rounds out the model, four extra ounces per pour, a merch discount, and monthly events where members help shape what gets brewed next.

The Thomas Square Neighborhood Association's involvement matters here too. TSNA didn't just tolerate the new brewery, it hosted its own happy hour there and thanked the owners for working with the association to get the doors open. That's a different posture than a bar opening to catch foot traffic from tourists walking the squares farther north. This one opened with the neighborhood's own civic group standing behind the bar.

Two Blocks South, a Bigger Bet

If First City Brewing tests whether Thomas Square wants a small, slow bar, the redevelopment underway two blocks south at 2517 Bull Street tests whether the corridor can support something larger. The property, described in local reporting as the former home of both C&S Furniture & Upholstery and Bart's Bakery, sold for $2.4 million in December 2023 to a Delaware-based buyer, Starland Bull LLC, according to sales records reported by Savannah Agenda. The original 2024 petition described a managed food hall with bar uses and alcohol sales, and that April the Metropolitan Planning Commission voted to recommend the special use permit needed for on-premises drinking, since restaurant use alone was already allowed by right in the zoning district.

By the fall of 2025, construction was underway across three historic buildings on the site, and the plan had broadened into a mix of office and retail space alongside the promised restaurants and bars. As of a December 2025 interview with one of the developers, two retail leases were already signed with letters of intent out for additional office and retail space. That's a meaningfully different bet than First City's forty-eight seats. Where the brewery chose to stay small on purpose, the Bull Street project is zoned and positioned to bring several independent tenants under one roof at once, closer in spirit to a food hall than to a neighborhood taproom.

Current listing materials for the site count the businesses already within a mile as a selling point: Victory North, Starland Yard, Brochu's Family Tradition, Starland Strange and Bazaar, The Vault, Sulfur Studios, Two Tides Brewing, Foxy Loxy Cafe, Sixby, Say Hey, and Flora and Fauna, a lineup that reads less like a gap and more like a corridor that has already proven its dining demand. The 2517 Bull Street project isn't trying to create a market. It's building into one that's already there and, until this spring, was under-supplied on the drinking side.

What Changes on a Tuesday Night

For a resident who already knows every menu on this stretch, the practical shift is less about what's new to eat and more about what's now possible to do after. A route that used to end at the check now has a next stop.

• Morning coffee at Foxy Loxy Cafe, still the default for a slow start
• Lunch at Sixby or Bull Street Taco, both pioneers of this stretch of Bull Street
• An early dinner at Cotton & Rye or a plate from The Vault
• A stop at First City Brewing afterward, close enough to walk from either
• A late burger at Over Yonder if the night keeps going

The Thomas Square Neighborhood Association's calendar adds its own rhythm to that week. Bi-monthly membership meetings run at Victory North on Whitaker Street, opening with a 6 p.m. meet-and-greet before the meeting starts at 6:30. A monthly litter clean-up happens every third Saturday at 10 a.m., open to anyone who wants to help keep the Streetcar Historic District looking the way its residents expect it to look. None of this is programming built for visitors. It's the maintenance work of people who plan to be here next year too.

The same May weekend First City Brewing opened its doors, a local newsletter's roundup of neighborhood happenings listed the brewery's debut on Habersham right alongside that month's Thomas Square Neighborhood Cleanup. A new bar and a scheduled trash pickup, back to back on the same list, is a fair snapshot of what Thomas Square actually runs on: steady civic upkeep punctuated by the occasional new thing worth walking to.

The neighborhood was never short on flavor. Bull Street has been proving that for years. What it lacked, until a small taproom on Habersham decided to test the theory, was a place built for the second round instead of the check. Whether the bigger bet two blocks south at 2517 Bull Street proves the same demand at scale is the next thing worth watching, not because the corridor needs convincing that people will show up, but because the buildings are already zoned for the answer.

If you're weighing a move into Thomas Square, or already call it home and are curious what a property here is actually worth in a market that keeps adding reasons to stay, Liza DiMarco knows this corridor block by block. Let's Connect.