Centennial Yards president Brian McGowan recently predicted the downtown megaproject will emerge as the Times Square of the South. The district's newest tenant is at least from the right zip code.
CIM Group announced it has signed a lease with The Dead Rabbit Group for The Irish Exit, the award-winning New York hospitality company's first location outside the city.
The space
The Irish Exit takes a relatively large 4,735-square-foot spot in Centennial Yards' under-construction Entertainment District, the retail, dining and hotel core taking shape across the street from Atlanta's main sports stadiums. For scale, Park Tavern's interiors and patios on Piedmont Park total roughly 5,700 square feet.
Blueprints call for garage-style doors creating a flexible indoor-outdoor layout, which CIM describes as producing a vibrant street-level experience. That detail matters more than it sounds: the Gulch's defining problem for decades was that it had no street level worth standing on.
Who The Dead Rabbit Group is
The Dead Rabbit's flagship in Lower Manhattan has collected essentially every award the cocktail industry hands out, and the group's expansion outside New York has been deliberate rather than rapid. Atlanta getting the first one is a real signal about how the district is being positioned to national operators.
The pattern at Centennial Yards
The Entertainment District has been assembling anchors on a steady cadence: Cosm's 87-foot immersive dome, a 5,300-capacity Live Nation music venue due in 2027, a Shake Shack, and now a destination pub. Each signing is a bet that the blocks between State Farm Arena and Mercedes-Benz Stadium can hold people on nights when nothing is playing in either building.
That is the actual test of the Times Square comparison, and it will not be answered until the district opens.
Original reporting by Josh Green for Urbanize Atlanta, published December 2025.
