Grant Park Atlanta September Events to Know

Look at the calendar taped to the fridge of anyone who lives near Grant Park this month and you'll see two dates circled eight days apart, both of them big, neither one much alike. The first lands on September 19, when Zoo Atlanta's wine festival and a food festival in the actual park happen at the same time, a few hundred yards from each other. The second lands on September 27, when Oakland Cemetery throws its 48th annual Sunday afternoon music festival among the headstones. The two weekends offer a snapshot of Grant Park's September event calendar.

The Weekend That Doubles Up

On Saturday, September 19, Zoo Atlanta runs its adults-only Sippin' Safari from 5:30 to 9 p.m., with VIP entry starting an hour earlier. Wine tastings, keeper talks at sunset, and live sets from Jay Shalé, Jana Holland, and The Joanne Smith Experience spread across the Grand Pavilion, Entry Plaza, and Flamingo Plaza. IDs get checked at the gate. It's the zoo's one night a year that belongs entirely to grown-ups.

At the same time, a different crowd is filling in the park itself. The Atlanta Foodie Festival runs both Saturday and Sunday, noon to 10 p.m., with free general admission and somewhere between 40 and 55 food and merchandise vendors set up on the grass. Organizers are expecting more than 4,000 people over the two days, and unlike the zoo event, nobody's checking ID at this one. Families, dogs, strollers, the whole neighborhood shows up.

Sippin' Safari is an adults-only event from 5:30 to 9 p.m.; the all-ages food festival runs from noon to 10 p.m. on both Saturday and Sunday.

What The Beacon Is Turning Into

A few blocks away, another notable change is taking shape. The Beacon, the retail and dining complex built out of six old industrial buildings on Grant Street, used to have Elsewhere Brewing as one of its anchors. Elsewhere closed in 2024, leaving an empty storefront next to what's now the Grant Park Farmers Market's home base. This fall, that space is becoming the second location of Kinship Butcher & Sundry, the whole-animal butcher shop that's operated out of Virginia-Highland. The Grant Park expansion will roughly triple Kinship's current footprint, adding a seafood butchery program alongside the meat counter, and it comes with a cafe and coffee shop serving breakfast, lunch, and dinner, plus a full bar for beer, wine, and cocktails.

Read that lineup again. A brewery closed. What's replacing it isn't another bar, it's a butcher counter with a market shelf, a coffee bar in the morning, and a kitchen running three meals a day. There's a full bar, too.

One tenant's departure has made room for a different kind of business.

That's a small thing on paper, one storefront swap in one shopping complex. The two festival weekends and the planned Kinship location offer separate snapshots of Grant Park's events and businesses this September.

The Other Big Sunday

A week after the zoo and the festival wrap up, Oakland Cemetery hosts its own version of a big day, and it couldn't look more different. Sunday in the Park featuring Tunes from the Tombs runs on September 27, in its 48th year, and it's built entirely around daytime family fun rather than an evening ticketed affair. Expect a costume contest where showing up in Victorian, steampunk, or goth dress earns you a shot at a prize, guided tours of the grounds, a market of handmade goods from local artists, food trucks, and live bands playing across the cemetery's grounds. The tradition dates back to a Victorian custom of treating a cemetery as a place for a leisurely afternoon outing rather than something to avoid, and Oakland, which sits at the northern tip of Grant Park and holds the graves of Bobby Jones, Margaret Mitchell, and Maynard Jackson among others, leans into that history every year it runs this event.

The two weekends feature different events and schedules. September 19-20 includes an adults-only event at the zoo and an all-ages food festival in the park. On September 27, Oakland Cemetery hosts its afternoon event.

The Ritual That Never Stops

Underneath both festival weekends, the neighborhood keeps its actual weekly rhythm running at the Grant Park Farmers Market, set up every Sunday from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. at The Beacon, year round, closing only once a year around the very end of December. It's been running since 2011, it's a producer-only market, meaning what's on the tables was actually grown or made by the people selling it, and it's been voted the city's best farmers market more than once. Dogs are welcome on a leash. It's the one Sunday morning constant that doesn't care whether there's a festival happening or not, and it's the same market that will sit a few doors down from Kinship's new counter once that opens this fall.

If You're Walking Between The Two Weekends

For anyone stitching together the zoo, the park, and the cemetery over these two weekends, the Southeast Beltline Trail is the connective tissue, running from Krog Street Tunnel through Reynoldstown and Cabbagetown before reaching Grant Park itself. A few stops worth knowing along the way:

• 97 Estoria, a dive bar sitting right at the mouth of Krog Street Tunnel, open daily.
• Breaker Breaker and Florida Man, a mostly open-air seafood and cocktail spot with an upstairs 21-and-up bar.
• Muchacho, the Reynoldstown breakfast spot that Travel + Leisure has called out as one of the best in the country.
• Patria Cocina, a family-owned Mexican restaurant at The Beacon serving tacos de papa and grilled octopus.
• Buteco, a coffee shop by morning and street-food spot by evening, with a Grant Park location alongside its East Atlanta original.

Reading The Month Right

This September, Grant Park's public calendar includes the zoo's evening Sippin' Safari, the all-ages Atlanta Foodie Festival, and Oakland Cemetery's daytime event. The Beacon is also set to welcome a second Kinship Butcher & Sundry location this fall. These are a few of the events and business changes on the neighborhood's calendar.

If you're weighing a move into this pocket of Atlanta, or you're already here and wondering whether the neighborhood's character is shifting under your feet, that's the kind of texture worth understanding before the for sale sign goes up or comes down. Roxanne Sellers has been tracking these shifts across Grant Park and the rest of intown Atlanta for exactly this reason. Let's Connect — Schedule a Consultation.