What's Actually New To Eat In Downtown Gray, And What Never Left

Drive through downtown Gray this year and you will pass several restaurants that were not there just a few years back. That is a lot of new signage for a town this size, and if you have not been paying close attention, it is easy to assume the whole downtown has flipped over, that some places closed to make room for others, that Gray is trading one identity for another.

It has not. Look closer at what actually opened and you will notice something more interesting: almost none of these new restaurants are competing with each other, and none of them are competing with the one restaurant that has been feeding this town since before most of the current storefronts existed.

The New Names On Clinton Street

Start with Giganti on Main, an Italian restaurant that opened at 124 West Clinton Street in March 2026. It is run by a group of siblings from Jones County, including a brother, Keith Dupree, who serves as chef after years of restaurant experience elsewhere. His sister, Ashley Robertson, has talked about what it has felt like to open in the town where they grew up.

"We love being a part of this community and working together with other business owners," Robertson said.

Before Giganti, Gray did not have a dedicated Italian menu downtown. Now it does, in a location that had not held a restaurant of that kind before.

Nearby, Jarocho's Mexican Bar and Grill opened in February 2026 at 216 Old Clinton Road, in the building that used to be El Sombrero. Owner Emma Baiza took over a space that already had a Mexican food identity attached to it and rebuilt the concept from there. That is a succession, not an invasion. The category stayed the same. The name and the kitchen changed hands.

Trinabell's Diner arrived in 2025 with a straightforward southern comfort menu and a family atmosphere, filling a gap for classic diner food that downtown had been missing. The Lazy Frog, a steakhouse at 300 West Clinton Street, opened in 2024 with a menu built around steak, frog legs, and hamburger steak plates, plus a small chicken selection that servers will tell you not to overlook.

And Surcheros, a fast-casual burrito chain, broke ground at Landmark Pointe in Gray in 2024. Founder Luke Christian talked about the fit at the groundbreaking.

"When I saw this, it had Surcheros, our culture and our heart written all over it," Christian said.

Here is the pattern once you line these up: Italian, Mexican, southern diner, steakhouse, fast-casual burrito. Five different categories, five different price points, five different reasons to go. None of them are fighting over the same customer on the same night.

Where Each One Landed

Laid out this way, the story stops looking like turnover and starts looking like a town filling in its own menu. Downtown Gray did not have Italian. Now it does. It did not have a steakhouse. Now it does. The one true replacement on the list, Jarocho's stepping into the old El Sombrero space, is a like-for-like swap in the same category, not a sign that Mexican food struggled here.

A Different Kind Of Growth Happening At The Same Time

While downtown has been filling in cuisines, a separate stretch of Gray has been growing for a completely different reason. Zaxby's, which already had a longtime location in town, relocated into a larger building just down West Clinton Street from its old spot. Local reporting has also pointed to a planned Taco Bell near the Pickle Barrel Cafe & Sports Cafe and the Waffle House, along with construction on the Gray Bypass for a gas station, car wash, and coffee shop, all part of the same commercial push along the highway-facing edge of town.

This is chain and commercial growth, and it is happening on the highway-facing edges of town rather than in the walkable downtown core. It is a different kind of expansion, driven by drive-through convenience and traffic counts rather than the kind of local, family-run experimentation you see with Giganti or Trinabell's. Main Street Gray, the nonprofit behind downtown's revitalization push under the banner of what it calls growing the town gracefully, has been focused specifically on that walkable core: design, promotions, and drawing foot traffic back to Clinton Street rather than out to the bypass.

Both tracks are real growth. They are just not the same growth, and they are not stealing customers from one another. A family picking up Taco Bell on the way home from work is not the same trip as a family sitting down for lasagna at Giganti on a Friday night.

The One Restaurant Nobody Is Trying To Beat

None of this touches Old Clinton BBQ, and that is the point. Old Clinton BBQ sits out on N Columbia Street, not on the downtown strip at all, and it has carried the tagline "Best in Georgia" since 1958. Discovery Channel's Dirty Jobs came through to film it. Generations of Jones County families have grown up on its Brunswick stew and chopped pork sandwiches.

Old Clinton BBQ is not part of the recent wave because it never left long enough to need replacing. It has occupied its own lane, barbecue, on its own street, for longer than any of the new Clinton Street restaurants have existed combined. Nobody opened an Italian place because they thought it could out-barbecue Old Clinton. Nobody ever will.

A handful of other Gray fixtures sit in that same category, places that predate the current wave and are not part of the turnover story at all:

• Old Clinton BBQ, N Columbia Street, since 1958
• Treasures By The Tracks, known locally for its outdoor seating
• Cone Crazy on Main, the town's go-to ice cream stop
• Jack's Family Restaurant, a longstanding breakfast and lunch spot

These are not the places getting the new signage and the local news coverage this year. They are the places that did not need it.

What This Means For Your Next Dinner Decision

If you have been putting off trying Giganti on Main because you assume Old Clinton BBQ will not be there in a year, that assumption does not hold up. If you have been avoiding Jarocho's because you liked El Sombrero, the category you loved is still there, just under new ownership and a new name. The honest way to think about downtown Gray right now is that it added five new answers to "where should we eat tonight" without removing a single old one.

That is a good problem for a small town to have. It means more nights out without more decisions about which favorite to sacrifice, and it means the next new restaurant that opens on Clinton Street is more likely to fill a gap than to fight over territory that is already spoken for.

Jacque Applegate has spent more than two decades getting to know towns like Gray, block by block, restaurant by restaurant, which is the same kind of attention it takes to understand a neighborhood before you ever put a for sale sign in the yard. If you are curious what a home in Jones County is worth, or you know someone weighing a move to Middle Georgia and wondering what daily life here actually looks like, reach out to Jacque Applegate anytime. A free home valuation is always just a conversation away, and so is a good recommendation for dinner.