Freddy Benitez can tell you the exact moment a restaurant comes alive. It happens the first night strangers fill the room, staring at the colors on the menus and amazed by the unique choices in the buildout and decor. Glasses clink against each other. Somebody laughs too loud at a table in the corner. The noise settles into something that sounds like a place people want to be.
"We have the idea and the vision, but the feeling comes once the people are inside," he says.
That feeling has followed him from Dos Margaritas, where the family started, to La Cantina on Main, and now fifteen minutes north to Ball Ground, where Northbound Tavern has already found its regulars and La Cantina Off Main opens this fall. Ask why he keeps building, and he answers fast. He's addicted to the process. The story starts with his father. Ramon Benitez had partners once, and he got tired of hearing that things had to be done a certain way because that was how they had always been done. Combination plates. Familiar menus. Choices that worked fine and surprised nobody.
"I was tired of people not being forward-thinking," Ramon says. "We can do anything we want. We don't have to be mainstream."
Dos Margaritas came out of that decision, and it is still the first place pointed to when anyone asks where all this began. Freddy brings it up twice, unprompted, making sure it doesn't get lost behind the newer names. "Dos is where my father and I were able to express our creativity," he says. "I always make sure I don't leave out Dos." Dos also taught them the limits of working inside something that already works. The combination plates are staying. You don't fix what isn't broken. But the more the two of them tinkered, the clearer it got that expressing themselves further meant building something from nothing.
That is where Guillermo Pomares enters, and Freddy is careful about this part. Everyone calls him Memo. The three of them, Ramon, Freddy and Memo, became partners, and La Cantina on Main followed. Historic bones, modernized. A Mexican table with wood everywhere you look, warm in a way photographs never capture.
Freddy will tell you the partnership is the reason any of the rest exists.
"I'm able to do what I do because everybody else is doing what they do so that I can be happy," he says.
He means that literally. Allison Benitez runs administration, human resources and payroll, the unglamorous machinery that keeps four operations breathing. Ana Pomares, Memo's wife, is the designer and artist who brings their vision to reality alongside her husband. Chef Edwin runs the kitchens, now joined by his son, who came from Old Blind Dog in Milton. Freddy gets to walk in, feel the room and chase what is missing, because four other people have already handled what cannot be left to chance.
Ask him why he still does this after a lifetime in restaurants, and he goes somewhere unexpected. Not to growth. Not to revenue.
"What comes out of my heart on a daily basis is creating," he says. "If I create and it gives somebody else a good feeling, then I, in return, feel good. And the money follows."
He is genuinely uninterested in making the conversation about money. On any given day, he walks through a door and someone is smiling, and he knows the smile exists because his team built the conditions for it. That, he says plainly, is the only reason he keeps going.
The rest, in his telling, arrives on its own. Customers turn into friends. Friends start texting reels back and forth at midnight. A restaurant stops being a business and becomes a room where people know each other.
Which brings us fifteen minutes north, to Ball Ground. Northbound Tavern sits in a building the town knew for years as a Choate barbecue. The tavern name came from geography and a little bit of comedy. Head up 575 and the tavern is the last stop before the land starts climbing toward the mountains. "My whole life, I've always been heading northbound," Freddy says. "It was a place marker." He laughs about the sequel possibilities. Eastbound. Westbound. Southbound. Somebody in the room brought up Eastbound and Down, and the idea has apparently not gone away.
What happened inside the building is less of a joke. For the first time, the family put real money into fresh seafood, and Freddy talks about the first grouper and salmon he tasted there like a man describing a magic trick performed on his own property. Order the seafood. That is basically the whole recommendation. Then there is the club sandwich, which arrives with cranberry in it and tastes, improbably, like Thanksgiving at somebody's grandmother's house. Nobody expects a tavern club to feel that personal. That is roughly the point.
The drinks got the same treatment. Memo brought in a glassware representative, and Freddy and Allison sat down and hand-selected every single glass in the building. Every cocktail has a vessel chosen for it specifically, drawn from years of remembering what a drink felt like at this bar or that one. Freddy is sober these days, which somehow makes the care more interesting, not less.
La Cantina Off Main in Ball Ground may be the purest example of how he thinks. The team walked the property, built a large deck, and then realized the best thing on the lot had been standing there long before any of them arrived. "You can't pay for what's already been there," he says. "That huge tree shades the whole patio deck." So the deck accommodates the tree. Shade all day, tables tucked underneath it, somebody playing music on a warm evening while Ball Ground goes about its business. When Freddy describes it, he sounds like a man counting down.
His actual job now, as he explains it, is to walk into a space and ask what people cannot feel there yet. Then the next building, wherever it turns up, and the same set of questions. What do they have? What are they missing? What could we bring that nobody here has felt before?
A lifetime in restaurants later, he is still doing it for the noise in the room. The glasses. The laughing. The particular sound a restaurant makes when it finally becomes somebody's regular place. "That's the only reason I still do it. I consider myself very lucky to be partnered with my father, my sister, and my best friend," he says.
Two rooms in Ball Ground this fall. Bring people who talk with their hands.
La Cantina, Translated
Ask Freddy what the word means and he goes quiet for a second, because the honest answer is older than any dictionary definition. Cantina means tavern. Not the modern kind, either. Freddy reaches for the image of riders coming into a small town, tying up their horses and walking straight to the one room where everybody else already was. Ball Ground almost certainly had a version of that once, probably within shouting distance of where his own two restaurants now sit. So did downtown Canton, and throughout Cherokee County, and just about every crossroads between here and Atlanta. "Same thing as here in the States," he says. "They get into Ball Ground, they had a tavern somewhere."
That is why the new place is a tavern rather than a grill, and why the two names a few blocks apart in Ball Ground are really the same name in two languages. La Cantina Off Main. Northbound Tavern. One room, one purpose, a few hundred years of people needing somewhere to sit down together after a long ride.