Joe Schafer has spent more than 30 years in kitchens, from washing dishes at 15 to leading the kitchen at Atlanta’s Forbes Travel Guide Four-Star Bacchanalia and directing culinary operations at State Farm Arena. He knows the discipline it takes to put an exceptional plate in front of one guest. He also knows what it takes to serve thousands of people in a single night, maintain the standard, and develop the team responsible for doing it.

Joe grew up between Griffin and Senoia, Georgia, and began working in restaurants as a teenager, washing dishes and bussing tables. He was drawn to the pace of the kitchen, the people working in it, and the feeling that there was always something else to learn. Early jobs at Outback Steakhouse and in hotel kitchens introduced him to cooks who were serious about the craft. Their example eventually took him to the Art Institute of Atlanta, where he graduated with honors in 2001.

Competition was part of that education, too. His early career record includes captaining a junior culinary team that earned bronze at the 2000 Culinary Olympics. The experience helped establish habits that would stay with him: preparation, precision, teamwork, and the willingness to do the same difficult thing again until it is right.

Joe built his culinary foundation under chefs who took those habits seriously, including Todd Annis at Rainwater Restaurant, Ciaran Duffy, and Anne Quatrano. He also worked alongside Ford Fry at King + Duke, developing a style grounded in Southern ingredients and informed by European technique. Eater Atlanta included him among its Chef of the Year nominees in 2013, an early indication that other people in the city were paying attention to what was coming out of his kitchen.

His years with Anne Quatrano’s restaurant group became a defining chapter. Joe spent 4 years as chef de cuisine at Bacchanalia, one of Atlanta’s most respected fine dining restaurants, and went on to serve as executive chef at Little Bacch and Bacchanalia. He helped guide Bacchanalia through its move to a new home, bringing the same standards into an entirely new kitchen. During his tenure, Bacchanalia was named a 2016 James Beard Award semifinalist for Outstanding Service. Little Bacch earned an Eater Atlanta Restaurant of the Year nomination, and Joe was included among Eater’s Atlanta Chef of the Year nominees in 2015. Bacchanalia’s reputation has endured. When the MICHELIN Guide debuted in Atlanta in 2023, the restaurant earned One MICHELIN Star and a MICHELIN Green Star, and it retained One MICHELIN Star in 2024 and 2025. Those distinctions came years after Joe left in 2017, and speak to the enduring standards of an institution that helped shape his approach to cooking and leadership. In those kitchens, the ingredients, the technique, the service, and the people behind every plate all had to work together.

In 2017, Joe accepted a very different challenge. The Atlanta Hawks hired him to lead the culinary program at Philips Arena as it prepared for the transformation that would become State Farm Arena. He went from running a celebrated fine dining kitchen to directing food for NBA games, concerts, premium clubs, suites, and an entire building full of different appetites and expectations. He brought the standards of a fine dining kitchen into a much larger operation.

In a 2018 interview with Forbes Travel Guide, Joe described a culinary operation with 6 chefs, more than 20 supervisors, and roughly 120 cooks. He helped bring respected Atlanta restaurant talent into the arena, elevate the premium dining experience, and build food programs that could work across the building. With his executive sous chef, he also developed a from-scratch pizza program designed to produce consistent food at arena volume. It required the same discipline as fine dining, applied to an entirely different set of logistical problems.

The results were visible to the people eating there. In the NBA’s 2018 to 2019 Fan Loyalty Tracker, State Farm Arena ranked No. 1 in the league for food and beverage satisfaction among season ticket members. The share reporting that they were very satisfied rose from 22% the previous season to 60%, a 38 percentage point improvement. The Hawks credited the broader food and beverage team, including Joe and the arena’s hospitality leadership, for helping deliver that change. Joe remained with the arena for 6 years, proving that quality, accessibility, creativity, and serious volume could belong in the same conversation.

After State Farm Arena, Joe returned to Atlanta’s restaurant scene in a different kind of leadership role. As Vice President of Culinary at Electric Hospitality, he guided culinary teams across Ladybird Grove & Mess Hall, Muchacho, Ranger Station, and the group’s events and catering operation. His work reached into menu development, chef leadership, sustainability, and experiences built around how people actually gather and eat together. He later brought that experience to the developing restaurant group behind Seventh House and Bovino After Dark. By then, Joe had worked at just about every scale this industry can offer, from a small independent dining room to a national sports and entertainment stage.

Ask Joe what keeps him interested, and the answer usually comes back to 3 things: research and development, developing people, and solving problems. He likes taking an idea apart, understanding why it works, and improving it until the result is worth serving. He gets the same satisfaction from seeing a cook develop judgment and confidence as he does from getting a recipe right. He wants his team to understand the standard, know why it exists, and have enough ownership to make the next service better. When he got to know AMP Up1, something else stood out: the people seemed genuinely happy to be there, and different opinions were welcome. That gave him a good reason to believe he could do serious work with people who cared about how they treated each other.

Joe serves as Culinary Director of Your 3rd Spot, and looks towards The Looking Glass, AMP Up1 Hospitality’s next brand. At Your 3rd Spot, he is applying the discipline of fine dining and the practicality of arena service to food that is designed for sharing, built for volume, and worth coming back for. He is also helping shape the culinary program for the first Looking Glass, scheduled to open in downtown Atlanta in summer 2027. That experience brings dining, beverage, storytelling, and social exploration together, creating room for several kinds of hospitality under one roof. For Joe, the opportunity is to build thoughtful menus, reliable systems, and a kitchen team that can deliver on both brands while continuing to grow in its own right.

Outside the kitchen, Joe spends time woodworking, camping, and maintaining planted aquariums. He and his wife take their daughter to metal shows, and their household includes a dog named Freddie Mercury and a cat named Desdemona the Shrieker. He would love to take an eating tour through several European countries, visiting new places through the food and the people behind it. His interests tend to reward the same things that drew him to cooking in the first place: curiosity, patience, and the satisfaction of learning how something works.

Joe has worked in dining rooms where every plate matters and in an arena where thousands of meals have to come together on the same night. His next chapter is about putting those lessons to work, developing people, and giving guests food they want to share with someone else. For Joe, a good day still comes down to a team proud of its work, guests happy they came, and a kitchen ready to do it again tomorrow.