"Eighty percent Italian and twenty percent everything else." That's how Adam Tsirnikas describes the menu at Milano's, the pizza and gyro spot that reopened last year in the exact building where it first served customers back in 1998. A few minutes down Highway 34, in a shopping center that didn't exist just a couple of years ago, Dave's Hot Chicken opened this past February with a completely different pitch: fast, hot, and new to Coweta County.
Both are true right now on the same stretch of road, and neither one is the whole story on its own. Highway 34 through Sharpsburg has spent the past year and a half filling in at both ends at once: brand-new construction going up on open ground, and long-vacant storefronts a half mile away getting reoccupied, including one building that's now serving the same family recipe it served the first time around.
The New Ground Half a Mile Down the Road
Fischer Marketplace sits at the intersection of Highway 34 and Fischer Road, on land that was undeveloped a few years back. It's now a fully leased, Publix-anchored center, and the roster reads like a compressed timeline of a corridor going from two-lane commuter road to retail destination in under two years.
The tenant list includes:
- Publix, which occupies about 69 percent of the center's square footage under a long-term lease with a drive-through pharmacy
- gusto!, which opened May 29, 2025, its first location south of Hartsfield-Jackson and its 13th in metro Atlanta
- Whataburger, which opened September 4, 2025, next door to a La Parrilla that broke ground the same month
- Dave's Hot Chicken, Jersey Mike's, and Nothing Bundt Cakes, all part of the shop-tenant lineup
- Andy's Frozen Custard, one of three outparcels sold alongside the center in a November 2025 commercial real estate transaction
That sale, arranged by Hanley Investment Group, is where the traffic numbers show up. The firm's release pegs the corridor at 44,900 vehicles a day with four access points, two of them signalized, and describes the broader mixed-use footprint around Fischer Marketplace (Floor & Decor, Piedmont Healthcare, Miller's Ale House, and the rest) as headed toward more than 1.5 million square feet of retail by 2026. That's the kind of traffic count that makes a site attractive to a chain deciding where its next Georgia location goes, and it explains why so many of these openings landed within months of each other rather than trickling in over years.
The Old Strip Is Filling Back In Too
None of that explains what's happening at Thomas Crossroads, the older commercial stretch closer to the heart of Sharpsburg, where the story isn't new construction. It's buildings that sat empty finding tenants again.
Waldo's Chicken & Beer took over the long-vacant former KFC at 3430 East Highway 34, filing for its beer and wine license with Coweta County in June 2025 as it prepared to open its doors. It's a chain, but it's chain growth solving a different problem: an empty building on an already-established strip, not a new pad site on raw land.
Milano's is the more layered version of the same pattern. The brand traces back to 1976, when John Couscos opened the first location in Athens, Tennessee. It expanded across Georgia and Alabama over the following decades, including a stint in Sharpsburg that closed and left the building at 3500 GA-34 sitting empty for years. Tsirnikas, who married into the family and now runs the LaGrange and Valley, Alabama locations, got the tip that the original space had come open again from Jimmy Swaringa, Couscos's former business partner. Swaringa showed up for the grand opening in July 2025 to welcome customers back to the same building.
The restaurant seats about 60 and runs a menu built around pizza, pasta, calzones, wings, gyros, burgers, and steak, open seven days a week (11 a.m. to 10 p.m. Monday through Saturday, noon to 9 p.m. Sunday). Tsirnikas's son Steve currently oversees the LaGrange and Valley locations and is set to become the third generation to run the family business. Regulars who remember the original Sharpsburg location have been finding their way back since the reopening.
Why Both Ends Are Filling At the Same Time
A shopping center with a 44,900-vehicle traffic count is the kind of site a regional or national brand's real estate team can justify with a spreadsheet. A family recipe returning to the exact address it first served from nearly three decades ago is not that kind of decision. Tsirnikas didn't come back to Sharpsburg because of a traffic study. He came back because the specific building became available and someone who remembered the original opening made a phone call.
That distinction matters if you're trying to understand what's actually happening on this road, because it's not one trend, it's two running in parallel. New construction at Fischer Marketplace is a predictable response to traffic counts and rooftops, the same math that brings a Whataburger or a Jersey Mike's to any growing corridor in Georgia. The reoccupation of Thomas Crossroads is a slower, patchier process where empty buildings get picked off one at a time, sometimes by a chain filling a vacancy, sometimes by someone with a personal reason to bet on that exact spot again.
Put together, the corridor's dining options have roughly doubled since early 2025 without any single anchor event driving it. It happened in pieces: a groundbreaking here, a beer and wine license there, a phone call from an old business partner.
What This Means If You Drive This Stretch Every Week
If you've been avoiding the Fischer Marketplace end because it still feels like a construction zone in your head, most of it is open now. Publix, gusto!, Whataburger, La Parrilla, Andy's Frozen Custard, Dave's Hot Chicken, and Jersey Mike's are all operating, with Nothing Bundt Cakes and Great Clips rounding out the shop space.
If you're looking for something that isn't a drive-through, Thomas Crossroads is where that's landed. Milano's is running full dinner service seven nights a week, and Waldo's has settled into the old KFC spot with its beer and wine license in place.
The corridor didn't get more crowded so much as it got more legible. There's a fast-casual and drive-through cluster at one end of Highway 34 and a slower, sit-down cluster with actual history behind it at the other, and for the first time in a while, both ends have something worth pulling off the road for.
If you're weighing what a Sharpsburg address actually gets you day to day, beyond the school zone and the commute time, this is the kind of detail that doesn't show up on a listing sheet. I track corridor changes like this across Coweta County because they shape how a neighborhood feels to live in long after the closing date. If you want to talk through what's changing near a specific address you're watching, Tina Bantin is a call or text away. Let's connect.
