Green Tomato Buffet is preparing to bring its growing Georgia country-buffet operation to Hiram, where owner Geng Lin says a roughly 6,500-square-foot, 225-seat restaurant is targeting a November opening at Hiram Square, 5157 Jimmy Lee Smith Parkway.
The planned restaurant will follow the concept’s homestyle, all-you-can-eat formula with a particularly large rotating spread. Lin told Business Debut the buffet is expected to carry 10 meats, 10 vegetables, 10 starches and two soups at a time, with examples including fried and baked chicken, ribs, meatloaf, country-fried steak, barbecue pork and pork neck bones. Separate salad and seasonal-fruit bars are also planned.
Dessert is getting its own small department. The Hiram layout calls for one cold dessert bar with items such as pies, cakes and banana pudding, a second hot dessert bar for selections including apple pie, cinnamon rolls, cookies and bread pudding, and unlimited packaged ice-cream cups and popsicles. One dessert bar, apparently, was not enough.
Hiram-specific pricing and hours have not yet been announced. For comparison, when Green Tomato prepared to open in Moultrie in 2025, Lin described an 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. daily schedule and opening prices of $14 Monday through Thursday and $15 Friday through Sunday, including drink and tax. Those figures have not been announced for Hiram and should not be assumed to carry over.
The Hiram restaurant is the latest step in a Georgia expansion led by Lin and members of his family. A Rome location was operating by late 2024, Moultrie followed in 2025, and Milledgeville opened in early August 2026. During the Moultrie rollout, Lin said Milledgeville and Hiram were under construction and also identified Calhoun and Covington as markets he hoped to enter. No newer confirmed sites or timetables have surfaced for those two cities.
Hiram will also be a larger Green Tomato than the Moultrie restaurant described by Lin last year. The Moultrie unit was about 5,000 square feet with roughly 160 seats; the Hiram plan adds about 1,500 square feet and approximately 65 seats. The new restaurant is going into existing space at Hiram Square rather than a freestanding ground-up build, and current commercial-property marketing for the center already lists Green Tomato Buffet among its new tenants.
What Hiram diners do not have yet is an exact opening day, final hours or local pricing. It is also not yet clear whether the restaurant will adopt specialty rotations such as the Friday seafood offering now promoted at the Milledgeville location. For the moment, the November target and the unusually detailed buffet plan give Hiram something concrete to watch – including, importantly, two separate places to begin dessert.
