Sand Bar opened on College Ave in the summer of 2007. The story behind it isn't complicated. It's mostly about one guy and one tropical idea.

Jason Dunn grew up in Roswell, Georgia and came to Athens for school in the early 2000s. He stayed. In 2003 he opened Infusia, a small tea and coffee shop downtown. By 2004 he'd traded the espresso machine for a bar. By 2007 he was ready to build the place he'd been picturing since he was a kid: a tropical-style beach bar in the middle of a landlocked college town.

Twenty years in, the beach still hasn't come to Athens. Doesn't matter. We've built our own.
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Athens already had bourbon bars, sports bars, dives, and brewpubs. It didn't have an escape. Sand Bar opened with palms in the corners, tiki torches by the door, rum on the back bar, and a soundtrack stuck somewhere between summer and last call. The whole point was to make College Ave feel a few degrees warmer. To pull a piece of the coast inland and see if it stuck.It stuck. Almost twenty years later, the palms are still up. The torches still light. The crew still pours heavy and the regulars still come back. Sand Bar is the original chapter of what's now Hospitality South, an Athens-grown collective of bars and restaurants that includes Double Barrel, Woodford, Paloma Park, and Empourium.