DINING OUT
Before or after the exhibits, grab a bite nearby
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Tuesday, November 11, 2008
Two exciting exhibits opening, and so many restaurants nearby from which to choose! If you’re braving Midtown streets this weekend for the Tut and Terracotta Army shows, try these restaurants nearby.
For the “Tutankhamun: The Golden King and the Great Pharaohs” exhibit at the Boisfeuillet Jones Atlanta Civic Center:
BECKY STEIN/Special
Blackberry-chocolate cornbread upside-down cake with coffee gelato is one of the treats at Dogwood on Peachtree Street.
Dogwood 
565 Peachtree St. N.E., Atlanta. 404-835-1410, www.dogwoodrestaurant.com.
For the first time in 25 years, downtown Atlanta is one of the hottest dining places to be. Open since August, Dogwood, nestled nicely on two floors inside the Reynolds condominium building on Peachtree Street (just a few blocks from the civic center), continues the city’s trend toward new Southern cuisine.
Chef-owner Shane Touhy, formerly of Blue Ridge Grill, has created a grits bar that turns out to be, oddly enough, one of the most workable things on the menu. Don’t think salad bar with sneeze shields — the “bar” here is simply an offering of grits du jour, Southern milled, with a selection of three daily flavors, from a tiny, perfectly fried oyster resting on a nest of pepped-up hollandaise to butter-poached lobster. If this sounds a little heavy for an opener, hear this: The offering is small and a very regionally inspiring way to begin a meal, not to mention satisfying.
Indeed, Dalton native Touhy scores most often with his innovative approach to appetizers, from an autumnal offering of seared foie gras with a smear of smoked pumpkin puree and a red wine-and-black pepper reduction to a “flight” of his incredibly hearty yet sophisticated soups.
Room at Twelve
400 W. Peachtree St. (inside Twelve Centennial Park), Atlanta. 404-418-1250, www.concentricsrestaurants.com
Room is one of the latest ventures from Concentrics Hospitality, Bob Amick’s restaurant group that includes One Midtown Kitchen, Two Urban Licks and the highly acclaimed Trois. With it, Amick has provided downtown with the triple threat of Atlanta dining: drinks, steaks and sushi. And chef Nick Oltarsh knows how to cook the heck out of a steak.
The restaurant is pretty and smart, with a gorgeous food bar facing the open kitchen and lots of modern, open space accentuated with bold strokes of red and muted grays.
Sushi chef Tomohiro Naito of Tomo provides the hands behind a lengthy sushi menu and the sashimi salad, featuring sliced avocado, buttery tuna, hamachi and salmon in a light-but-sassy ginger vinaigrette.
As for the steaks, sauces like staid bearnaise and a mad-mod chimichurri verde are available for dousing your meat. But honestly, when a steak is this good — a cowboy-cut ribeye and the Kansas City strip are best bets — I’m not for dressing it with anything but fork to mouth.
French American Brasserie 
30 Ivan Allen Jr. Blvd., Suite 125, Atlanta. 404-266-1440. www.fabatlanta.com
Owner Fabrice Vergez is smart enough to know that there was no way to move downtown into a developing space such as Ivan Allen Plaza and keep the old Brasserie le Coze he opened with Maguy Le Coze at Lenox Square years ago. Not only is the space more than twice the size of the old, the menu includes additions such as a large offering of steaks, chops, shellfish and oysters along with Brasserie favorites, including the escargot and mushroom soup.
The good news about FAB is that the food is, on most levels, better than Brasserie Le Coze. The skate wings are crisper, saltier and even bolder than before, scrumptious in their brown butter sauce with fat Pantellerian capers. The sweetbreads are preciously plump, soft-centered works of art delicately placed over whipped potatoes graced with mushrooms and surrounded by a pool of black truffle sauce, topped with micro greens. The profiteroles are the French answer to a Dairy Queen dream: plump and filled with nutty pistachio ice cream, drenched in Valrhona chocolate sauce and tons of fun to make a mess with. Couple all this with a completely approachable wine list that also offers deep options.
Rooftop dining here offers a grand view of the city’s ever-expanding skyline. Too bad the dining room — large and overstated — lacks the personality the brasserie menu begs for. But picking over every little detail here is like complaining that George Clooney is too short.
Harlem Bar (not rated)
262 Edgewood Ave., Atlanta. 404-588-0014. www.harlembaratl.com
A jazzy in spot for hip-hop crowds (and sometimes the celebs they’re shadowing), Harlem Bar serves up some mean shrimp and grits along with fat, crispy barbecued chicken wings.
The right perch at the small bar will give you full view of “Cleopatra Jones” (or the blaxploitation film du jour), and the cocktail list — with names like Superfly and Banana Pudding— is way downtown.
Start with a heap of catfish fingers and finish with some sweet potato cheesecake, a Sweet Auburn classic.
For “The First Emperor: China’s Terracotta Army” at the High Museum of Art:
Trois
1180 Peachtree St., Atlanta, 404-815-3337, www.trois3.com/home.html
Restaurateur Bob Amick is a man who has built a restaurant empire (including prepubescent pretties One Midtown Kitchen, Two Urban Licks and Lobby at Twelve) based on the kind of glitzy glam that Atlantans lap up like the latest vodka martini
At the grown-up Trois, talented and understated chef Jeremy Lieb has taken Amick’s pinup fantasy of a modern French restaurant and brought it into flattering focus, albeit with a few strokes of the airbrush. All of Lieb’s dishes possess a clever modernity that impresses but never overreaches, even in the portion of the menu dedicated to a few brasserie-style classics such as beef bourguignon and flounder Parisian.
Desserts, overseen by Concentrics pastry chef Jonathan St. Hilaire, are modern marvels.
Tamarind Seed Thai Bistro
1197 Peachtree St., Atlanta, 404-873-4888, www.tamarindseed.com
Some like it hot, and no restaurant in Atlanta creates the fire show that is great Thai food with quite the amount of flavor and finesse as Tamarind Seed Thai Bistro.
Chef-owner Nan Niyomkul, along with husband Charlie and son Eddie, has packed up her galangal root and curry paste from the former 14th Street location, and things couldn’t be hotter. From the bright fuchsia orchid on each plate to Tamarind’s gorgeous new dining room, replete in layers of rich chocolate color, with black lacquered tables and bright glass cookie jars of spices along the walls, this is by far Atlanta’s best and most refined Thai dining experience.
Along with some of the best fish dishes the city has to offer, the classic Thai salads are small universes of enjoyment. Order a beer and let the flames begin.
Spice Market
Inside the W Atlanta Midtown hotel, 188 14th St. N.E., Atlanta. 404-549-5450, www.spicemarket.com
French super chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten’s first foray into the Atlanta restaurant scene is comme çi, comme ça: For all its bells and whistles, Spice Market looks exactly like what it is — a restaurant inside a hotel, a far cry from the detailed intricacies of its NYC mothership.
The menu is practically identical to the original in New York, though, and executed better by Ian Winslade. The array of street dishes meant to be shared span much of Southeast Asia: Beef satay with mildly pickled veggies, shrimp tod mun pla and incredibly seasoned samosas save the meal.
Large — did I say large? I meant gigantic — chicken wings are lost in spicy breading, and entrees of halibut with ginger, scallions and tarragon and cod with an overly sweet Malaysian chili can be a yawn. But short ribs are delicate and layered with a barbecue of spice and onion laced with chile flavor over flat noodles. And duck comes curried in a rich, heated sauce laced with coconut, part Indian, part Thai.
Desserts are perhaps the most well-conceived dishes: Thai Jewels, a groovy soup of mochi-mad textures over coconut ice, and a chocolate-and-Vietnamese coffee tart that tastes like a smooth mouthful of chocolate-flavored sweetened condensed milk are worth skipping an entree for.
Oceanaire Seafood Room 
1100 Peachtree St. N.W., Atlanta. 404-475-2277, www.theoceanaire.com
The atmosphere is part 1930s movie set, part sepia-toned ocean liner splashed with blue — and feels a bit like a chain, which it is.
The menu has an old-fashioned, horse-sense feeling, full of fresh fish selections and high-end house specialties that focus on seafood of enormous portions and a la carte entrees and sides. The appetizers, especially a milky white crab cake full of feathery crab meat and held together by not much more than flavor, are the most interesting offerings, short of the raw bar — clearly the restaurant’s strongest showing, with oysters as the front runners.
The bar is a perfect perch to while away time before a show, sip champagne and suck back a few oysters.
Table 1280
1280 Peachtree St. N.E., (at Woodruff Arts Center) Atlanta. 404-897-1280, www.table1280.com
This high-profile restaurant, opened inside the High as part of its multimillion-dollar redo a few years back, came with high expectations, too: Shaun Doty started as chef, then left to open his own spot, replaced by Todd Immel, who promptly left to work for Anne Quatrano and Clifford Harrison of Bacchanalia et al.
Tracey Bloom’s dishes still possess quiet charm with modern edge, and the atmosphere — especially the sweeping bar area — still allows for a grown-up experience, whether it be dinner or just drinks.
TAP
1180 Peachtree St., Atlanta. 404-347-2220, www.tapat1180.com
At Bob Amick’s clever restaurant, Atlanta’s first official gastropub, the menu, printed as a snappy little clip book, is one of the coolest things about the place. Designed by John Turner (aka BoyBurnsBarn designs), it offers a flavor chart of the tongue on the front, the Morton Meilgaard beer flavor wheel on the back, and bits of philosophy throughout, including a quote from Sir Francis Bacon.
What it doesn’t offer, like most U.K.gastropubs, is an old building rife with history that’s been refurbished. Instead, TAP’s digs front the Spalding Building and share a pastry kitchen and valet with the restaurant’s sophisticated older sister, Trois. The horizontally challenged space (everything here goes up) boasts wooden walls bathed in red while overhead a suspended glass vault hovers above the centrally located bar, where 21 beer taps stand at the ready. The bar even sports a British beer engine and bartenders smart enough to tend it.
And the food is gastropub central: house-made pickled veggies, chickpea fritters with tzatziki sauce and pub fries fit for a king.
KEY TO RATINGS
Outstanding: Sets the standard for fine dining in the region. Excellent: One of the best in the Atlanta area. Very good: Merits a drive if you?re looking for this kind of dining. Good: A worthy addition to its neighborhood, but food may be hit or miss. 
Fair: The food is more miss than hit.
Restaurants that do not meet these criteria may be rated Poor.
