RESTAURANT STORIES
Atlanta’s restaurant culture now in the cool neighborhoods
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Sunday, April 05, 2009
Some cities with vibrant dining scenes can communicate the unique nature of their hometown yumminess with a few short words. San Francisco is the birthplace of California cuisine. New York offers the world on a plate. New Orleans has not one but two native cooking styles — Cajun and Creole.
Atlanta dining, however, doesn’t reduce to a convenient aphorism. Yet dining is one of the city’s favorite pastimes and perhaps even one of its cultural draws. How do you let people know what to expect?
Courtesy of Annette Thompson
Chefs from Bacchanalia transfer a pig from a truck to the kitchen. Travel writers from the Midwest had just enjoyed a high tea at the Westside restaurant.
For years the Atlanta Convention and Visitors Bureau has grappled with this question. Five years ago, they first asked me where I steer visitors. I said Buford Highway. Maybe something fancy like the Dining Room at the Ritz-Carlton Buckhead or Joël.
This year, the ACVB asked again. I said that Atlanta has changed. Now I like to show visitors cool neighborhoods like the Old Fourth Ward and the Westside, where interesting, small restaurants have been the catalyst for their resurgence. Fine, said the ACVB. Would you be willing to explain this to a group?
This is why I recently found myself standing up in a shortbus, staring down a cohort of visiting travel writers from the Midwest, rolling through the Old Fourth Ward. The ACVB had set up a mini-tour of restaurants, and I was supposed to explain why they were somehow illustrative of Atlanta’s restaurant culture.
“Have any of you all been to Atlanta before?” I asked.
“Once. Long time ago,” came a taciturn answer from the front.
“How was the food?”
“Everything was fried.”
Okaaaaay, then.
“John, tell them about the trends with Atlanta food now,” piped in Lauren Jarrell, the ACVB associate whose was along for the ride.
I mumbled cliché after cliché. Farm to table. Market driven. Gastropub! Pig offal! Not that old New Southern, but new-and-improved New Southern!
“What about some popular dishes in Atlanta,” Jarrell prodded.
Right, right, right. Pimiento cheese! Deviled eggs! Fried pickles! Did I say pig offal?
Luckily, I could soon shut up because we had pulled into our first stop — 4th and Swift in the Southern Dairies complex.
“Now this restaurant, this is soooo Atlanta,” I enthused to the few members of the group who were still holding onto hope that I had something to say. “Just look at this design with the exposed brick and, um, you know, warehouse thing going on.”
Fortunately, chef Jay Swift had invited the architect, Dan Mass of ai3, who could cogently create a sense of history and place, and share an aesthetic that does feel intrinsically Atlanta. Chef Swift put out a tasty sampling of his menu and talked with feeling about local farmers.
“I’m trying out a new pig farmer,” he said, offering everyone a terrine filled with all kinds of gelatinous, wiggly and delicious bits.
Next, we went across North Avenue for a menu sampling at Repast, where chef Joe Truex was waiting for us. I tried to mumble something about Atlanta finally being a mature enough city that we could support a wholly idiosyncratic place like Repast, with its octopus carpaccio and Basque wines.
By this point no one was listening, as Truex (who, full disclosure, is a friendly neighbor of mine) was passing out bites and tastes of said comestibles.
After a final bite of lemon-mustard curd chiffon cake, we loaded back into the shortbus and headed to Bacchanalia. There, chef Anne Quatrano met us in the downstairs dining room was set with a dainty high tea. Amidst copious bouquets of fresh flowers and shimmery French chanson in the background, we dipped sliver of spring vegetable into Green Goddess dressing and ate radish tea sandwiches and tiny biscuits stuffed with strawberry jam and Sparkman’s Dairy sweet butter. We were floating on a cloud of refinement.
Then, as we walked outside, I saw the dead pigs.
“Come on folks,” I said, leading the group to the loading dock where young chefs were transferring two pigs — splayed on their backs, legs akimbo — from a truck. Behind them, railroad tracks wended through a poetic landscape of graffiti, kudzu and crumbling brick.
“High tea and dead pigs,” I said triumphantly, “This is what Atlanta is about.”
