Author: John Kessler

Rare Soul Tapas has reopened after a fire closed it more than a year ago. Lorenzo Wyche’s atmospheric restaurant/lounge serves creative takes on Southern dishes in a small plates format. Think Cajun-fried Cornish hen, Buffalo-style chicken livers and “forever braised” baby back ribs.

Wyche has put his popular Westside breakfast joint – Social House — up for sale. According to a report from the Shumacher Group, a restaurant real estate broker, the “absentee owner does not run shifts while growing late night life management, consulting firm and new hotel venture.”

In other restaurant news:

• Crazy Cuban is slated to open at 290 14th St. in February. This should be of particular interest to fans of the late, lamented Kool Korners a block away in Home Park. No word on whether this restaurant is any relation to Crazy Cuban in Marietta, but I’ve got a call out to the contact listed on the report.
• Yoforia will open a new location of its fro-yo franchise at 1410 Dresden Drive in …

Please check out my new blogroll listed on the right side of this page. I think it’s now the best and most thorough collection of blogs related to dining, cooking and drinking in the metro Atlanta area.

I was really happy to get such a great response from local bloggers when I put the call out for links. Among the many interesting ones are:

• Doing Laundry and Other Tasty Bites — a local woman cooks through Thomas Keller’s cookbooks.
• Cured Meats — a fascinating and instructive blog about making charcuterie at home.
• Datelicious — restaurant reviews from a dater’s perspective.
• Sous Vide Geek — experiments with a home sous vide set.
• Young & Hungry — a blog written by two college friends, one of whom lives in Atlanta and the other in Dallas.

You’ll find links to these blogs and many others in the blogroll.

Please take a look through them and tell me which ones jump out at you.

When Ria Pell opened Sauced restaurant recently, she decided to gamble on a now-unusual business practice: the restaurant will not accept credit cards.

Pell has installed an ATM on the premises so that guests who find themselves stuck without enough green stuff after dinner can withdraw the needed cash.

“It’s an interesting way not to have Visa suck you dry,” Pell told me of her decision. By not having to pay credit card processing fees, Pell says she can pass the savings on to customers and keep her prices lower.

She got the idea when she was visiting restaurants in New York and noticed that the practice was becoming more commonplace there.

Here in Atlanta you might find cash-only policies at breakfast spots, such as Thumbs Up Diner. But most customers have the $10 in their wallets to front a breakfast tab. As far as I know, there aren’t any other places that serve full dinners and refuse to take plastic.

Pell says the policy is an experiment for now and will change it …

For the past 14 years, Ria Pell has had her eye on the building on the corner of Edgewood and Waddell Streets in Inman Park. With its jauntily angled plate windows and geometric midcentury modern lines, it looked just a bit — if you squint — like a vintage piano store or maybe the Jetsons’ rec room.

About a year ago she took the lease over from its former tenant, 11:11 Teahouse, and on Christmas night opened Sauced restaurant as a gift to all the retro design buffs in the city.

The Look: With its glossy black naugahyde booths and incandescent light emanating from vintage lamps, Sauced gives off a vibe that at once brings to mind Graceland, that gloriously divey tavern your friend took you to in Philadelphia, and the best finished basement on the street you grew up on.

“It was a ton of hands-on work with carpenters and metal workers,” says Pell of the build out. Woodworkers recycled the bar top from the building’s roof rafters, and the warm wooden paneling — so in line with the …