Author: John Kessler

Chef Terry Koval stands by my table, points to my half-eaten burger and says, “That was a good cow.”

I suddenly have an image of Bessie being led by the ring in her nose right into a meat grinder.

Koval continues. “This one is so juicy and has such a good flavor. Much better than that first cow we had.” He sighs. “Of course, I never thought we’d already be onto our second cow by now. But we’ve been so busy.”

You want farm to table? We got you some farm to table right here. Call it cow to bun.

The process of sourcing meat at Decatur’s new and phenomenally busy Farm Burger goes something like this:

The kitchen sources a grass-fed cow from one of several local farms. Koval mentioned a North Carolina farm for this one and says he works with Charlotte and Wes Swancy of Riverview Farms in Ranger to build a network of suppliers. The marked beast is sent to Happy Valley Processing in Dearing to be humanely killed (whatever that means), and the trimmed meat ages up to three weeks …

It’s Saturday night. The $12-an-hour babysitter has arrived and she might actually wash the dishes and not spend all evening on the Internet. The minivan has at least a half tank of gas. A dress has been picked out. A husband has been told to change his shirt with food stains on it.

Date night!

Time for the parents to dine in a restaurant. Drink a bottle of wine. Order a $23 fish entree. Share a chocolate dessert. Spend, oh, $175 for an evening that involves only sitting, eating and conversation as normal. But this time it will be  — not that we don’t love them — without kids.

The AJC’s Momania blogger Theresa Walsh Giarrusso set this conversation in motion when she asked me and restaurant reviewer Meridith Ford Goldman about our favorite no-fail, always-reliable, babysitter-worthy restaurants. Theresa was concerned with finding places that offered good value for the money, and where the staff would make minivan-driving suburbanites feel welcome rather than not cool …

Every other Friday, the guys from Top Flr host Dinner Party — a gathering of strangers around a dinner table in locations announced just prior to the event. It might take place in a private home, a warehouse, a high-rise condo or a park.

The one happening this Saturday, May 1,  is special, and I’ve got two tickets to give away. This benefit for the Piedmont Park Conservancy will host 200 people somewhere in the park (though I’m assuming not the dog run). Top Flr chef Shane Devereux has asked some of his colleagues (Hector Santiago from Pura Vida Tapas and Craig Richards from La Tavola, among others) to join him in preparing the food, which will largely come from local farms. Also on hand: five of the town’s top bartenders, including Greg Best from Holeman & Finch and Miles MacQuarrie from Leon’s Full Service, will mix the drinks. Michael McNeill, the former Ritz-Carlton Buckhead wine steward and the city’s only certified Master Sommelier, will oversee the wine selection.

So …

Mario Batali — the chef who has done more to change the look and feel of Italian cooking in this country than anyone in 20 years — will be coming to Atlanta this weekend. Not to scout out a place to open a restaurant, alas, but to demonstrate recipes from his new cookbook, “Molto Gusto: Easy Italian Cooking” (Ecco, $29.99), at the Metropolitan Cooking & Entertaining Show at the Cobb Galleria Centre. Batali and his partners run 14 restaurants in New York (his home base), Las Vegas and Los Angeles, and are gearing up to open two more in a Singapore casino. He has authored several cookbooks and is a regular performer on the Food Network program “Iron Chef America.”

We spoke on the phone briefly:

Q: What are you planning to demonstrate?

A: Really this book is all about the simple and predominantly vegetable-based foods of the Italian daily table. So I’m planning to make a dish of cavolo nero (Tuscan kale) with ricotta thinned with olive oil and water — it’s like a thin soup. And …

Researchers at the University of California San Diego have discovered a link between chocolate consumption and depression. According to their findings, which were published in the Archives of Internal Medicine, either people suffering from depression tend to reach for chocolate more, or something in the chocolate triggers the depression. You can read about it here.

Some dessert menus skew toward chocolate — a basic flavor pole around which the ancillary flavors of nuts, butterscotch and marshmallow revolve. If there is a fruit dessert, it will likely be something heavier, such as pear-caramel cake, or a chocolate and banana confab.

I find these kinds of desserts easy to pass on after dinner. I love them, but really think such dense sweets taste better in the afternoon with a cup of coffee than following a big meal.

But I am a sucker for fruit-based desserts. When I went to Market Buckhead recently to write up a burger of the week, I couldn’t resist this concoction. It’s a coconut flan with candied kumquats, lime whipped cream and toasted coconut. What an amazing combination of flavors! I particularly loved the way the barely sweetened cream flecked with lime zest added such a sparkly top note.

True, it was pretty rich. I either resisted eating it all or thought about resisting it all, but this was one of the better desserts I’ve …

Downtown Decatur

Organizers of this past weekend’s great non-event claim that it was canceled due to the accurate forecast of nonstop rain. But the word never got out, and a number of ticket holders showed up, walked around the drenched burg and didn’t get any food. The inDecatur blog has the story.

Did anyone reading this try to go to Taste of Decatur and have a similar experience?

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Korean food (Wikimedia)

On the way home to Atlanta from spring break a couple of weeks ago, we made a great road-food discovery. JK House Korean Restaurant is less than a mile off of I-85 in Valley, Alabama, just across the Georgia state line. It caters to the Korean management community for the nearby Kia Motors  Manufacturing Plant in West Point, Georgia.

Of course, getting my family to eat Korean food is another matter altogether.

Below is the Sunday column I wrote about the restaurant. But I’m curious to know. What are your great hidden finds for road food in and out of Atlanta?

A Korean find in Alabama

By the time we pulled into Valley, Ala., my wife was fast asleep, the teenage girls in the back seats had depleted every laptop battery on episode after episode of “The O.C., ” and the minivan was out of gas. We had been driving for nearly five hours, and once I stopped at a gas station, stomachs started growling.

We looked around. There were a couple of fast food …

Oh, yes, indeedy. But not here.

The trade publication Burger Business is reporting that Burger King has begun test-marketing brunch at stores in Massachusetts and Florida. Flush with the success of its BK Breakfast Bowl (left), the fast food giant has decided to test a menu that skews markedly more upscale than its competition. New menu items include an scrambled egg ciabatta sandwich with cheese, tomato, ham and bacon, as well as a mimosa made with orange juice and Moët Champagne Sprite. But if you really want a Whopper for brunch (and what says brunch more than a Whopper?), you can get one of those, too. I know where I’m taking my wife for Mother’s Day brunch!

In other news:

• Ziba’s Wine Bar has opened in the old Solstice Cafe space on Boulevard in Grant Park. According to its Twitter feed, the restaurant is BYOB (or BYOW) until its liquor license goes through.
• Bobby and June’s — the breakfast mainstay in West Midtown — will close after more than 30 years in business. Owner …

Welcome to the one, the only, South African restaurant in Atlanta: 10 Degrees South.

The menu here, with all its unusual words, seems to be talking to you in a foreign language.

But the flavors speak a language you know — that of staid, familiar Continental cooking. Throw in some easygoing sweet-and-sour sauces and a basketful of South African wines, and you’ve got a nice, non-challenging, date-night kind of spot with a slightly exotic sense of dress.

Consider these cheerful  sosoties ($11) — an appetizer portion of skewered beef tenderloin served with a tangy, balanced apricot curry glaze. I was impressed that the first flavor wasn’t sugar. That said, 11 bucks seems a little steep for four bites of beef.

I had to order this sliced beef sausage ($9) after hearing the waiter carefully pronounce it with the right accent, sounding the “w” like a “v.” Boer-VUHRS.

You know what it was? Beef sausage swimming in a brown sauce that brought a strong whiff of Worcestershire as soon as …

Who can tell me where this sun-streaked dining room is? It was my first time here, and I had to wear sunglasses during the first 30 minutes of our meal. I felt like a rock star, although I’m sure I looked like a doofus…

The “Double Beef Patti” at Serpas True Food ($13) in the Old Fourth Ward is not so much a hamburger as it is a small building.

Though it was too dark on the patio for me to get a good picture of the actual burger eaten, this publicity shot is essentially what we had — minus the green frills and the upside-down top bun. The middle slice of bread on ours had compressed into something that looked like one of those novelty dry sponges that spring into form when you put them in water.

And I mean this in a good way: it was nicely absorptive.

The curious spelling must surely be a reference to the first line of Patti Smith’s “Gloria” — i.e., “Jesus died for somebody’s sins, but not mine” — because this burger is the very picture of gluttony. Maybe chef Scott Serpas can enlighten me.

Despite its verging-on-preposterous height, this burger is neither too drippy nor too plumped with slide-about ingredients. So if you are able to open wide and not risk lockjaw, it is possible to eat with …

These almond macaroons are for sale at OU For U — a vegetarian Kosher restaurant in Dunwoody that I first discovered last December.

Prepared by Einat’s Bakery, they contain just almonds, egg white and sugar and are labeled “gluten free.” They are fantastic — delicate, sheer and just the tiniest bit chewy in the center. They seem like they would be perfect with a cup of coffee or tea in the afternoon.

I spoke briefly with the baker (Einat?), who works at the restaurant, to make sure they are prepared in a facility free of cross-contaminants. Though she didn’t speak much English, she seemed to understand the drift of my question and was very reassuring about the safety of these cookies for sufferers of celiac disease. She also said that she was planning to debut a line of gluten-free cakes later this week.

A look at her website shows that Einat makes all kinds of Kosher cakes, cookies and pitas and is now conducting a “Passover mega sale.”

Does anyone else have recommendations …

Credit: ABC

And so it ends. The sixth and final episode of “Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution” airs this Friday on ABC in a stadium. From the promos, it looks like there will be tears, hugs, surprises and twists aplenty, and general yumminess bursting over Huntington, West Virginia, like fireworks.

I’ve streamed the first three episodes online, and will certainly see the rest. Though I find some of the reality TV tropes cheesy and manipulative, the message of this show is incredibly compelling, and its truths cut deep. It presents a powerful indictment of our food system.

Have you been watching the show? Do you think Jamie Oliver is really planting the seeds for change in our school lunch programs nationwide, or do you find his quest too idealistic?

Nasu karashi — eggplant with miso-mustard sauce

A friend and I stopped in for lunch today at Bishoku Japanese Restaurant in Sandy Springs — a spot that has been getting good play on local food blogs. It has a unique presence in the Atlanta Japanese food scene: the lengthy menu offers a number of small plates much like you’d find at Shoya Izakaya, Hashiguchi, Jr., or Sushi Yoko. In other words, it has bona fides. This place is a real Japanese restaurant, not a sushi-fusion whatever.

But unlike those other places, which push the booze, Bishoku is kind of fancy. Dark wood, soft lighting and discreet nooks create a serene effect. There is  no bar and no bottle of liquor in sight, though I think the restaurant serves beer, sake and shochu. A large sushi bar dominates the center of the room.

The young, businesslike woman making the rounds of tables is Jackie Fukuya Merkel, the owner and daughter of the founding owners of Sushi Huku — a longtime Northside favorite.

I haven’t tried …

Tomorrow’s News Today is reporting that Atlanta’s first franchisee of Pinkberry frozen yogurt was handing out samples this past weekend in front of its still-under-construction retail space at  3937 Cobb Parkway.

I’ve heard the owner is David Beall — the younger brother of Sam Beall, who runs the ultra-exclusive inn/working farm Blackberry Farm in Tennessee. Both Bealls are heirs to the Ruby Tuesday restaurant chain fortune.

Pinkberry is the California chain widely credited with starting the new age of FroYo.

In other news:

• Bill Addison is reporting over on Atlanta Magazine’s Covered Dish blog that Linton and Gina Hopkins of Restaurant Eugene have plans to open a gourmet food market in 2011. The working name? Drovers. No, it’s not a skin condition…
• Decatur Metro (hey, dude, you a dad yet?) says that Farm Burger will open its doors on Wednesday and unleash its grass-fed goodness on Decatur. A friend of mine went to a preview dinner and says the burger brought her paroxysms of …

Sam Sifton, the newish restaurant critic for the New York Times, has been writing and blogging about the massive caloric intake required by his job. He has even gone so far as to track his diet and exercise habits for a week and show the net calorie consumption day by day. Not surprisingly, on one day he had a net intake of over 4,000 calories thanks to fried oysters, rabbit livers and a couple of meat pies.

The restaurant critic calorie confidential seems to be turning into something of a blogging subgenre. Recently, Dallas Morning News critic Leslie Brenner tracked her own 20-pounds-in-20-weeks “Restaurant Critic’s Diet.” Like Sifton, she kept track of everything she ate and energy expended through exercise with calorie counts. Unlike Sifton, she restricted her daily caloric intake by only taking bites of the food she reviewed and cooking sensibly at home.

I don’t know if the AJC’s Meridith Ford Goldman counts calories, but I do know she shows amazing restraint at the table. …

Sunday was one of those evenings when we were teetering between packing up the kids and walking into town for dinner or scrounging a pretty bare pantry for edibles. When the children started moaning loudly that didn’t want to get cleaned up for public viewing, I decided to scour the kitchen for food. I flung open the freezer (chicken tenderloins…done), the fridge (one head of romaine…done) and the pantry (15 boxes of penne because you never know when Barilla might go out of business.)

So I started thinking chicken pasta. But as the chicken took shape in the skillet with bacon, onions, thyme and a splash of vermouth, it seemed like a dish that would be happier without pasta.

The next logical step for the noodles? Mac and cheese, of course. Or, rather, penne and cheese. It was a fine idea, except the cheese drawer offered only a fossilized rind of some expensive gouda I bought months ago.

At that point I recalled a meal I ate about 10 years ago in Lyon, France. It was a piece of …

Miller Union was hopping today at lunch. How nice to see a cool new restaurant go after Atlanta’s fickle lunch crowd.

The menu is trim: starters, salads, a few sandwiches and four entrees. I ordered this vegetable plate ($13, left), which manages to look virtuous while delivering satisfying doses of butter and salt. Beets, creamy white beans, fantastic collards and roasted carrot coins made for a nice, soppy plateful of flora.

I also really loved our starter — a “radish and feta snack” ($4, right) with icy cold veggies and a creamy feta dip.

Other items at our table included a super-squishy and super-delicious oyster po’ boy ($10) that you’ll want to inhale, and a pair of homemade fennel sausages ($13) nicely paired with more of those white beans and parsley pistou. These sausages were like other homemade versions I’ve tried around town — tasty but too dry and crumbly. (I’m getting the feeling that Atlanta’s meat mavens are starting to turn their attention from cold salami to …

Avocado and roasted carrot salad with cumin vinaigrette

A few days ago someone turned to me and began, “I bet you get asked this all the time….”

I knew exactly what was coming next.

“So, what’s your favorite restaurant?”

I do get asked this question often, and I never have a great answer. I love Bacchanalia, but that’s more a birthday and anniversary kind of restaurant. Kyma is great, but it has a certain high-gloss ambiance that doesn’t necessarily match my standard wardrobe or attitude. I have a bunch of Korean, Vietnamese and Japanese joints I really like. When I impetuously spend more money than I should on dinner, that usually means sushi.

Usually, though, I will say Cakes & Ale or Pura Vida Tapas — the two restaurants that my wife and I like to steal away to when we can go out for a nice dinner that won’t necessarily mean a three-digit bill. They are both small, personable, chef-run and have menus that change often. We know that we can walk into either place, peruse the …