Author: John Kessler

The #5 juice from the juice bar at Whole Foods Market in Sandy Springs — apples, carrots, celery and kale ($3.99).

It’s absolutely delicious, but it does look like a salve used in alien medicine….

Zagat released its 20th annual survey of Atlanta restaurants yesterday, and the results are…..not very surprising.

Bacchanalia again headed the list of 737 restaurants in the “top food” and “most popular” categories. Quinones at Bacchanalia got the nod for “top service,” while Nan Thai Fine Dining earned “top decor.” Other high-scoring restaurants include Bone’s, Rathbun’s, Aria, Canoe and Nikolai’s Roof.

In other findings:

• 51% of Atlantans make their reservations online, second nationally to San Francisco with 52%.
• Atlantans eat out 3.3 times a week, slightly above the national average of 3.2 times.
• The average meal here costs $31.35, significantly below the national average of $35.25.
• Significant percentages of the 2,731 survey respondents reported cutting back on alcohol, appetizers and desserts in an effort to keep meal costs down.

Here’s my question: Does anyone still keep a copy of the Zagat Survey in the glove compartment, or have we all moved online for our hoi …

Ann Price (AJC Staff)

Raymond Sokolov — the journeyman food writer who has recently been penning restaurant reviews for the Wall Street Journal — has decided to leave his post, the New York Times reports. He quit after the paper announced it would abandon opinion-driven restaurant reviews in favor of food trend stories.

In recent years, the New York Daily News has also shed its restaurant reviewer.

Sokolov is the writer who called the Ghetto Burger at Ann’s Snack Bar the best burger in the country. The “trendiest” burger in the country, it is not.

The annual Oxford American Food Issue is now out on newsstands.  (We all remember what those are, right?)

It’s a bounteous meat-and-three of Southern food writing — lots of meaty features and compelling side stories, a few of which are up online:

• Todd Kliman’s heartfelt piece about his obsession with the Chinese chef Peter Chang, who briefly cooked at Tasty China in Marietta. It cuts deeper (and funnier) than Calvin Trillin’s recent New Yorker piece on Chang, which was told from a bemused distance.
• Beth Ann Fennelly writes about the widespread practice of geophagy, or dirt eating, that is particularly prevalent in the rural poor South. Ever see those little packages of white kaolin sold at the Sweet Auburn Curb Market produce stands?
• Warwick Sabin ponders the reasons why the obesity epidemic affects the Southern poor so disproportionately. The “fresh, local food” now so in vogue is becoming a luxury item, the author argues.
• Brandon Reynolds looks at the Mattie’s Southern …

Last weekend a friend and I got together and cooked for a mutual friend’s birthday party. It was one of those turning-of-the-odometer birthdays, so we went all out. I was charged with inventing a cocktail, and since I’m a fiend for the flavor of yuzu — i.e., Asian citron — I came up with this concoction.

I started with a jar of Korean citron tea — basically a yuzu marmalade that is meant to be stirred into hot water for a beverage. Instead, I pureed the contents of the jar with the juice of 4 large lemons and double strained it, first through a sieve and then through cheesecloth, to get rid of all the fine bits of rind.

A shake in a shaker with some nice, botanical-forward gin, a few drops of Fee Brothers orange bitters and some ice, and we had one helluva cocktail. I really love the unique perfumed tang of yuzu, which is like lemon and jasmine combined.

You can get the citron tea at any large Asian market and the bitters at any good liquor store.

Feel the city breaking!

Everybody shaking!

Where? Why, at Andrews Upstairs in Buckhead — or what was Andrews Upstairs above East Andrews Cafe & Bar but is now — Bee Gee falsetto, please! — 8 Traxx Disco!

You should go this Saturday night to the “St. Paddy’s Night Fever” party. If you don’t like it, I’m sure the bartender will give you the password to get into Prohibition downstairs.

You just have to be able to speak jive…

Thanks to everyone who, in more than 200 comments on this blog, gave me an idea of where to start looking for the city’s best and most interesting burgers. There is a real burger revolution afoot as restaurants rethink the staple menu item. The 8-ounce patty that you can barely fit your mouth around has given way to much more elegant and carefully constructed sandwiches. I’m noticing several trends:

• Thanks to the runaway success of the Holeman & Finch Public House 10 p.m. burger, stacks are in. Gooey, drippy, American-cheesy stacks.
• Flip Burger Boutique has found the sweet spot between ginormous and slider with its 5-ounce burger. You savor every bite, you have room for one of the creative sides and, heck, you maybe order a second one to share with a friend.
• Burgers served in fast-food restaurants and made from some supermarket ground beef can be the ultimate in unwholesome mystery meat. So more and more burger places are reassuring customers that the beef is from a reliable …

Last week, Inland Seafood’s general manager of plant operations, Rich Luff, took me on a tour of the distributor’s Tucker headquarters. Three things particularly fascinated me:

1. The building, a former Mary Kay Cosmetics distribution center, has hallways laid out in the form of the letters “MK.”
2. Fish cutters insert sides of salmon into a machine that spits out perfect 6 ounces portions. If the fillets are very large then the long, skinny slices that emerge are called “hot dog cuts” in the trade.
3. These two oysters, which are really the same critter. Both are Pacific oysters (Crassostrea gigas) — a species native to the Pacific coast of Asia but now cultivated all up and down the North American Pacific coast. Left to their own devices, these pups can grow to a foot or longer. Indeed, Chinese chefs are quite fond of the 6″-8″ specimens (right), which can be steamed and then topped with black bean or ginger/scallion sauce.

So what do we have on the left? This little guy is a …

Gwinnett County Taco Truck, June 2005

In yesterday’s Sunday column I caught up with my old friend Christiane Lauterbach, the longtime Atlanta food writer, who has started a blog that documents both the paucity of and the growing cry for food carts in Atlanta. There are a few taco trucks that fly under the radar here and there, but nothing of the gourmet food truck revolution that has rocked other cities like Los Angeles, Portland and New York.

If you know of any good food carts, be sure to let Christiane know.

LOOKING FOR FOOD CARTS

Christiane Lauterbach takes an appreciative bite of her Sonoran hot dog — a bacon-wrapped tube steak piled high with messy, gunky yumminess — beans, queso, slaw, mayo. It is a fine simulacrum of the dish served from trucks parked throughout Tucson, Ariz.

“I like this, ” she says, “but I don’t believe in $9 street food. How about that?”

How about that.

This hot dog was not served from a real truck, but rather from a stage-set truck parked in front …

Couscous prepared by Yves Samake of the Atlanta Ritz-Carlton

Normally I prefer to not dwell on what Atlanta lacks in terms of food choice and instead go looking for what we have. But I have long decried the lack of a good French North African couscous meal.

I know we have a couple of good Moroccan restaurants — Imperial Fez in Buckhead and Imane in Gwinnett County — that serve couscous. But a Moroccan meal can be kind of an event with the floor cushions, the eating with your fingers, the acrobatic green tea pouring, etc. It’s shebang-y.

In France, couscous is a popular ethnic dish that cuts across economic levels. People may go out to a fun, slightly cheesy, super-cheap couscous restaurant the way we might go out for Mexican. Or a neighborhood bistro might serve couscous once a week as a special and use high quality meats for garnish in the spirit of fried chicken Tuesdays at Watershed. Or a Parisian might invite a bunch of people over for a couscous dinner at home the way a …

Atlanta’s ethnic dining scene looks like it will get a fair bit more interesting with the opening of these two restaurants:

• Fado Fine Dining will open with a 45-restaurant and banquet hall, serving upscale renditions of  African cooking. It opens in Cobb Marketfair Place on Austell Road. The owner is hoping to get the doors open next Friday and will prepare Nigerian and other West African cuisines.
• La Garita Bistro is coming to Lawrenceville, serving Puerto Rican food. The Web site is up in “coming soon” mode, but my call and email hasn’t been returned. Cool logo…

Yelp! — the popular online message board where people post reviews of restaurants and other businesses — has been hit with a class-action lawsuit instigated by a pet hospital.

Cats and Dogs Animal Hospital of Long Beach, California, asked to have defamatory and out-of-date reviews removed from the site. Instead, the plaintiffs claim, Yelp! account executives called them repeatedly and demanded payment in the form of bought advertising in exchange for removing the reviews.

In the lawsuit they allege that “business listings on Yelp.com, contrary to the website’s ‘Real people. Real reviews.’ mantra, are in fact biased in favor of businesses that buy Yelp advertising.”

You can read about it on TechCrunch, which broke the story.

Do you Yelp? Do you find it a reliable source of information?

(Thanks to blog commenter John for alerting me to this.)

My family loves spinach salad with orange or tangerine segments, almonds fried in olive oil and a splash of rice wine vinegar. It is the easiest possible salad to make as long as you are willing to invest a little time into preparing the citrus. Sure you can use canned mandarin segments, but the flavor is so superior with fresh.

When I make the salad with big navel oranges, it’s easy enough to cut it into the segments that French chefs call suprèmes — those little wedges painstakingly extracted from their pith. But last night I was staring down juicy, sweet and exceedingly seedy honey tangerines and got the idea to cut around the center. This left all the seeds in the center and produced fat wedges. As Borat would say, “It was a great success!”

I made a very rudimentary video showing how to do this. I cut off my head because I didn’t feel like washing my hair or shaving. Note that a thin, serrated steak knife is the tool of choice.

The basic recipe:

• About 8 cups leaf …

Credit: Chick-fil-a (old, not-spicy sandwich)

I cannot begin to tell you how distraught I was to be away from the office on the day that business reporter Jeremiah McWilliams brought back not one, not two but three of the new spicy Chick-fil-a sandwiches from the company’s headquarters for our staff to try.

I’m afraid I’ll have to wait for the official roll out sometime in June.

Who else can’t wait? Also, do I need to get a life?

Read Jeremiah’s story here.

AJC Staff

From the better-late-than-never file:

Mitra – the once-lively Southwestern restaurant on Juniper St. in Midtown — shuttered its doors January 1 rather than renew its liquor license.

It was the second restaurant from restaurateurs Sia and Mitra Moshk.

Their original spot, Sia’s, continues to thrive in Duluth.

It’s one thing when inexpensive places participate in $25 restaurant week specials. That usually translates into more food than you really need.

It’s another thing when restaurants where you expect to spend $100, such as steakhouses, throw a bone to the masses with a restaurant week special. That means a salad, salmon or chicken, and a scoop of ice cream for dessert while you watch the people at the next table dig into their porterhouses.

But Buckhead Restaurant Week, which starts this Saturday, March 6, offers plenty of enticements from the sweet spot — interesting menus at those places that are just a bit too expensive for weekday dining. Consider these $25 three-course menus:

• At Aria – Lobster and Sweet Potato Soup with sweet peppers, leeks, peanuts, basil and lime; Zinfandel Braised Short Rib of Niman Beef with celery whipped potatoes, parsnips and tender carrots; Valrhona Chocolate Cream Pie with chocolate sauce and soft whipped cream.
• At Bluepointe – Volcano Roll or …

Atlanta food writer Krista Reese — currently the restaurant critic for “Georgia Trend” magazine — has just released a wonderful new cookbook filled with the most local of flavors.

“Atlanta Kitchens: Recipes from Atlanta’s Best Restaurants” (Gibbs Smith, $30) is not your typical chef’s cookbook with recipes that are beautiful to photograph and, oh yeah, require 30 pounds of veal bones and a teaspoon of fennel pollen for the sauce.

Consider this instead:

• Five recipes for fried chicken, from Scott Peacock’s Watershed classic to those from Wisteria, Son’s Place (R.I.P.) and Mary Mac’s Tea Room. I see a fried chick-a-thon in my future.)
• Great ethnic recipes, such as the always-delicious Mom’s Cabbage Soup from the Vietnamese restaurant, Nam.
• Linton Hopkins’ fascinating recipe for lobster poached in corn milk — a dish he invented to earn a spot on “Iron Chef America” and then put on the menu at Restaurant Eugene. What’s fascinating is that it calls for precisely 6 ingredients: …

Rice, Kewpie mayonnaise, seasoned seaweed crunch and mentaiko (spicy cod roe). That’s how I roll.

A friend recently asked me for a restaurant recommendation with these parameters:

• In Midtown
• Going with older family members
• Price not a huge concern
• Good service
• Nothing too unusual or exotic
• Nothing too stuffy

I asked her to name a restaurant that had worked successfully for this group in the past, and she mentioned Bone’s.

I fed all these criteria into the Kessler restaurant Choos-o-lator, made some robotic beeping noises, and came up with the Oceanaire Seafood Room.

While I’ve never actively loved this restaurant, I’ve always found it correct at what it does. The 1930’s cruise liner decor is maybe a little kitschy but makes for a pleasing environment. I think it’s a quality operation. While our Atlanta branch doesn’t have a lot of impact on the local dining scene, I know that it’s quite popular elsewhere — both in its hometown of Minneapolis and in my old hometown of Denver, where it pulls a downtown after-work drinks crowd.

But I hadn’t been to our Oceanaire in years, …

The venerable Atlanta food blog just underwent a serious redesign. Check it.