A neighborhood favorite, Solstice Cafe in Grant Park announced its closing on Facebook with this message:
“hello everyone. want to thank you for all the great times we had and helping us live our dream. it is with a sad heart that we must close the door on this place. we will miss all of you.”
I’m sounding like a broken record here, but it’s another place that I never made it to. Grant Park neighbors: will you miss it?
Courtesy of Serious Eats
There’s some serious food-porn love given to Flip Burger Boutique on the influential A Hamburger Today blog on Serious Eats.
The Westside restaurant, which is owned by chef Richard Blais and Barry Mills, got high marks for the milkshakes, fries and concept. The burgers themselves were all deemed very tasty even though not a one was cooked as ordered.
More than anything, though, this post is notable for its googly-eyed, close-up shots of juicy ground meat.
Vegetarians: DO NOT CLICK HERE — DISTURBING IMAGERY.
AJC Staff
It was interesting to read the comments following the post about the closing of Aquaknox, the glitzy seafood restaurant in the Terminus building in Buckhead.
Some past patrons liked the food and service. Others didn’t. But nearly everyone had complaints about the valet parking situation.
I had never been to Aquaknox before it closed, but I’ve made several visits to its neighbor, MF Buckhead, and can share in the valet parking frustration.
If you choose to valet part, the cost is quite high ($6, if I remember correctly) and there’s always a long wait for your car at the end of the evening. I recall it taking nearly 15 minutes on one freezing evening. My wife eventually went back into the restaurant, and I stood outside, hopping to keep warm.
You can also self park, but the parking spots aren’t particularly close to the restaurants and the set up is strange. I actually got lost in the parking garage once. (In the interest of full disclosure, I’ll admit that I could get …
Now that I have this big, fancy blogroll, I’m going to try to do a weekly round-up of the most interest-piquing posts. Without further ado:
A Cook and Her Books: lemon puddig
A Cook and Her Books made this appealing, seasonal warm lemon pudding and let her husband scarf up the all the strained-out bits. What a nicely written post. I can’t wait to try the recipe.
Cured Meats: lamb for prosciutto
Cured Meats takes this boneless leg of lamb from Costco and seasons it with gobs of rosemary and other spices to make lamb prosciutto. Judging by the comments, a few folks are trying this.
Live to Nibble: Steamed papaya
This pretty steamed papaya contains coconut milk, honey and — oh, yes — the fallopian tubes of snow frogs. Live to Nibble ate this in China and will tell you about its texture and health benefits.
Sous Vide Geek: salmon
Sous Vide Geek made this tasty-looking salmon the first day he had his fancy new Sous Vide Supreme. The fist was cooked in a vacuum-sealed bag in …
AJC Staff
After so many weeks when I was reporting nothing but restaurant openings, now it seems that I’m only hearing about closings.
Avra Greek Tavern — the little sister to Taverna Plaka — has indeed gone out of business. The Midtown restaurant was the latest occupant of a seemingly snakebit restaurant space on Juniper Street that has been home to several failed restaurants. Avra did hang on the longest, for more than four years. It closed after New Year’s Eve.
I’ve got a question, and it comes with a prize. What restaurant was in the space before Avra. The first person to answer this correctly will win a $10 gift card to Denny’s.
I know…the mind boggles…
Credit Alison Cook, Houston Chronicle
The Houston Chronicle’s restaurant critic, Alison Cook, has a wonderfully descriptive essay on how the evocative aromas of some dishes bring up memories and associations, and really make a difference in how you experience food. I highly recommend it.
The same idea came to me the other day when my wife, back from a business trip to Bahrain, brought me back a spice from the market there I had never seen before called dar filfil.
Dar filfil (left) and licorice root
These hard dried fruit spikes (they look a little like tiny pine cones) are grated and used as a spicy seasoning, which is why they are sometimes called “long pepper.”
The flavor is similar to black pepper in that it’s sharp and fruity, and it makes your tongue tingle. But there is also something more that comes out in the smell. A friend was over, and we ground one of these little cones into a hillock of powder when we both made the same comment: The smell! Musky, floral, kind …
Admitting that you have a thing for Asian fusion restaurants is like saying you prefer the Eric Clapton covers of Robert Johnson to Robert Johnson.
But as I see it, Asian fusion cooking can have something to say in the hands of the right chef. It doesn’t have to mean mealy seared tuna, limp field greens and sweet sauces.
No chef in America has done as much to burnish the reputation of fusion as Jean-Georges Vongerichten. He opened the original Spice Market in New York as one of his first forays into casual, high-volume dining with a menu that riffed on Asian street food. It was so popular when it opened that reservations were impossible. When I stopped by one evening and asked just to peek inside, I was turned away at the door by a bouncer.
The Atlanta branch of Spice Market in the W Hotel Midtown reprises many of the dishes made popular in New York. It would be a fun restaurant to like.
I stopped by for lunch last Friday and found a mostly empty dining room, and food that had …
View Larger MapThe Midtown mainstay — which has fed families heaping plates of pasta in that antique-y, Tiffany-lampshade style that was so in vogue in the 1970’s and 1980’s — finally gave up the ghost on Sunday and served its last supper. The restaurant had been in business for over 20 years.
I never did visit the one in Atlanta, but hit up the Denver branch more often than I care to admit. Our children were in a daycare center next door, and on more than a few occasions we’d find ourselves rushing in at 6 p.m., scooping up the kidzos, turning to another strung-out parent and proposing: “Spaghetti Factory?”
I don’t even remember what the food was like. I do remember that it arrived lickety split and included a salad, drink and ice cream dessert for a small fixed price.
My former AJC colleague Maria Saporta has a sweet essay about the restaurant on her blog, the Saporta Report. Yes, she actually did eat in the streetcar booth once.
Any Atlanta parents out there have stories …
AJC Staff
The Hil — chef Hilary White’s cozy restaurant in Serenbe — has been named a Top 10 new romantic getaway by the editors of Bon Appétit restaurant.
Restaurant editor (and Atlanta native) Andrew Knowlton looked for places “that have stellar food, a warm welcome, and a certain off-the-beaten-path appeal.”
That certainly describes the Hil, which features refined versions of such Southern classics as chicken pot pie and tomato sandwiches, and uses produce from the Serenbe garden.
You can read about all 10 (and plan your getaway before Friday’s snowfall) here.
Courtest of Melissa Libby
Tuk Tuk Thai Food Loft is a curious place. You enter through a small vestibule where you are greeted by an actual tuk tuk — a colorful auto rickshaw with headlights that glower at you like Darth Maul’s eyes. Then you take an elevator to the second floor where a vast, sleek, seductively lit dining room awakes. Only the witty displays of canned goods, dry crackers, colorful candies and even washing powder alert you this isn’t Thai as usual.
Tuk Tuk’s lovely young chef/owner, DeeDee Niyomkul, is the daughter of Charlie and Nan Niyomkul who have defined high-end Thai in this town at Tamarind Seed Thai Bistro and Nan Thai Fine Dining. This restaurant goes for something different. The menu lists a dozen or more small-plate versions of Thai street foods as well as a handful of Thai style salads and “Bangkok Street Noodles.”
Unique dishes include hoy tod, a crispy mussel pancake, and neau sawan, which are plugs of warm, sweet, appealingly chewy beef jerky …
Aquaknox (AJC Staff)
The Atlanta Business Chronicle is reporting that Aquaknox — the 2nd-floor restaurant in Buckhead’s Terminus Building — has closed.
This sister establishment to a flashy Las Vegas restaurant got decent marks from local critics for its upscale seafood menu.
That said, I never went. Did you? As much as I love good seafood, there’s something about high-gloss seafood restaurants without any sense of place (there is some irony in it being a Las Vegas import) that doesn’t entice me.
Still, it’s sad to see any restaurant close.
The Terminus is batting .500. Of the original four restaurants, two have failed so far. Lola Bellini Bar has morphed into Cantina Taqueria, while MF Buckhead and Bricktops are still in business.
The History Channel show “Good Eats” is filming today at Ria’s Bluebird for a segment on the best diners in the country.
The filming is probably over by now, but owner Ria Pell has been inviting her Twitter followers to swing by for their 15 minutes.
My Sunday Column grew out of a post on this blog about a superlative brussels sprouts dish I tried in a Los Angeles restaurant.
Here’s my theory of brussels sprouts: People eat them on Thanksgiving as a kind of Puritan penance. At least, that’s what I think happened in our house.
Preparing the brussels sprouts required the kind of coordinated joint effort usually reserved for a pig killing. My father and all the able-bodied men performed the annual chestnut-peeling ordeal — an event that involved much swearing, arguing over technique and finger pricking until a scant handful of crumbly bits was produced.
Meanwhile, my mother would trim and carefully mark each brussels sprout heel with a talismanic X so they would “cook properly.” This meant boiling them for the entire duration of the Macy’s Thanksgiving parade until they resembled not vegetables so much as eyeballs wrenched from the sockets of decomposing zombies.
The chestnut bits and slimy green scleras were then mixed in a …
The chicken people are back!
Yes, during this as every January, 20,000-some attendees of the biggest chicken-and-egg conference plan to roost in Atlanta for the week.
As a way of spreading out the welcome mat for this confab — officially the International Poultry Expo/International Feed Expo — the Atlanta Convention & Visitors Bureau has devised something called FeatherFest 2010. About 50 area restaurants are currently serving dishes that use poultry meat or eggs. If you go to one of these participating restaurants, you can vote online through January 28 and rate the dishes.
Dishes range from steak and egg sushi at Geisha House to Rochelle’s egg custard pie at Max Lager’s.
Again, the Web site is here.
This does remind me of a dish I used to enjoy when I lived in Japan called oyako donburi that consisted of eggs and chicken simmered in an onion sauce and served over rice in a lidded bowl. The name literally means “parent and child in a bowl.”
Courtesy of foodiebuddha.com
Crawfish Shack Seafood –until now a tiny 15 seater — will expand into the space next door in its Buford Highway mini-mall.
I got this missive from owner Hieu Pham (edited for typos):
“This Coming Saturday the 30th the new dining room at Crawfish Shack Seafood will be open. It should be able to host about 70 guest. Yes! going from about 15 to 70 is a huge number! I do hope your be able to come and check out the new dining area. Alone with the new dining area I will be adding to the Menu “Beignets and Coffee” From the very Famous Cafe Du Monde.”
The menu is very simple, but it has that “just right” quality. This is one of the rare seafood restaurants that really deserves the word “impeccable.”
Though, if I could make a suggestion, I might skip the Cafe du Monde in favor of the fresh sugar cane juice that is so great with fried seafood.
If you have any trouble finding Ms. Betty’s House of Ribs in Eastland Heights, just roll down your window when you’re getting close and let your nose guide you. That sweet smell of barbecue smoke perfumes the neighborhood.
This place is a true rib shack — a double-wide trailer set in a parking lot with one plastic table inside, a counter with a pass-through window to the kitchen and a sign warning customers not to fiddle with the air conditioner. The smokehouse is out back.
On a friend’s recommendation I ordered this rib tip dinner, which was a huge portion for $8. On the side: super cheesy-crusty mac and cheese and mildly seasoned but extremely tender collard greens.
I also ordered a rib dinner ($8.99, right) and a half chicken ($5.25).
The ribs and the rib tips had a great flavor — imbued with plenty of smoke and well seasoned. I also loved the house “boss sauce” that was an unconventional sweet soy glaze. (The other choice is a yellow mustard sauce.) I did think they both …
Courtesy Custom Choice Cereal
Are you the kind of person who wishes your Honey Bunches of Oats contained pumpkin seeds and dried strawberries rather than almonds and raisins? I only ask because I am. In fact, I have a huge appetite for dried fruits and nuts. I eat them with yogurt in the morning, keep them in my desk drawer for snacking and toss them into salads at nights. My children suspect I am part squirrel.
That’s why I have become interested in the sudden proliferation of online custom cereal blenders. These companies, such as Moja Mix and Me and Goji allow you pick a base, such as granola or corn flakes, and then add the dried fruits and nuts that you like.
I am particularly interested in a company out of North Carolina called Custom Choice Cereal, which offers plenty of healthy options and mixed them all in a gluten-free facility. You can start with a base of corn flakes enriched with flax and quinoa, then add such diverse garnishes as goji berries, dried pears, …
Blackeyed pea curry
Over the weekend I had a meal from the tired Indian buffet at Bay Leaves restaurant on Lawrenceville Highway in Decatur. It was…depressing. I chewed on my rubbery tandoori chicken wings, pulled limp cucumbers from the salad and ate what I needed to fill my stomach. Some rice, chickpeas, chicken tikka masala, pappadums and chutney…enough.
There’s something about sad Indian food that is the saddest food of all. It is the food equivalent of a bad recording of an old Leadbelly ballad played on a scratchy 1970’s school phonograph for a roomful of children who aren’t listening. It sings a fiery song that has been tamed through apathy and neglect.
And so I needed good Indian food to take the flavor out of my mind. The other day I was picking up my car from the shop in Decatur’s Indian restaurant row when I drove by Kusum Foods and remembered enjoying it soon after it opened in October. I ordered a quick meal to go and was really happy with the Styrofoam …
AJC Staff
The National Restaurant Association is forecasting substantial growth in Georgia restaurants — both in terms of restaurant sales and job growth.
The Atlanta Business Chronicle has the story here.