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March 2007
Best new places to put some South in your mouth
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
We still love Atlanta institutions like Thelma’s and the Colonnade for Southern classics, but there’s a newer breed of Southern restaurants that are showcasing the flavors of the region in some ways that might catch Grandma off guard — as in JCT Kitchen’s chicken and dumplings, in which the chicken is cooked in red wine and the dumplings are actually Italian gnocchi.
Then there’s the catfish at Wisteria that’s served over green tomato and eggplant with crawfish ragout, and the Harlem Bar’s Banana Pudding cocktail served in a martini glass.
We welcome these new offerings when they’re done right, and after months of artery-clogging research we share the best Southern-inspired discoveries we’ve tasted, served by both the old guard and the new.
What restaurants and chefs do you think are doing the best job of cooking Southern food these days?
Saving New Orleans eateries
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
More than a year and a half after Hurricane Katrina, the New Orleans restaurant industry is still hurting. There’s some good news: Willie Mae’s Scotch House will reopen soon after a 14-month rebuilding project organized by the Southern Foodways Alliance. And Dooky Chase’s, a landmark Creole restaurant a couple of blocks away from Willie Mae’s, is expected to reopen later this spring.
But the overall picture remains bleak. Of the 1,882 restaurants in Orleans Parish before Katrina, fewer than half have reopened. And the ones that have face labor shortages and reduced business in a city that has lost half its population. Some will no doubt fail.
Do you think it’s worth the effort and expense to rebuild restaurants like Willie Mae’s? Are there any New Orleans eateries you couldn’t live without?
What’s the best burger you ever had?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Wall Street Journal food reporter Raymond Sokolov has named the “Ghetto Burger” at Ann’s Snack Shop the best hamburger in America. What’s the best burger you ever had?
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Big Bad Boo Boos, Like Hair in Your Food
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
An editor passed by my desk a few days back to discuss something that had happened to her and a friend on a recent dine out. I’ll just cut to the chase: Her friend found a hair in her food.
I know.
Bleeeeeeeeeeeeccccch!
Gross.
Yuck.
While the idea of finding someone else’s strand of DNA in my arugula salad is, to put it mildly, a turnoff, the whole situation prompted a lot of questions from me, and they weren’t about sanitation.
I mean honestly, it’s not like it hasn’t happened to all of us before. In my dining travels, I’ve found hair, fingernails — in one restaurant’s bathroom I even found a used condom on the floor of the women’s restroom (and it was a “nice” restaurant).
No, my interest in what happened to my editor and her friend was how the restaurant handled the whole mess. Sometimes a mistake — even one as icky as a hair in your food — can be an entree into a special relationship between the customer and the restaurant.
In this case, the customer was offered another entree immediately, and the price of the dish was removed from the bill. The manager took care in discussing the situation with her until her comfortability level returned. When the bill came, her dessert was on the house, too. A big minus was turned into a plus with an outcome where everyone wins: My editor and her friend both plan to return to the restaurant.
In my own experience, I’m happy when management makes an effort to let me know they’re sorry for my a) being yucked out or b) having been inconvenienced, like say, the time a waiter spilled an entire pitcher of beer on me. The horrible thing (as if being drenched in beer isn’t horrible enough) was that nothing was done about it at all, except for a rather inept apology. No free dessert. No offer to dry-clean my clothes. No plus, big minus.
Still, the discussion prompts me to offer this bit of irony to diners: Get over it. Unless something at a restaurant has made you physically ill and you know it (and if so, you need to report it to the authorities and the restaurant), we need to all take a chill pill and realize that mistakes — even disgusting, gross, big, bad boo boos like hair in your food — happen because people are handling your food and serving you. People, not machines. People, most of whom have hair. We should all be far more concerned about whether food handlers are washing their hands often enough — a sanitary habit everyone from my mother to the CDC knows is the No. 1 way to prevent the spread of germs and food-bourne illness from food handlers.
Of course, if management doesn’t bother to do anything about a problem, there’s, um, a problem. But when care is taken to make you feel comfortable, even under dire circumstance, people are doing exactly what they’re supposed to do: their jobs.
Have you ever found something really disgusting, like hair, in your food at a restaurant? What did the management of the restaurant do to compensate?
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