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Monday, March 2, 2009
More Signs of The Recession
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Editors, colleagues and readers have been quick to ask me if I’ve noticed signs of the recession while I’m dining out. I answered with a blog many weeks back — I’m seeing packed dining rooms at Craft, Market, BLT, a first peek at Leon’s Full Service this past Friday.
And yet.
A birthday dinner at Ecco for my sister proved the same: the dining room was elbow to elbow, and running on all cylinders throughout our evening.
But there is a recession lurking beneath that dinner napkin: Beverage manager and sommelier deluxe Vajra Stratigos of Fifth Group tells me that while people are obviously still dining out, numbers are off because “a couple who used to order a bottle of wine has down-sized to two glasses. Everyone orders the less expensive entrees.” Ditto appetizers and dessert, which are sometimes are sells anyway. The real blow for Stratigos is the halt of his cherry-wood veneer wine labels — written by him and given to the guest as a souvenir (and a signature idea for Ecco and Fifth Group). We received one of the last on Saturday.
“They’re just too expensive to keep,” he sighed.
Other recession notes: The ink on chef Joel Antunes’ dismissal notice from the Oak Room in NYC was hardly wet when Joel Restaurant, through a publicist, released a press release that basically says “good luck, but we don’t know you. Even though that’s your name over the door.” More facts in Food and More, but I gotta say, this is a move that just wasn’t needed. Sure, everyone was wondering if Antunes would return to Atlanta — perhaps even to Joel — but most of us with our ears to the ground knew that the jargon that he still had a hand in his former namesake restaurant was just that — jive.
I was pretty incensed to find him leaving so soon after a five-star review last October. It’s sort of hard for a person to be in two places at once (ie, NYC and Atlanta), and I figured Joel’s second hand man, Cyrille Holata (who is now the restaurant’s chef and managing partner) had been the one doing most of the cooking anyway. Still, that’s no reason to kick a chef when he’s down.
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