Makan restaurant review, Decatur

Credit: John Kessler

Credit: John Kessler

That would be nice. If anyone in Decatur wants to join me, we could start a club: the Beer Belly Brotherhood. Makan taps good local microbrews from Orpheus, Wild Heaven and Three Taverns. After we’ve had our toast and first round of porky goodness, y’all could help me figure this place out.

I’ve tried. The cautious hope with which I first approached this restaurant has been replaced by a mounting sense of bewilderment whenever I explore the modern pan-Asian menu beyond that $4 bun.

The ambitious list features comfort dishes that miss the spot, edgy experiments with blurry flavors, and family-style meals that don’t communicate a sense of plenty.

Chef-owner George Yu — who was raised in his family’s Chinese restaurant business and has worked in upscale restaurants such as Midtown’s Ecco — knows his stuff and buys the best local meats and vegetables. He has no shortage of interesting ideas about Asian-American cooking in the 21st century, and some tasty flavors will emerge from his kitchen. Yet, the pieces rarely fit together in a way that makes dining sense. This is an appealing restaurant to consider, but a hard one to use.

When Yu and his business partner, Michael Lo, opened Makan this past summer, the menu suggested a mashup of dishes from night markets and street carts throughout Asia. Guests ordered noodle soups and small plates. They augmented their meals with little $2 bites served from a cart that rolled through the spare, hip dining room (an easy-on-the-eyes, less-is-more design by Atlanta’s Square Feet Studio).

This being Decatur, the focus soon enough switched from the streets to the hearth, from the market stall to the home table.

Credit: John Kessler

Credit: John Kessler

The “family meals” on the menu show this kitchen at its most convincing. You order a beast to share (a duck, a fish) and nibble on appetizers until it comes. We missed out on the duck, which is prepared in limited quantities. But we liked the fish — slender bronzini (we got two to the order) with crackling skin and milky flesh served on a bed of mushrooms with a generous lashing of ginger-scallion sauce.

I’m going to sound petty here, but I think our server should have brought serving spoons and told us to order rice and a side vegetable. We needed that “Ta-da! Here’s your fish!” moment you get in a good Chinese restaurant. We needed heaped plates. Instead, it was one more dish at the end of a meal that arrived in dribs and drabs, another thing to pick at with our chopsticks.

Makan doesn’t settle into any particular method of service, instead combining the painstaking coursing out of upscale bistros with the the family-friendly shared platters of Chinese restaurants and the catchall slinging of small plates. The food follows in a similarly confused vein. One dish says Buford Highway, the next says Bacchanalia.

Whenever I’ve brought friends or family here, they survey the menu and focus on the few familiar Asian comfort dishes. The ramyun (Korean-style ramen) brims with good noodles, a nicely wobbly egg and more of that pork belly, but the rich broth so overloads your palate with salt that your reach the breaking point far faster than you’d like.

Ditto the kimchi fried rice studded with BB-shot bits of hard bacon. Wontons stuffed with pork and shrimp in a chile oil taste less salty by comparison, but you’ll still need to keep an eye on the busboy with the water pitcher.

I suspect that Yu’s heart is more in the fancy/edgy restaurant dishes. I really do like the three slices of tender, crisp-skinned chicken roulade served with a few rainbow carrots in a stock-enriched soy basil sauce. But I worry that guests will balk at the $14 price.

I wanted to like a $14 lobster salad, if only for its intriguing bed of slivered celtuse, a kind of crisp lettuce stalk. But the lobster was so tough and off-tasting we had to return the dish.

The biggest head-scratcher on the menu combines dukbokki, tubular Korean rice cakes, with chewy nuggets of sweetbread and bacon in chili paste. I love white, spongy dukbokki and I love beige, spongy sweetbreads, but combine the two in a blood-red sauce, and together they just seem like a prop from a low-budget horror movie.

What else can I say about Makan? The bar seems like a fun place to hang out, and the bartender has smartly shifted focus from Asianish cocktails to classics, like the Manhattan and the Aviation. The patio looks awesome, and I bet this is the coolest restaurant ever to share space with a Courtyard by Marriott. The menu shows a picture of the toddler Yu in his chef father’s arms next to a picture of him in chef’s whites and an apron holding his own toddler. Underneath it is the hashtag #secondgenerationchefs.

See what he’s doing? Like many millennial Asian-American chefs around the country, Yu is trying to take the food he craves and the food he admires — the food of his immigrant family and the food of his professional training — and from it all he wants to craft something real for that next generation, the one he can still hold in his arms.

Keep at it, sir. And don’t lose the pork buns.