The side of the reach-in of Tierra's downstairs kitchen is papered with tallies of the restaurant's covers —- the number of seats served in a night —- from the past 10 years. Look at 2006 on Valentine's week and the numbers spike in the 200s. Look a year earlier and the numbers are proof of the bad weather that kept all but one lone diner home for the evening on a sparse Tuesday night.
The restaurant business is a finicky animal, and it takes long days (and nights) of dedication to make a go of it.
Dan and Ticha Krinsky have been married 14 years, but in many ways they are as wedded to this restaurant —- their life's work —- as they are to each other. Ticha, once a single mom with no formal training in the kitchen, raised her two children on a salary as a hospital kitchen manager. Dan, a California Culinary Academy graduate, met her at a wedding and eventually moved across the country to marry and work with her.
Tempestuous and high-spirited, Ticha was raised the daughter of a doctor-turned-diplomat in South America, born in Mexico of Salvadoran parents and raised in Mexico, Panama, Peru, Chile, Nicaragua and Brazil. Behind her beautiful brown eyes is a Latina passionate for all things Latin. Dan could not appear more opposite: He is the steadfast straight man to her ardor.
Cobbling together money from loans, the couple opened Tierra on Feb. 16, 1999.
"We were trying to avoid opening on Valentine's Day," Ticha remembers, knowing even then what that crazed day can do, even to the prepared, in the restaurant business.
The menu was, and is, pan-Latin cuisine researched from Ticha's childhood and yearly trips the couple has taken to South America —- a varied offering from chicken with a rich, layered cashew-coconut-and-peanut sauce inspired by Ticha's years in Brazil to her famous tres leches cake.
"When we first opened, it took years before people coming to the restaurant realized that we weren't serving chips and salsa with a bar list of margaritas," Dan says.
The years have been tough at times. "After 9/11, we really thought for a moment we might not make it," he explains.
Small, intimate and nestled into its Ansley Park environs, Tierra has grown from a neighborhood favorite to a citywide treasure, garnering some of the most devoted fans of any restaurant in Atlanta. It's most worthy of holding this year's title as AJC restaurant of the year.
The couple tried at first to have Dan solely in the kitchen and Ticha upstairs in the dining room. That quickly had to change.
"Dan is so much more patient and congenial with people than I am," Ticha says with a laugh.
But since both of them were most at home in the kitchen, they worked out a schedule unlike almost any other restaurant's, alternating with each other weekly between the kitchen and dining room —- something that could have proved a nightmare for consistency. The miracle of that is that their recipes are so intact and cooking styles so similar that it's difficult to tell the difference in the luscious food from week to week. (Though because of kidney disease, which tires him dramatically, Dan spends less time behind the kitchen line than he used to; see accompanying article.)
But consistent they are, varying only with some seasonal ingredients and Ticha's addition of weekly menus that celebrate different countries, commemorating their Independence Days.
The rest of the time, their offerings are loaded with the kind of dishes that, once tasted, quickly become signatures whose removal might cause an uprising: black bean soup, deeply layered with savory bacon flavor spruced up with platanos fritos and a dollop of creme fraiche; mussels in a delicate pasilla pepper sauce dotted with nibs of corn, julienned jicama and sprigs of fresh cilantro; succulent pork loin served with a not-too-sweet tropical fruit relish and a generous mound of mashed potatoes laced with smoky chipotle.
Never go to Tierra without trying these, or the Puerto Rican version of pionono, a beautifully created circle of seasoned, thin slices of platanos filled with a sweetly spicy beef picadillo. Never go without ordering simple papusa, a thick corn tortilla filled with mild, gooey Salvadoran quesillo cheese, served with curtido —- a pickled slaw that perks up the papusa's mild flavor.
The Krinskys are busily preparing Tierra's fall menu now, where calabaza or onion soups might replace chilled cucumber, and Ticha is adding a Brazilian bobo de camarao shrimp dish, made with yuca-tomato sauce served with coconut milk pudding and kale to the entrees, as well as yummy acaca pudding made of coconut and rice flour as a fall dessert.
And, of course, that tres leches. The key to Ticha's cake is that it is sturdy enough to hold the sweet milk without falling apart or becoming cloyingly sweet. Oh, and the meringue, which is like biting into a cloud of heavenly sweet fluff. It's tempting to just bury your face in it.
"There were times when I really wanted to change Tierra's concept to something more recognizable to the public," Dan says, "but Ticha held fast to what we were doing —- she's never lost sight of our original idea."
And that originality is what has set Tierra apart, and made it the gem it has become, whether it's serving one or 200.
> THE 411: Tierra, 1425 Piedmont Ave., 404-874-5951, www.tierrarestaurant.com.
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