New chef Zeb Stevenson’s tenure at Watershed on Peachtree promises to be a very good one. For the neighbors who frequent the bar, he has written a short menu of crowd-pleasing snacks: a simple burger, a roll of pimiento cheese, deviled eggs and ham, pork rinds and hot sauce. Tucked among those is Stevenson’s pickle plate, an unusual and delicate collection of curiosities like garlic flowers and coriander seeds, bamboo sections, ramps and so on. I leaned over the plate, oohing and aahing over each fun, bright little taste.
Stevenson is at his best, in fact, when he is being a bit fussy. A plate of grilled peaches wrapped in paper-thin slices of lardo would be pleasure enough, but Stevenson delivers the dish plated with rounds of cucumber, smears of mint yogurt, a quenelle of savory rice pudding and a miniature bouquet’s worth of edible flowers that have been artfully set in place with, one must assume, a pair of tweezers. It is a summer stunner.
And, yes, there’s still fried chicken.
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