Reviewing Doraku, American Food and Beverage in Buckhead Atlanta

250 Buckhead Ave., Atlanta. 678-705-0454, americanfoodandbeverage.com/atlanta. $$$ Rating: 2 stars (very good)

Restaurants — like people — go forth, are fruitful, and multiply. They may start out as a luncheonette in a Birmingham suburb (Zoës Kitchen) or an outdoor stand in a city park (Shake Shack), but soon enough they start to replicate.

While we tend to think of restaurants as either unique entities or mass-replicant chains, they do go through an in-between period. It happens just after first mitosis, as the owners are trying to duplicate their initial successes. Their building blocks of DNA are the same, yet they find themselves in a new city with a new customer base and, most importantly, a new staff. It’s not the easiest time in the life cycle.

This week, we’re looking at two such restaurants in the Buckhead Atlanta development.

Doraku, a sushi bar with a menu of inventive small plates, began life just outside Miami in glamorous South Beach. Its founder, Kevin Aoki, is the son of Behihana founder Rocky Aoki, who managed to systematize a vision of Japanese food for the American public. He has since opened another Florida location, along with two in Hawaii. Atlanta marks the fifth iteration.

The younger Aoki ditched the hibachi tables and flying shrimp in favor of a more modern and sophisticated concept. Doraku looks rather like an izakaya (Japanese pub) crossed with a Miami ultra lounge — all dark woods, tile, slate and glowing pendant lights. It’s homey but chic and clearly wants to attract large tables of flirty young people with uptown tastes and $75 to drop on colorful bites, fun cocktails and fancy sake. The food takes its cue from South Beach, so Latin flavors and presentations curl through the menu.

It also can be kind of a mess. I didn’t have much patience with some of the expensive small plates I ordered. Seafood ceviche (striped bass, shrimp and octopus) tasted more of iodine than salt or lime juice despite its “aji amarillo citrus sauce,” and it wasn’t well served by a glop of mashed sweet potato on the side. Alaskan cod nanbanzuke is not actual nanbanzuke (oil-seared then vinegar-marinated fish) but rather flabby fried cod fingers in a too-sweet ponzu.

But there are better dishes, including a tasty beet salad with arugula and pickled onions in a miso dressing. Rounds of Japanese eggplant grilled with miso and garlic chips are also tasty, as are edamame in a sweet-spicy miso sauce you’ll need to lick off your fingers. Everything conspires to get too sweet, but there are some interesting recipes on this menu we haven’t seen a million times before.

Best (and cheapest) dish? A lunch chicken-and-egg rice bowl sparked by pickled onions and sauteed kiku (edible chrysanthemum).

That said, I’m wary of the sushi. A house-special whitefish comes with a thread of shiso (Japanese mint), fresh yuzu juice and pulverized dried miso. This could be a great signature item were it not for the ultra-chewy whitefish and sweet, too-sticky rice.

Service presents more of a problem than the food. You can wait minutes to get seated in a nearly empty restaurant. A waiter may bring you a soda and say, “Let me go fetch you a straw,” only to return three minutes later. One night an empty beer glass sat at the edge of our table throughout the meal, and our mostly absent waiter only thought to offer a refill as he was clearing the dishes. There’s a lot of friendliness, but no hustle.

Around the corner is a new restaurant called American Food and Beverage. Catchy, right? When I first made plans to visit this place, I couldn’t for the life of me remember the name. I kept trying to Google “The American Restaurant” and “National Dining” and so forth. Finally, I remembered that the first location was in Fort Worth, and so I searched “Fort Worth Atlanta American restaurant” and it came up right after Catfish King in Atlanta, Texas.

On my first couple of passes, I found it blandly nice: the kind of restaurant you want to go to when you’re dining with people you don’t really know — and you don’t know how they’re going to dress, or whether they just might want a sandwich rather than a main course. There are local craft beers and craft cocktails, plates big and small, nice wooden booths and thick cloth napkins, tall plate windows and a deep bar where you can easily eat your dinner. Make of it what you will: This is American food and beverage, dagnabit.

The training manual here clearly paid more attention to the finer points of service. There are always two hostesses to greet and walk you to your table as well as a manager making the eagle-eyed rounds.

The staff do have to go through a little bit too much of the “my favorite dishes” and “this is truly spectacular” routine, but it doesn’t come off as hot air. Even when a waiter did screw up our order and brought the wrong entree, the response was perfect. We were told to enjoy the erroneous dish while we waited.

Chef Jeremy Miller has sneakier ideas about good food than the wording on his bland, something-for-everyone menu suggests. He’s also a good technical cook. He firms up a pork shank in a sweet-tea brine, then braises it to melting softness before setting it on a bed of soft grits. With the salty brine and creamy grits, this pork really cottons to its garnish of sweet spiced tomato jam.

Although it has gone off the menu, I still think about a crisp-skinned char set over a mustard green puree with raw baby mustard greens, orange segments and watermelon radish slices. Miller seems to understand how mild fish works with bright flavors.

But AF&B is that rare restaurant where the entrees are better than the starters. Wood-grilled mussels in a buttery charred onion broth were twice tepid and wiggly. If mussels don’t steam, they’re not worth eating. A scoop of house-made ricotta with country ham and olive oil was a bland business to spread on toast. The one exception was a terrific starter of broccoli soup: vivid in flavor and color and blessedly not too rich.

So, one day in the future I will be walking down a street in a city I don’t know and looking for dinner. If I see Doraku, I think I’d keep walking. American Food and Beverage, however, might pull me in.