A market pop-up, an unusual bar menu and the best pizza

If you want to chase down the most interesting cooking in Atlanta today, you may need to give up your preconceptions about what makes a dining experience. At Gunshow, where the hyper-creative kitchen performs a nightly data dump, they’ve done away with menus and ordering, if not waiters, plates and wine.

Wait until you try Eat Me.

This semi-permanent pop-up at the Candler Park Market is probably not the restaurant to take your wife to for your anniversary. Or maybe it is, depending on your wife.

On Monday through Friday evenings, a young upscale-dining refugee named Jarrett Stieber cooks his brains out from behind the deli counter. He plates the food inside cardboard sandwich baskets with all the Zen sauce swooshes, organic produce and frilly microgreens you’d expect from a five-star kitchen. You collect a disposable plastic fork and a paper cup of water whilst looking longingly at the chilled beer that you can’t drink on the premises.

A veteran of the kitchens at Empire State South and Abattoir, Stieber said he chose this path to get away from the pressures of a big kitchen and remember why he went into cooking. “It’s nice for a change not to get yelled at,” he joked.

Usually, he prepares a half dozen or so dishes each night. If two of you get it all, you’ve spent about $60 total for an intriguing tasting menu.

Our party of two reached a split decision on the heirloom tomato salad topped with crunchy, three-alarm spicy serrano chile hard candy and doused in a vinaigrette flecked with ground coffee. It took me a couple of bites, but I was convinced; it’s a pretty cool dish.

Clams steamed open with edamame, lion’s mane mushrooms and peanuts was a delicious yet confusing business I wanted to pour from its cardboard basket into a waiting bowl of steamed rice. Cubes of fried eggplant presented in a tangle of picked pak choy leaf with a scattering of almonds would have been a lot better had the eggplant not been so dry and spongy. (I’ve noticed that local farmers market eggplants this season need a lot of cooking to soften.)

A better choice is tofu, marinated and burnished on the griddle, then set with zipper peas, okra and a sweet-tart muscadine sauce.

If you ask nicely, Stieber will tell you about his secret menu of “Fun Things.”

“The meat farmers I’ve worked with will sling me some organs,” he said by way of explanation. Our serving of blood sausage picked up that sweet spiciness that comes with aging, cannily echoed in the garnish of pickled blueberries. Fun!

By the way, on Thursdays there may even a speakeasy somewhere in the neighborhood where you can take your dinner and go find a drink. Just sayin’ …

———————-

Bad bar food starts to look enticing after a few drinks when you realize your choices are few. But good bar food? Ah, that catches your eye the moment you sit on a stool and crack the menu.

It seems that more and more watering holes throughout the city now break with the orthodoxy of burgers and brats and offer dishes that need washing down with a good pint of beer.

I had a perfect moment at Steinbeck’s Ale House in Decatur’s Oakhurst Village. Among the evening’s bar snacks were chicharrones — cubes of fried pork belly served Mexican style with sliced jalapeno and lime wedges. Salty, fatty, chewy, with that glassy layer of skin that threatens to break a tooth but then dissolves into porky goodness. Now, that’s what pork belly is for.

Chef Andy Gonzales has fans of his offbeat Asian-Mexican-Southern stylings. It’s the kind of food I don’t want to oversell because it’s sort of slipshod and not always quite thought out, but welcome in the moment. Kung pao brisket, fatty and spicy, arrives dumped over clumpy jasmine rice with fried peanuts and whole stems of cilantro. It tastes like smart drunk food.

You need to pay attention to the specials board, where you might luck into a soulful bowl of crowder peas. But sandwiches from the standing menu taste more like placeholders. Both the lamb burger and fried chicken sandwich (called the “Pimp Fil ‘Eh”) turn sloppy and moist in your hands and get discouraging.

But it’s bar food; I’ll get over it.

——————————

I don’t imagine a soul in Atlanta wants to revisit the pizza wars or hear another point-by-point comparison of crust and char. Besides, everyone knows who won: Giovanni di Palma and Antico Pizza Napoletana. Not only did this makeshift restaurant make di Palma hugely rich — the maestro behind a burgeoning Little Italy in Home Park — it still attracts nightly lines and national accolades.

I do enjoy both the pizza and the circus at Antico, but let me quietly note at the bottom of this article that the best pizza in Atlanta is, in fact, at Varasano’s.

The restaurant has calmed down since its opening. It feels less concerned with selling the brand of owner Jeffrey Varasano and more with the business of cooking a fine product.

The crust — thin, crispy, pliable, lightly soured, well salted — tastes good whether you’re folding it to cram in your mouth, cutting it with a knife and fork or picking at the leftover bits with your fingers. These pizzas are constructed with care and that certain finesse that makes the tomato sauce taste brighter and the cheese milkier. Add in a good salad, an acceptable glass of wine and — if you’re hungry — an order of tender meatballs in terrific tomato gravy.

I’m glad the pizza trend has passed. This pleasure is timeless.