One Midtown Kitchen: 559 Dutch Valley Road, Atlanta. 404-892-4111, onemidtownkitchen.com.
Cafe Lapin: 2341 Peachtree Road, Atlanta. 404-812-9171.
T. Mac Sports Grill: 240 W. Ponce De Leon Ave, Decatur. 404-378-4140, tacomac.com.
When we visited One Midtown Kitchen (first time in years) we had a waitress in training. You know the scenario: The trainee conducts the order, while the trainer hovers nearby, hands clasped behind her back, ready to respond to any situation that might arise.
Our trainee did well — showed her personality, made us feel welcome, and got her money line delivered for a clean sell.
“I like to start each table with an order of our calamari, which comes in a wonderful sweet and spicy glaze.”
“I want the calamari,” responded my 16-year-old dining companion, who was had at hello. Sweet, spicy, fried: done deal.
The kid looked crestfallen when her dish arrived. “That’s not calamari,” she said, eyeing the strips of breaded cuttlefish steak with contempt. Kids, these days! They want tentacles. I ended up eating most of it — innocuous stuff, like strips of sweet-and-spicy foam mattress.
I recognized this dish for what it was — the menu mainstay. The item that has been a house specialty since the day the restaurant opened and would occasion massive rioting if it ever came off the menu. It’s the veal meatloaf at Buckhead Diner, the crab fritter at Bacchanalia, the peanut butter-banana cream pie at Rathbun’s.
The last update to the calamari happened when then-chef Richard Blais placed a swipe of smoked mayonnaise along the side of the bowl, long before “Top” met “Chef.”
I called One Midtown Kitchen’s current chef, Nick Oltarsh, to see if he’s ever tried to take the calamari strips off.
“My sous chef has tried,” he laughed, “but you know what? It’s popular and people like it. This business is all about making people happy.”
Oltarsh occasionally offers wood-grilled fresh calamari with pork belly or chorizo as an appetizer special, which is much more in line with his own style of Mediterranean-influenced bistro cooking. Perhaps he also just wants to show people that, yes, he does know from calamari.
If you want to taste a more Oltarshian seafood dish, try his delicious seared sea scallops with lentils, fennel and baby carrots in a saffron-kissed fish broth. He changes the menu frequently, and when I asked him about his braised rabbit leg over pink Madagascar rice with rabbit sausage in a grain mustard sauce, he laughed again. “You must have been in two weeks ago. The rabbit changes a lot.”
Further incentive to go back. With this guy running things, it won’t be years before my next visit.
————
Usually I’m not a fan of restaurants with elaborate displays of stuffed bunnies in the window, but I’ll make an exception for Cafe Lapin. This restaurant in the Peachtree Battle Shopping Center attracts a healthy crowd of women in large groups and well-dressed older couples for platters of pulled chicken salad.
The salad comes in a variety of flavors, from curry to tarragon, along with a house salad dressed in a sugar shock-sweet balsamic dressing. If you pay a small surcharge you also get a slice of banana bread and a “mandarin orange soufflé” — one of the last, true congealed salads in town. Creamy and wiggly, it’s kind of irresistible. One bite and I felt like I was 7 again, when the congealed salad was the only upside to the horror of lunch with my mother and her friends at the Lord & Taylor cafe.
After a meal like this you might just look at the dessert display set up in front the kitchen and snort in derision. You’d be making a mistake. The desserts are the real story here.
Both the chocolate and caramel cakes have a soft, soft crumb and little flecks of vanilla bean seed in the batter. The light, creamy caramel frosting definitely dates to the era before caramel met salt. The chocolate has a richer flavor than your typical cocoa frosting, with a bittersweet edge that works well alongside the tender cake.
The cookies we tried were fantastic. A sugar cookie came with a tart, true lemon-juice glaze, while an oatmeal cookie looked sleek and shiny and broke open to reveal hollow crags studded with chocolate chips, nuts and dried cranberries. I’m guessing a little meringue figured into the recipe.
If you like classic desserts done right and want to sample that hilarious orange orb of mandarin soufflé, then you should go.
—————-
How do you rethink a sports bar? Well, for starters, you don’t mess with the TVs. At the newly relaunched T. Mac Sports Grill in Decatur — a prototype for the next generation of Taco Mac — the flat screens blare dutifully. Even the new, semi-enclosed patio that opens to West Ponce de Leon Avenue has as many screens as tables.
Local design firm ai3 instead chose to sneak some of their ideas into the kinds of details you might not notice at first. The terrazzo bar and communal table tops contain remnants of glittery beer glass, while the pipes curving along the ceiling are overhead beer lines, there to ferry some of the 100 draft brews (an expanded selection) to their taps.
The menu smartly doesn’t veer too far from the sports-bar standard. There’s no young hotshot in the kitchen reinventing the Scotch egg or offering a special of chicken confit with bleu cheese foam. I like the gringo nachos here, with their cuminy black beans and fistfuls of chopped iceberg lettuce. The kitchen keeps things light and fairly greaseless, offering salsa and sour cream on the side if you need your nachos messier.
The famous wings are good enough, I suppose. Our platter of 20 was heavier on flats than drummettes (boo) and a little less crisp-edged than I like. But the meat tears off with the right mix of yielding tenderness and chew, and the bone never reveals an unappetizing flash of pink. Get the Three Mile Island sauce and tell your kids what it means. When wings come with a history lesson, that’s almost better than celery.
