In this age of drive-by online dining reviews, the Association of Food Journalists decided to publish guidelines for fair, unbiased dining criticism on its website. These truths are self-evident, but they bear repeating:
Restaurant critics shouldn’t announce their arrival or accept free food. Critics should visit a restaurant multiple times and order a variety of dishes and to test the menu. They should sample both exceptional and terrible dishes more than once to make sure their initial assessment holds. They should also give a restaurant time to work out opening kinks before making critical assessments. This last one is important, as first impressions tend to stick. (After all, there are such things in this world as ugly babies, though no one tells the mother so. You wait till it’s a toddler.)
These are precisely the guidelines we follow when we write starred reviews at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. But is all food writing formal reviewing?
I currently find myself in the midst of a project for our ajc.com blog, Food & More with John Kessler, that sidesteps some of these guiding principles. It’s called 30 Restaurants in 30 Days, and every morning I dish up a fresh visit to an area eatery.
Sure, I’m not announcing my arrival or accepting freebies. But I’m visiting each restaurant just once. Instead of covering the menu, I’m ordering whatever appeals — usually a dish that looks like a house specialty. My reports may be critical in the manner of a Yelp review, but they’re not full-on critical assessments. I’m not saying a restaurant is good or bad, if it’s still evolving or starting to get tired. I’m downloading one experience, one impression.
Since I’m less worried about trying enough food to reach a fair conclusion, I’ve been more attuned to how well different restaurants click.
Click?
Some seem to get the big picture, when the whole food-service-atmosphere-noise-lighting-price thing is all of a thematic piece. It’s not a question of where these restaurants land on the star-rating scale, it’s how well they work. They make a kind of intrinsic sense, and you know it. They somehow matter.
Here are three places that illustrate my point:
Kiosco Colombian Restaurant
The few other Colombian spots that have opened in Atlanta have favored multi-culti strip malls filled with other South American shops, salons and cafes. Kiosco opened on the south side of Marietta Square in 2004 in a cheerful little room with country wooden furniture and a mixture of oil paintings and framed posters on the walls. I’m not sure if Mariettans at large knew what to make of it at first; I recall it being nice enough and kind of empty when I visited.
But Kiosco played the long game. It plugged along quietly and let people learn that Colombian food is … well, what exactly?
Simply seasoned cuts of meat served with rice and beans, to start. Nobody (except perhaps a vegan) would have any complaints about the bandeja paisa, Colombia’s national dish, rendered here as a peppery minute steak outfitted with two plump chorizo sausages, chicharrones of crisp-fried pork belly, a cornmeal arepa, a quarter avocado and a fried egg with rice and beans.
If someone needs a daintier plate of food, there’s a fillet of salmon with mango sauce that communicates an ideal of tropical dining. I enjoy the dry-fleshed but gorgeously crisp-skinned half chicken that had been roasted then fried to a crackle. Do I need more than a taste of the sugary raspberry sauce on the side? Nooooo …
Owners Juan Carlos and Milena Delgado and their staff really know how to work the small room, talking up the food and making sure that the parties that invariably end up at the communal table in the corner acknowledge each other.
48 Powder Springs St., Marietta. 678-337-7999, kioscocolombianrestaurant.com.
The Butcher the Baker:
While Kiosco took a while to get its mojo working, The Butcher the Baker on the other side of Marietta Square has “instant hit” written all over it.
This months-old venue replaces the former Simpatico with a country-cool look that uses unfinished wood, Mason jars, soft golden lighting and an antique drinks fridge to place things clearly in Southern farm-to-table territory.
Married owners Micah (the butcher) and Katie (the baker) Pfister get their produce from the Marietta Farmers Market, according our waiter. Everything is made from scratch, from the baker’s bun croutons garnishing the heirloom tomato salad to the blueberry mostarda set over crunchy little nuggets of sweetbreads.
The restaurant critic wants to dutifully note that the plugs of house-made bologna were grainy and (yikes) a bit raw in the center, and that unripe melon cubes, no matter how local, should not prop up curls of pickled shrimp. Boiled green peanut hummus, clever as it is, shouldn’t be so salty that it leaves you gasping for water.
But you know what? Click that. This restaurant is rocking.
Marietta Square has been about its antiques stores for too long. There’s a latent hipster personality waiting to emerge in this diverse burg. People here thrill to the strong, funky bourbon cocktails that the bar pours at The Butcher the Baker. They’re lucky to have Katie Pfister’s buttery, warm bread and her terrific cane syrup pudding with braised figs. They won’t go wrong with Micah Pfister’s seared duck breast with caraway-flecked cabbage, piquant cherries and a brilliant cornbread puree that bridges German and Southern flavors.
The energy in this room is palpable, and I don’t mean in a shrieky bar-scene way, but in a Marietta’s-where-it’s-happening way. This is where interesting folks come out to play, and their feedback will make this restaurant get better by the day.
25 North Park Square, Marietta. 678-224-1599, eatlocaleatbetter.com.
South City Kitchen
True admission time. I’ve only been to South City Kitchen a few times since I’ve lived in Atlanta. On one of those visits I was dining with celebrity chef Todd English when he was in town. He pulled a picture of his then-wife, a bodybuilder, out of his wallet to show to me. I missed the handoff and dropped it in a plate of bread pudding with custard sauce. Awkward!
Aside from that memory, I have two reasons why I’m never keen on going back. One, that restaurant is so frenetic and noisy that I always feel like I have to meditate in a quiet room after dining there. Two, it has always struck me as fine; not horrible, not memorable, but decent. There are much better places to sample modern Southern fare in this town, such as Empire State South and Miller Union. Right?
Yet SCK remains perpetually packed and ever in the news. Visiting celebrities never tire of this restaurant, as my colleague Jennifer Brett will tell you. When I try to secure same-day reservations on a weekday, I get the dreaded 5:30 p.m. or 8:30 p.m. choice.
I figure we can just walk in at lunch if we go early. How wrong I am.
But as my friend and I sat at the bar and watched the chef garnish plates in the cramped space behind it, I could see just how smoothly this place runs. The hostess came and got us after precisely the 20 minutes she had promised and took us to a table in the small front room. The waiter appeared in a flash to take drink orders. It is a rare pleasure for diners when servers hustle without breaking a sweat. You’re a part of this complicated machinery, somehow vested.
We liked the bread basket filled with warm biscuits and cornbread — not the best, not the worst. We heartily enjoyed this kitchen’s Platonic ideal of a BLT, made with smoky bacon, heirloom tomatoes and basil mayo on toasted bread that had the softly yielding consistency of brioche. We kind of hated a “Southern-style banh mi” — a tortured rendition of the Vietnamese sandwich made with sweet-sauce barbecued pulled chicken.
But we loved the click, the energy, that high-wattage urban mixture of anonymity and attention. I can see why the celebrities come here.
1144 Crescent Ave., Atlanta. 404-873-7358, southcitykitchen.com/midtown.
