3060 Peachtree Road, Atlanta. 404-477-3500.
When Ford Fry opens a new restaurant, you can never quite be sure what to expect. His friendly Southern farm-to-table stylings at JCT. Kitchen & Bar hardly prepared fans for the gourmet-minded pizzas and pastas of No. 246, nor for the unlikely but winning fish-camp swank of the Optimist.
Yet, if there’s one theme that runs through his restaurants, it’s a kind of nostalgia. JCT pays tribute to the freight trains that rumble past its doors to capture the spirit of a historic depot bar. No. 246 — set on Decatur’s prettiest downtown block — refers not, as many assume, to the restaurant’s address but rather the plot number from the town’s first land survey. The Optimist was named for the kind of dinghy Fry took out as a kid at the beach.
This yearning for the past helps explain the enigmatic but appealing stylings of King + Duke, Fry’s latest restaurant, which opened in May at the prominent Buckhead corner long occupied by Nava. Its components include a clothbound drinks list stuffed with a surfeit of obscure literary references, an open-air dining space set under striped canvas awnings that makes you feel like you landed in the Hamptons, and a front bar designed to look like someone’s expansive home library.
But the focal point is a massive open hearth fueled by crackling firewood and hardwood charcoal. The signature item to come off this grill is a Mini Cooper-sized ribeye steak for two (priced out at $75) that arrives heaped on a wooden board with a pair of split marrow bones. This is the King, and the only appropriate response to its arrival is a hearty grunt.
You can try and find the narrative thread here, or just ask Fry.
“So many restaurants are doing modernist cooking these days,” he said when asked how all these pieces fit for King + Duke. “I thought it would be fun to take a step backward — like back in Colonial times when you had those hearth kitchens in the basement and the women were down there in their bonnets, cooking in the fireplace.”
So Fry began with that grill — a 24-foot-long behemoth fired by constant infusions of wood and charcoal and set with four Wonka-esque crankshafts that raise and lower the broiling hunks of flesh toward and away from the fire. He then built the restaurant around it.
The design firm, Meyer Davis Studio, came up with the library theme — a home to go with the hearth. Shelves of books not only set the stage but gave Fry the idea for this restaurant’s name. The King and Duke are the two grifters whom Huck and Tom invite on their raft in Mark Twain’s “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.” It seemed fitting to Fry, who considers himself a parvenu from the funkier climes of Midtown making his first big statement in Buckhead.
Bar director Lara Creasy went even further with the book theme and larded the menu with quotes and references. Before the meal’s finished, you’ll surely pull out your iPhone to figure out that the quote that accompanies your gin cocktail belongs to Robert Louis Stevenson.
All this explication makes the restaurant sound more like 10th grade English and less like the party it is. You can read the SparkNotes later; for now, you’ve got an extremely interesting menu to explore. Fry and executive chef Joseph Schafer offer all kinds of shareable bites, appetizers, entrees big and small, and side vegetables that sound too compelling to ignore.
“Crispy, sticky, smoky wings” make good on all the adjectives and get the meal started right. When you eat with your fingers, you quickly relax.
You might follow those wings with buttermilk-fried quail perched over a romesco sauce, or grilled rusks of bread heaped with warm, buttered crabmeat, chilies and radish. Wood-roasted carrots (this year’s kale salad) come outfitted with roasted beets, a spicy harissa sauce and a stick of creamy sheep’s milk feta.
Therein lie the sneaky smarts of this menu: It seems timeless but pays heed to trends, and culinary finesse sneaks into the “primitive” cooking methods. The Mississippi rabbit — furred game you practically expect to see hanging in the larder as part of the set decoration — arrives on the plate as a confit leg, pancetta-wrapped loin, fat sausage, and toast spread with liver parfait. The seasoning on ours needed a dialing down (the kitchen likes salt), but the presentation came as an unexpected delight.
Other entrees include a whole pastured chicken for two served with a bread salad; the Duke, a house-ground hamburger; and “Boy Scout style” trout, which means that the Boy Scouts of America have decided this trout can swim any which way it wants. No, actually, it means that it’s roasted whole over fire.
Vegetarians and flexitarians will love the crock of roasted ratatouille outfitted with blobs of melting mozzarella and a soft-cooked egg. You might consider getting one for the table.
As at the Optimist, the side dishes are anything but ordinary. The crispy torn potato salad with scallions, crème fraîche and egg tastes like a million calories of love. Other choices include soft polenta with roasted mushrooms and duck jus, and coal-roasted artichokes with anchovy aïoli.
Chrysta Poulos, the talented former pastry chef at 4th & Swift and Woodfire Grill, has brought her mind-blowing sticky toffee cake to the party, which she now serves with a stout ice cream. A Black Forest cake arrives deconstructed and splayed out over a board as desserts tend to be these days — half moons of cake with cookie dust, cherries and peppery ice cream. I know King + Duke is a Colonial-era themed restaurant, but when it comes to dessert, Reconstruction sounds like a good idea.
About the Author
