Meet Monti Carlo: Food and Dining’s new senior editor
“My Atlanta food story doesn’t start with a meal. It starts in a hospital,” Monti Carlo, the new senior editor of the AJC’s Food and Dining section, writes.
In 1999, while Carlo was on her way to broadcasting school, a dump truck hit her car in Alpharetta. “I woke up from a coma two weeks later in the ICU at Northside Hospital with 19 broken ribs, a punctured lung and cracked bones in my neck,” Carlo recalls. “My Toyota Tercel looked like a street taco folded in half by a drunk with fat fingers. The paramedics had to cut me out with the Jaws of Life.
“I couldn’t return to waiting tables at Stoney River Steakhouse and Grill in Roswell. A server hobbling across a dining room is never a good look. So my manager moved me into the kitchen as garde manger, the kitchen station responsible for cold dishes.”
Carlo says that as she sat on a wooden stool making salads and desserts, “popping Aleve like M&M’s,” she learned the rhythm of the line: “Pans clanging, cooks leaning into one another, the quiet urgency and odd intimacy of feeding people you’ll never meet.
“That back-of-house dance changed me. It gave me a deep appreciation for the obsessive labor behind even the simplest dishes.”
🔎 Read Carlo’s full column, including how the AJC saved her mother’s restaurant and brought her home
