ATLANTA — Atlanta has long been considered the capital of the New South. It boasts the world’s busiest airport and 16 Fortune 500 companies. It is a black entertainment mecca. So many movies are shot here that people call it Y’allywood.
Getting traction as a great restaurant city has been harder. It has been tough to compete with neighbors like Charleston, South Carolina, New Orleans or that sexy food upstart, Nashville. As a national food contender, Atlanta never had the culinary firepower or customer base of New York, Los Angeles or Chicago. Diners made do with a parade of meals at local or national chains, punctuated by the occasional steak in a pretty room.
But now, as the nation’s infatuation with Southern food matures and Atlanta’s recession-battered economy recovers, a city that often looked over its shoulder for culinary validation and inspiration is coming into its own.
Over the last couple of years, a record number of new and independent restaurants have opened. Especially in the urban core — what people here call intown Atlanta — veteran chefs and newcomers alike have taken advantage of cheap rents and a growing cadre of good line cooks who don’t feel the need to prove themselves in bigger ponds.
“Up until five years ago, it kind of wanted to be Dallas,” said Hugh Acheson, whose Empire State South helped define a new breed of progressive Southern cooking when it opened here in 2010. “The really popular restaurants were all valet and neon signs and kind of nightclubby.”
Now, eaters grin at one another across dishes of spicy pork confit or kimchee curd with Ethiopian kale, cross their fingers and talk about their good fortune.
“It’s hard to even make a decision about where you want to go,” said Anne Quatrano, whose restaurant Bacchanalia opened in 1993 and was one of the first to make use of the region’s agricultural offerings in an elegant new American style.
People here call Quatrano the godmother of modern Atlanta food because so many chefs have come from her kitchens. It was through her that Scott Peacock, who cared for chef and author Edna Lewis in the last years of her life, got a job in 1998 in the kitchen at Watershed in Decatur, Georgia, a restaurant in a former gas station that helped the rest of the country see Southern cooking through a new lens. Steven Satterfield, a seasonally inspired chef who celebrates Southern vegetables at his restaurant Miller Union, came from the same kitchen.
In this new wave of Atlanta dining, originality and technique have joined a reverence for simplicity and Southern ingredients. At Gunshow, which Kevin Gillespie opened in 2013, food comes to the table in rapid-fire, dim sum style. Smoked Carolina gold rice might become risotto accented with figs and sunchokes. Uni ends up paired with buttered turnips and salsa verde.
Still, Gillespie never strays too far from the South. Last year, he opened the homey Revival in a clapboard house in Decatur as homage to his North Georgia roots. His menu is loaded with cast-iron cornbread, fatback-fried Silver Queen corn and catfish smothered in tomato gravy.
Perhaps the borders of Atlanta dining have been pushed furthest at Staplehouse in the Old 4th Ward, not far from the childhood home of Martin Luther King Jr. In a glittering, narrow room carved from a century-old building, chef Ryan Smith creates precise tasting menus and à la carte dishes that may include a snack of flash-fried beef tendons and courses built from scallops, preserved maitake mushrooms and baby collard greens or charred turnips tossed with ‘nduja vinaigrette and wheat berries. Don’t forget to ask for a warm, fermented potato roll.
The restaurant’s profits go to the Giving Kitchen. The organization provides emergency assistance for Atlanta hospitality workers. It started after chef Ryan Hidinger, who, with his wife, Jen, ran a popular supper club from their home, was diagnosed with late-stage gall bladder cancer. He died in 2014. The way the city’s restaurant community pitched in to help his family inspired the charity, which has come to symbolize an ethos of support among many cooks here.
“All of the sudden you see this very intense communal sense of pride about being an Atlanta chef,” said Sean Brock, the Southern food revivalist behind Husk, which operates in Charleston and Nashville, and a cheerleader for Atlanta’s new restaurant rigor.
“If you make a list of the great restaurants and chefs in Atlanta and compare that to the list of any other city in the South, and even beyond the South, you’ll see quickly that it’s happening,” he said.
Brock likes it here so much that last fall he opened an outpost of Minero, his Charleston taqueria, inside the Ponce City Market, a mammoth food and shopping complex built in the brick complex that used to house Sears, Roebuck & Co. Jamestown, the outfit that created New York’s Chelsea Market, developed the project.
Its two dozen food shops and restaurants is a who’s who of Atlanta restaurants. Jonathan Waxman, the California cuisine pioneer, opened an Italian restaurant called Brezza Cucina there, featuring his beloved Barbuto roast chicken.
Adam Evans, a favorite local chef, runs the kitchen. That’s important in a city that has never liked carpetbaggers. Several big-name chefs — Emeril Lagasse, Tom Colicchio and Jean-Georges Vongerichten — have all opened and closed restaurants in Atlanta over the years.
“They didn’t give the hug,” Acheson said. “The hug — the table touch — is an important thing in the South.”
“It’s a difficult town for an outsider,” said Guenter Seeger, considered one of the city’s most skilled chefs until he left in 2008 at the height of the recession. Seeger, who plans to open a restaurant in the meatpacking district in New York in April, calls what’s happening in Atlanta “a food revolution.”
To be sure, Atlanta is still facing challenges. Managers at top-flight restaurants complain that they still sell more steaks than they’d like to. And like Scarlett O’Hara in “Gone With the Wind,” diners can place appearances ahead of everything else.
“It’s more inventive visually than it is gastronomically,” said Corby Kummer, the Boston-based food writer and restaurant critic for Boston Magazine who took on a side job as the restaurant critic for Atlanta Magazine while his spouse is stationed at the Centers for Disease Control, which is headquartered here.
When it comes to creating visual playgrounds for diners, Atlanta’s king is Ford Fry, who opened four restaurants in the city last year. His latest is BeetleCat in Inman Park, a little sister to the Optimist, the sophisticated seafood restaurant that Esquire named the nation’s best new restaurant in 2012.
Some diners worry that Atlanta has still not shaken off its penchant for chasing trends or stuffing fancy versions of pimento cheese into Mason jars and making hummus out of peanuts.
“We still need a few more years to be Atlanta and not be everyone else,” said Tami Cook, a culinary producer and recipe developer who used to work for Alton Brown (who also lives in the Atlanta area) and works as a food stylist and cook.
The city’s divisions — cultural, geographical and even racial — remain a challenge, too. It takes a long time to get around, and most of the metropolitan area’s 5.5 million residents live outside the city limits. Even the drive to Decatur, a small city one might call Atlanta’s gastronomic equivalent of Berkeley or Brooklyn, can seem too long.
Most of the restaurants selling food from South Korea, Vietnam, Mexico and other countries remain concentrated on the Buford Highway, a busy road that stretches north from the city into the dense suburbs. And the city’s star chefs remain mostly white men.
“Atlanta has a lot of things that make it not an easy story line,” said Linton Hopkins, who with his wife, Gina, opened the local food stalwart Restaurant Eugene 11 years ago. His newest venture, however, will be a steakhouse. He plans to open it near the new Atlanta Braves stadium, scheduled to open in 2017 north of the city in Cobb County.
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