I went to Tap with Roger for our first weekly Atlanta dinner. It’s one of those brewery-restaurant combinations that tries to cool things up with decor and fancy-sounding entrees. The beer list is extensive but only one is actually brewed by the restaurant. There isn’t much selection when it comes to entrees - there are more appetizers than anything else. For starters, I had decent Lebanese-style lamb meatballs and a forgettable spring roll. My main dish was really strange - it was a few scallops in this strange broth infused with artichoke and potato. Definitely not what I expected and it tasted more like a novice chef’s experiment than anything good. My waiter insisted there was pistachio in it, which doesn’t make any sense. Roger had a pretty crummy-looking burger that was ruined when he dumped the chocolate ice cream meant for the fries on top of it. The fries weren’t very good either - more fried than potato. Not recommended.
I went to this joint on Wednesday with a bunch of people from work and it was packed. The main draw is the scantily clad but mostly gorgeous waitresses (the non-gorgeous ones can be classified as hot so it’s not like there are any duds). Unfortunately, our table of all guys was attended by another guy, which makes strange business sense. I had a chili bacon burger and it was pretty decent. The rest of the orders seemed pretty standard - nothing excellent but nothing terrible, either. After dinner, we moved to the bar area and, as mentioned, it was packed, despite what might have been the worst music act I’ve heard in a long time. Some dude with a keyboard was singing over programmed beats and melodies. Not cool. Conclusion: it’s like a Hooters with better food and better waitresses.
Recommended by a co-worker, we headed to this place that’s supposedly the best Chinese in Atlanta. We narrowly averted disaster when I noticed the Sweet-and-Sour soup had beef in it and alerted my Indian friend before he committed an act of unforgivable sin. I ordered Hunan Chicken - my standard - and it was good. But, honestly, I’ve had better, including the one at Asian Express in Charlottesville. I don’t think anyone was overly impressed by the place but it was a good lunch place.
This was my favorite place in Atlanta a few months back when I came to the Dirty South for a couple weeks. I was interested to see how it held up when I came back after a few months in New Jersey, which has excellent Indian food. My conclusion is thus: for an Indian lunch buffet, it’s a solid-to-great choice. The non-vegetarian options are much stronger than the vegetarian options, which is strange and seemed to displease my vegetarian Indian co-worker. In my mind, the buffet is made by the amazing Butter Chicken and number of options. A great lunch choice in the Northwest Atlanta area.
I went to this South African place with Roger for the second in our weekly series. I’d only had South African once before in Charlottesville and I liked it. This place seems a bit more adventurous with the various flavors of South Africa. The service is a little stilted and the waitress was a little slow but the food was worth it. As an appetizer, I had South African sausage and it was good but standard. My main dish was chicken curry. It certainly was not the standard kind as the curry flavor was muted, the heat was notched up a little and the sweet was an important flavor. There were bananas in it! I really enjoyed it. Roger had some weird shepherd’s pie looking thing which he said was pretty good. The problem was that the place was kind of dim. I suppose they’re trying to make the joint a romantic place but it just made me unable to see the food very well. Pricey as far as Atlanta is concerned but worth checking out.
I first went to Sweetwater when I accidentally put its address into my GPS instead of Tavern. I didn’t go in because it closes early - last call is before 7:30. It isn’t really a bar or an eatery or anything like that. As its name implies, it’s a brewery and that’s that. You go in, you buy a glass - which you can keep - they give you six tickets and you try beer. The beer is actually all very good and I’m not a huge beer fan. There’s the 420, the regular type of beer that definitely distances itself from the crowd. The Happy Endings is a great dark and alcoholic (I had two at my hotel the night before and I was pretty tipsy). Then there’s a blueberry ale which is delicious. There’s a beer garden for socializing and I’m told that in the summer toward the weekend it gets packed. We went on a beautiful Wednesday afternoon but there weren’t as many people. Probably because it was Wednesday. Despite its random location, it’s worth checking out.\
I went here with co-workers after knocking back a few at Sweetwater’s. Mali is a Thai place in a random place which I couldn’t find if you had a couple guns to my head. There was a hubbub at the table next to us where two girls seemed freaked out by something. Our guess was vermin but the girls stuck around at the bar and kept their food so it was probably something else. As far as the food was concerned, we started with fried tuna roll, which was good, I had a ho-hum Tom Yum Soup, and there was also veggie tempura, which I can’t remember. For main dish, I had my Thai standard of beef and basil and I enjoyed it. I think the best Thai I’ve had is Thai 54 on Columbia Pike in Arlington, Virginia. This one doesn’t come close but it certainly beats a lot of other places I’ve been. It’s a solid Thai place but probably not worth going to if you’re not in its immediate vicinity like we were.
I was craving some sushi so I looked up some top ten lists and MF Sushi was listed as tops in Atlanta. It was within walking distance of my hotel in downtown Atlanta so after a quick workout I made my way over. I’m never walking in Atlanta again. It was a beautiful night, I walked past some nice apartments and there were plenty of good-looking restaurants along the way, but I was basically the only person walking except for some psychos. Anyway, I walk into this place, and it’s steamy as shit and smells like one of those towels they give you before you order. If I had beaucoup money or an unlimited expense account, I’d walk up to the sushi chef and tell him to give me what wants. But since I don’t, I do the next best thing and order the sashimi combination, which, in my opinion, gives a fairly good representation of the quality of the place. Well, it was okay at best. They ruined my favorite sashimi - salmon - by giving it a smoked or salty kind of treatment. Why would you do that to salmon? Overall, I would say that while it’s decent sushi, the place is way overpriced for its quality. You can find twice as good sushi for the same price - in New York!
When it rains it floods. The day after MF Sushi, I went to another sushi place for lunch. This was definitely not a fancy place. There was a buffet, which didn’t look too good, and tons of options for cheap, which is always a little disconcerting for sushi. I mean, you don’t want it to be too cheap: doesn’t say much about the quality of the raw fish. In any case, I went with the Salmon Quartet, which was four mounds of salmon prepared in different ways. There was regular sashimi, a slightly seared offering, cooked and raw mixed with capers and onions, and sashimi with aioli. They were all surprisingly good and the cucumbers on the plate worked much better than ginger. One co-worker had the buffet and he said it satisfied his simple tastes. Another had the Tuna Symphony, which was like mine except with tuna. Very good price for the amount of food. Good sushi place for lunch. I think there a number of locations throughout Atlanta.
Later that night, I overdosed on seafood by hitting up this Hawaiian fusion place with Roger. Things didn’t start too well when I had to give me car to valet parking and the guy driving literally ten meters to park my car. The menu is a little intimidating because there are so many choices and most of the stuff isn’t fish you’ve heard of. I ended up getting Roy’s combo. Despite sounding like something you’d get at family restaurant in Lynchburg (what a weird name for a town, by the way), it was pretty fancy and good. There was salmon with ponzu sauce, butterfish, and seared tuna. The butterfish was really quite good, living up to its name. The salmon was good, though the sauce was a little tart. The tuna was mediocre. Maybe I was just sick of raw fish by that point. The main problem I had was that the portions were super small. Roger had a fancy swordfish-type fish but wasn’t impressed. Why would you get swordfish? I mean, nine times out of ten it’s going to be overcooked or just not good. His co-worker who tagged along got some fancy sushi. I tried a spicy tuna looking thing but it wasn’t great. My conclusion: it’s pretty pricey but it’s a different sort of place. If I had a bigger expense account, I’d come back and try different things.
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