Restaurants

Hugo’s Oyster Bar, a new concept from C&S Seafood & Oyster Bar’s Rich Clark and chef Jon Schwenk, opens Saturday in Roswell. The restaurant will serve only seafood indigenous to Southern waters, from the Carolinas to New Orleans, with the exception of oysters, which will come from the Northeast due to the high quality there.

Pizza places are often casual, kid-friendly and varied enough to please just about everyone—making them an easy neighborhood hangout. In that vein it makes sense that Ron Eyester, a chef and restaurateur known for Morningside gathering spots Rosebud and the Family Dog, would choose pizza for his next venture, Timone’s.

Yesterday, national food gossip blog The Braiser released a list: "The Top 10 Chefs You Need To Know In Atlanta." Hopefully no one is confusing a blogger phoning it in from New York for a critic that actually has first hand experience with the chefs and city in question, but it is useful, I suppose, for seeing how Atlanta is perceived from the outside. So, here's the list that the Braiser cooked up:

Mihoko Obunai, a chef who came to local prominence after opening the now-defunct Repast with then-husband Joe Truex, will begin making ramen at So Ba in East Atlanta the second week in September. Obunai's most recent gig was a short-lived stint as executive chef at Joli Kobe Bakery & Cafe.

Watershed on Peachtree opened at the end of May. Why did I wait so long to review it? I wanted to give the restaurant time to properly settle. We ran a re-review of Watershed in Decatur in February 2011, when the menu transition between new executive chef Joe Truex and his predecessor, Scott Peacock, still felt schizophrenic. And a lunch after Watershed on Peacthree first opened in Buckhead didn’t wow (messy, jumbled vegetable plate; crabby shrimp burger with the squidgy texture of overcooked egg whites). I decided to give it some time, and I’m glad I did. Now that the kitchen has found its rhythms, Truex’s unorthodox but smart approach to Southern cooking has synchronized—the food bounces between tradition and modernism but the quality is consistent.

Here’s a number to consider: Ten million people work in the United States restaurant industry. That’s one in ten of us. Now, more than ever, Americans are dining out, usually without knowing tipped workers earn a minimum wage of only $2.13 per hour in most states, including Georgia. Author and activist Saru Jayaraman wants diners to know the real cost of such low wages.