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July 2011

Steve Fennessy
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July 2011

Thirty years ago this summer, the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta published a brief account of five young men in the Los Angeles area who had been hospitalized for pneumonia. Two had died. It is widely acknowledged that this report—just a few hundred words long in a weekly CDC newsletter—was the first time scientists had identified AIDS, a term that wouldn’t be coined for another year. Since 1981 the disease has killed 594,496 Americans—almost one and a half times the population of the city of Atlanta.

When I went away to college in 1989, the AIDS scare was at its peak. Signs on campus urged free and confidential testing. Others warned that there was no such thing as “safe” sex, not with a disease that didn’t seem to discriminate. The signs declaring that the disease was divine retribution got defaced pretty quickly. Still, by the time Magic Johnson announced in 1991 that he was HIV-positive, the message was clear: Gay, straight, it didn’t matter—to have sex was to play Russian roulette.

What a difference a couple of decades makes. If the pendulum of public awareness edged dangerously close to paranoia twenty years ago, it’s now swung back into complacency today. To the generation that’s come of age in the twenty-first century, AIDS may seem almost invisible. HIV is an infection that medicine can manage, right? Look at Magic Johnson. It’s been twenty years, and he’s still around. How bad can the infection be?

In this month’s edition, writer at large Justin Heckert spent time with a woman named Marianne Swanson, whose history with the disease is both professional and deeply personal. She can tell you that the disease has not gone anywhere in this new century. It is very much here. It is in Fulton County, where 5,629 new cases of HIV were reported between 2000 and 2008. It is in DeKalb County, where 3,269 new cases were reported in the same period. According to the CDC, one in sixteen black men will be diagnosed with HIV sometime in their life. Equally alarming? The CDC figures that one out of every five people in America who are HIV-positive don’t even know it.

No, HIV has not gone anywhere. For people like Marianne Swanson, it will always be here. Her story is one of hope and love, but also one of reality.

Steve Fennessy is our editor.
Learn more about him | Contact him

June 2011

Steve Fennessy
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June 2011
My first neighborhood in Atlanta wasn’t really a neighborhood at all. It was a gated apartment complex in Buckhead, with a gurgling fountain in the courtyard outside our window and walls so thin you could hold a conversation through them. This was in 2000, before the cheesy bars that defined Buckhead in the late twentieth century were replaced by a massive hole in the ground that is the stalled Streets of Buckhead. Back then the apartment complexes in that part of town were filled with people in their twenties, sunning themselves by their figure-eight pools in the day and pickling their livers at night. I remember my wife and I were once awoken by a drunk woman in the courtyard, trying to break up a fight between two would-be suitors. “I love you both!” she sobbed. I wish I were kidding. Not much later, we broke our lease.
For the next seven years, we lived in Inman Park, a place that hewed a bit closer to my idea of what a neighborhood should be—gorgeous old houses, walkable, close to Downtown. Of course it was also expensive, which is why we rented.
There are many arguments for homeowning—you can save on taxes, you can tear down a wall, you have something that’s yours—but the one I’ve found most compelling since my wife and I bought our house two years ago is that homeowning is a constant reminder that your fortunes are tied to your neighbors’. When we were renting, we didn’t have to bother with going to neighborhood association meetings or monitoring the message boards or planting flowers in the median. We were customers, basically. Short-timers.
We carried that same attitude to our new neighborhood when we bought our house. We didn’t make the rounds to our new neighbors, and we didn’t invite them over for burgers on the back deck. We always said we intended to, but we just never got around to it. But then one night, a few months after we moved in, an electrical fire in the ceiling above our kitchen brought two fire trucks screaming down our street to our front yard. While we waited anxiously outside, the neighbors started gathering. Did we need a place to stay? The number of an electrician? A carpenter? Is there anything we can do? When your house is close to going up in flames, it’s incredibly reassuring to know that people are so eager to help. And even if it was a weird way to meet the neighbors, I’m glad we finally did.
For this month’s cover package, we chose five neighborhoods that we feel embody the best of what a true neighborhood is. We wanted to incorporate both intown and suburban places, but we also wanted to capture the vast range of settings you find across Atlanta. So you have the industrial chic of Westside and the Mayberry feel of Acworth. One of the knocks against the metro Atlanta area is that it’s so sprawling, with no real focus. When it comes to neighborhoods, though, that variety is one of our true strengths. There’s something for everyone, and we’re here to help you find it.

Steve Fennessy is our editor.
Learn more about him | Contact him

May 2011

Steve Fennessy
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May 2011
When we started planning our fiftieth anniversary issue a year ago, we asked ourselves one question: “Do readers really care that we’re fifty years old?” The short answer is “No.” The longer answer went something like, “Maybe not, but they do care about this wacky and wonderful place they call home.” With that premise in mind, we set to work on a simple idea: Write about the city’s most influential people from the last half century. Which sounds easy—until you actually have to do things like define influence, for example, or cut people such as Clark Howard from your list. (Sorry, Clark.) We wanted the list to do two—at times contradictory—things: be authoritative, but also surprising. So yes, MLK is on the list, but so is Bill Lucas, a name you may never have heard of. You’ll see why he made our list when you read former editor Lee Walburn’s piece on him. At the same time, the story of Atlanta isn’t just about influence. How, for example, do you sum up fifty years without mentioning Blondie? Or John Rocker? So we came up with even more lists.
 
A final note: Each new editor of Atlanta magazine becomes custodian of a set of bound volumes containing every issue of the magazine. In flipping through those thousands of pages, one truth emerges, and it’s that Atlantans love food. So it seems appropriate that we use this issue to debut our new Appetite section, giving even more coverage to the one thing we can all agree on: There’s nothing like a good meal.
 
Steve Fennessy is our editor.
Learn more about him | Contact him

April 2011

Steve Fennessy
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For the past few months, we’ve been asking our subscribers what they think of the magazine. Editors are a notoriously defensive and insecure bunch, and surveys like this can be unnerving. (What if they think the stories are too long? Too short? My God, what if they hate us?) But occasional polling is a valuable tool. Done right, it can capture the attitude readers have toward the magazine—when it hits the mark, when it doesn’t, and most importantly, if the magazine delivers on its promise to the reader. Because every magazine is making a promise, whether it’s stated or not. Vogue’s promise is different from Popular Mechanics’, which is different from Esquire’s. Atlanta magazine’s mission is simple: to illuminate the city for our readers, so they can better navigate and take advantage of this remarkable place.
 
When I get the survey results each month, I turn first to the comments section, where each subscriber is invited to sound off. In general, readers want more—more dining coverage (we’ll debut a new dining section next month), more hard-hitting stories (planning them now), and more focus on neighborhoods (stay tuned for our June issue). Because the survey is anonymous, I can’t respond directly to many of our readers’ points, so I figured I’d take a moment here to clarify a bit about how Atlanta magazine operates.
 
“Your best restaurant listing seems motivated by those who advertise with you,” one subscriber wrote. Aside from receiving tips on new restaurants and the like from folks on the business side of our magazine, there is zero connection between the restaurants that advertise with us and the ones we choose to review or to feature among our annual best new restaurants. That separation is essential to our credibility, which is why our reviewers dine anonymously, making reservations under fake names and paying their own way. You may disagree with their opinions, but you can be sure those opinions aren’t for sale.
 
“Too many ads,” another subscriber grumbled. Advertisements are the lifeblood of any magazine, and readers, for the most part, like them. For the past year, in advance of our fiftieth anniversary, we’ve been spending a lot of time looking through old copies of the magazine. Like the stories, the ads capture what the city was like at a moment in time—what it valued, what it aspired to, what it was thinking. Thanks to our advertisers, we can charge just $1 (and sometimes less) per issue for a subscription. In some cases, magazines spend more simply to mail a copy to a subscriber (never mind the cost of producing and printing it) than the subscriber pays for that entire issue.
 
It’s impossible to summarize the individual thoughts of the hundreds of readers we’ve heard from. Some, for example, love Hollis Gillespie. Others railed against her. Some couldn’t get enough of our cover story on pets. Other readers couldn’t care less. As with every magazine, not every element will appeal to every reader. Our goal, though, is that all of our readers find something in each issue that interests them, that provokes them, that enlightens them, that amuses them, and yes, that occasionally enrages them.
 
A few weeks ago, the City and Regional Magazine Association named Atlanta magazine as a finalist in seven categories in its annual competition. The categories for which we’re nominated recognize our website, our reporting, and our design. I see this kind of recognition as a survey result of a different kind. It’s gratifying, but the opinion that matters most is yours. Please continue to tell us how we’re doing.
Contact Steve Fennessy at sfennessy@atlantamag.emmis.com

March 2011

Steve Fennessy
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When I was in college twenty years ago in Washington, D.C., I worked at a restaurant in Friendship Heights. I was the lowest in the pecking order, responsible for taking dishes from the expediter and topping them off with whatever they needed—a side of fries, a sprig of parsley, a ramekin of whatever. Then I’d arrange the dishes on a tray, hoist it over my shoulder, and bring it out to the servers. If they were busy with other diners, I’d deliver the plates myself. “Uh, who ordered the burger, medium well?” Food runners (that’s what they called us) got a portion of each waiter’s tips, but our profits were directly proportional to how much the waiters liked us.
I loved the upstairs/downstairs dichotomy of the place. In this case, the dining room was civilization, while the kitchen was organized chaos. The chef would not stop singing, the expediter would not stop cursing, and the dishwashers were bathed constantly in a cloud of steam. I’d read Down and Out in Paris and London that year, and while my working conditions were a bit more humane than those George Orwell experienced as a plongeur, I came to understand there is one truth about restaurants that is eternal: You don’t open one to make money.
 
Here at Atlanta magazine, we pride ourselves on our comprehensive and no-punches-pulled coverage of the city’s dining scene. But restaurant criticism is, by definition, an attempt to assess the experience of the average diner—what he sees, what he eats, how it tastes. What we can only imagine are the months of thinking and arguing and preparing and the lost sleep that led up to that moment when the braised rabbit was set down before us, the sides at ten and two o’clock.
 
Several months ago, we got an interesting offer: How would we like to hang out with three business partners who had just signed a lease on one of the most coveted (among chefs, anyway) kitchens in town? We’d get to follow them through the thousand headaches that come even before the first diner is seated—headaches like liquor licenses, certificates of occupancy, hiring staff, what salt and pepper shakers to buy, and oh yeah, the menu. The unfettered access allowed our senior editor, Amanda Heckert, to demystify what goes into making a restaurant, from the moment demolition began on the old space right through opening night and beyond. It’s an unvarnished look into not just the kitchen, but the heads of the people whose imagination and entrepreneurial spirit make this city such a vibrant place. Will Local Three make it in the fickle world of Atlanta dining? Only time will tell. But one thing comes through crystal-clear in Amanda’s story: If Local Three doesn’t make it, it won’t be for lack of trying.
Contact Steve Fennessy at sfennessy@atlantamag.emmis.com

February 2011

Steve Fennessy
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Before our food editor, Bill Addison, jetted off to Trinidad and Tobago last fall to tag along with local chocolatier Kristen Hard, what I knew about chocolate consisted of two indisputable facts: One, an open bag of Toll House chocolate chips in my house is not long for this world, and two, that same stuff could kill my dogs. (Seriously. Dark chocolate contains high levels of theobromine, a compound that dogs can’t metabolize; the same stuff in fine dark chocolate that gets your heart racing could stop your best friend’s.)
 
What I didn’t know was that chocolate, thanks to the passionate efforts of people like Hard, is finally taking its place in the artisanal movement in America. What were predictable staples of daily life barely a generation ago—cheap coffee, boring bread, bland beer—have taken on new vitality, thanks to the efforts of small-batch producers who are returning to traditional methods and quality ingredients. Today (if you want to pay for it), you can get your bacon from a charcuterie—and not off a grocery store shelf, where it’s wrapped in plastic and doused in nitrites.
 
Chocolate poses a particular challenge. First, the process of turning a cacao bean into a truffle is dazzlingly complex (page 73). But the real problem, as Hard has learned, is finding the right bean to begin with, and making sure that supply isn’t cut off. The fact is, as America refines its taste for exquisite chocolate, poorly paid cacao farmers—clustered near the Earth’s equator—are abandoning their crops, while huge conglomerates buy up what’s left. Meanwhile, unrest in cacao-growing countries such as Ivory Coast are putting further strain on the industry. The result is that the price of cacao (or cocoa, as most of us know it) is at its highest level in three decades.
 
Bill’s story outlines the forces arrayed against Hard as she works to expand her business in Atlanta. And we should all be rooting for her. Because what I’ve also learned about dark chocolate is how good it is for you. Dark chocolate suppresses coughs, reduces inflammation, and increases blood flow to the brain, which, in one British study, led subjects to improve their math. This explains why I’ve been uncannily accurate in counting up the number of calories we’ve consumed in putting together our Sweets package.
 
On second thought, who needs math?

Contact Steve Fennessy at sfennessy@atlantamag.emmis.com

December 2010

Steve Fennessy
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When it came time to review the hundred-plus entries in this year’s Best of Atlanta issue, I came to a simple conclusion: I need to get out more. I’m not sure if it’s a function of getting older, but I’m becoming more and more a creature of habit: shopping at the same stores (Off 5th at Discover Mills is a perennial favorite), eating at the same restaurants (Thumbs Up for breakfast, maybe, or Saravana Bhavan for dinner), grabbing coffee at the same shop (Inman Perk is on the way to the office). Each of these places, of course, is excellent in its own right—if you haven’t had a Heap for breakfast, you haven’t lived—but one of the joys of living in Atlanta is watching this city redefine itself. No, not watching; experiencing it firsthand.
 
Nowhere is this change more evident than in the dining scene. A decade ago, 10 percent of the metro area’s population was born outside the United States. Today that percentage has climbed to around 15 percent. The world has beaten a path to our door, and the newcomers have brought their recipes with them. Which means you can go to Tuk Tuk Thai Food Loft (one of our best new restaurants of the year, which I finally went to last week) and order a plate of mieng kum—spinach leaves wrapped around lime, coconut, peanuts, onions, and ginger. Or sip shochu at Miso Izakaya. Or bring your friends to share some Ba Vi at Nam Phuong.
 
But hold on. What makes all this even better, as our longtime dining writer Christiane Lauterbach explains, is that the children of these very immigrants are opening restaurants that draw from the traditions of their parents while also incorporating the cosmopolitan influences now ubiquitous in Atlanta. For a diner with even a modestly adventurous palate, there is no better time to be here. Yes, the economy is still sputtering, and no, not enough fine-dining destinations have been opening up, but the essence of what this city is becoming—indeed, has become—is as deliciously evident as ever.
 
It makes the job of scouting out the best each year a challenge, but it’s a true busman’s holiday. We do it anonymously, we pay our own tab, and in this way we get the unvarnished truth. I urge you to keep this issue around for a few months and, some night when you’re looking for someplace new to go, open up to a page and see where it takes you. My hunch is you’ll be glad you did.
 
Contact Steve Fennessy at sfennessy@atlantamag.emmis.com

November 2010

Steve Fennessy
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Three years ago this month, my second child was born in a North Georgia ditch. She was sightless and stinky, homeless and heartbreaking. She was, by all accounts, the smallest in her family, which in one day had gone from just swollen-bellied Mom (Dad had long since moved on) to a yelping little Brady Bunch bumping softly into each other. The details are vague, but at some point in the days or weeks that followed, she was plucked from her birth mother, scrubbed clean, and nursed. On a cloudy day in January, she was driven to a PetSmart on Ponce. Through the wire grids of her crate, she watched the shoppers come and go. A few picked her up, but they all put her back down. My wife did not.
 
My wife named our second child Piglet. The name was inspired by Piglet’s tail, which curled like a helix. Her tail would eventually straighten, but Piglet’s insistence on living up to her name never wavered. On a walk through Grant Park one Sunday in the spring, when she was barely five months old, she was so bloated she waddled. That night just climbing the stairs left her panting. The Internet told us the condition could indicate intestinal twisting, which can be fatal in just a few hours. We raced to an all-night veterinary ER. On the way she vomited in the car. They X-rayed her stomach, put the film up on the light box, and explained what we were seeing: pounds and pounds of dog food. Piglet had discovered where we’d stashed her kibble. The bill was $285. She didn’t need to eat again for three days.
 
When we brought our third child—our first human—home from the hospital last winter, Piglet had never seen a baby person before. She took a sniff, jumped onto the couch, howled bloody murder, and urinated all over the cushions.
 
Piglet’s older sister is Sadie. I picked her out from the Atlanta Humane Society. She was so shy she wouldn’t even walk out the door with us; we had to carry her. That was eight years ago. After we adopted Piglet, my wife and I decided that animals in our house should not outnumber people. Now that we have a son, I’ve been making an argument that now is the time for another dog. She says we don’t have the room, and that our attentions are pretty well monopolized right now. She’s right, of course. But still. Reading over this month’s pets feature, I was reminded yet again of the schizophrenic approach we take to pets in the South. The lucky few are spoiled rotten, some others are thoughtlessly overbred, and the vast majority just want to be lucky enough to end up outside a PetSmart, where they have a fighting chance. Our senior editor, Amanda Heckert, compiled a trove of information that begins on page 56, but to me the most important data is found on page 92, where she lists some of the most prominent pet rescue groups in the metro area.
 
One of those, in fact, was the source of the winner of our cover contest. Dexter Ewok was adopted last spring by Kim Eisenbrandt and her boyfriend, Chris Jacobs, both of Atlanta. As Kim explained it to me, they were scrolling through Atlanta Pet Rescue’s website when Dexter’s furry mug flashed in front of them. That was all it took. Of course, there’s a lot more to it than that, as Piglet can tell you. If only she would talk.
Contact Steve Fennessy at sfennessy@atlantamag.emmis.com

October 2010

Steve Fennessy
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If, as Tip O’Neill famously said, all politics is local, is there an elected office in America more complex, more perilous, more political, than big-city mayor? Take a city with a history of racial division, in an agricultural state that is Republican red, and add in pension obligations that are draining the city’s coffers by $125 million a year. Now remove the bottom from the economy. Don’t forget to include a demoralized city workforce, with underpaid police and clamoring unions.
 
This is what Kasim Reed walked into when he was sworn in last January as Atlanta’s newest mayor. A brutal job, its effects can be inspiring (see Andrew Young), enervating (Shirley Franklin), history-making (Maynard Jackson), legacy-building (Sam Massell), or just plain corrosive (Bill Campbell). The big-city mayor is allowed a vacation, of course, but the job is all-consuming. If a cop has been shot, it is our mayor we expect to see outside the hospital on the six o’clock news. If we’re angling to host the FIFA World Cup, it’s our mayor we want leading the delegation. If the feds are handing out buckets of money for streetcars or sewers or schools, we want our mayor at the front of the line. And even if our city makes up just a fraction of a vast metro area, we know it is the mayor who is the region’s figurehead, its heart, its spokesman. The big-city mayor must mediate, lead, console, dream, and twist arms. In Atlanta, we pay our mayor $147,500.
 
You’ll recall that Reed won the job by fewer than a thousand votes. My job requires I be pretty well-informed, but as the results came in, it occurred to me that I didn’t really know much about Kasim Reed. Sure, I knew his resume, thanks to the daily paper, but I had no grasp of who he was as a person. I don’t consider the question an academic or indulgent one, especially when we’re talking about the man who is leading the most influential city in the South.
 
Not long after his inauguration, we began work on the first truly comprehensive profile of Reed. Thomas Lake, our writer, talked to Reed’s family, his classmates, his former colleagues in the General Assembly. He talked to Reed too, of course—first for just an hour, then while he tagged along with him for two very long days. The result is the fullest picture yet of Kasim Reed, a forty-one-year-old bachelor for whom there is no line between work and what the rest of us would call a regular life.
 
As it turns out, this is Tom’s final story for Atlanta magazine. Sports Illustrated scooped him up last month, making Tom the latest in a tradition of our staffers called up to the journalistic big leagues. In his two years here, Tom’s articles have introduced us to a fallen war hero, a stymied developer in Buckhead, and a deadly flu virus. With his story beginning on page 72, Tom introduces us to Kasim Reed, our mayor.
Contact Steve Fennessy at sfennessy@atlantamag.emmis.com

September 2010

Steve Fennessy
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Our dining editor, Bill Addison, says I have bad karma when it comes to restaurants. He first said this after thieves stole my wife’s car keys from a valet stand at a swank restaurant in Buckhead. We saw the flashing blue lights of the police car while we were finishing up dessert. I remember thinking, as one does at these times, Gee, I’m glad it’s not me. Then we walked outside to discover that, indeed, it was us. The valet apologized. I don’t think he works there anymore.
 
You could say this was just bad luck, but it came not long after an evening at a beer bar in Little Five Points. My friend and I had paid the bill and were waiting for the server to come back with the receipt and my credit card, only she didn’t. Finally I tracked her down outside the kitchen, where she explained she’d lost my card. How does that happen? A half hour later, she bounced up to our table and announced that a customer had found it on the floor.
 
A few weeks ago, my wife and I were out for a rare date night, the kind that requires days of planning when you’re the parents of a six-month-old. We made reservations at one of the most buzzed-about places in town. The hostess gave us a great table in a quiet corner, and my wife sat with her back to the wall. Halfway through our second course, which involved some delectable quail, I thought I saw a shadow pass behind my wife’s right shoulder. I panned over to her left shoulder. Three seconds later, a Palmetto bug reappeared on the wall behind her, crawling toward the ceiling like it was coming home from work.
 
You’ll notice I haven’t named any of these places. It’s not out of any misplaced sense of loyalty or an excess of kindness. It’s more a recognition of the vicissitudes of fate in the restaurant business. You can open your restaurant at the nicest address in town, but that’s not going to stop a thief from rummaging through your valet’s key box. You can train your waiters for weeks, but they’re still going to drop dishes and glasses and credit cards. You can clean every corner of your restaurant every day, but nothing can stop a determined roach on a summer night in Atlanta.
 
This month we celebrate the best places to eat that have opened in the past year or so. They face the same challenges as any restaurant before them, but the stagnant economy has made the hurdles even higher. For a long time I used to think that the formula for the success of places like these was simple: Prepare good food in a comfortable location and the people will come. But the more I study them (and eat at them), the more I realize a restaurant is a living, breathing thing. Fine dining is all about control—the food, the lighting, the server—but you can’t shut out the rest of the world forever. It’ll find its way in. That’s not karma; it’s just nature.
Contact Steve Fennessy at sfennessy@atlantamag.emmis.com
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