Tag: Cheshire Bridge

At first, when I pulled into the parking lot of the newly reopened Tara Theatre for a Sunday screening, the 55-year-old theater seemingly hadn’t changed at all. The 1960s facade’s glittering lights still illuminated an otherwise generic Cheshire Bridge strip mall, finally lit after a seven-month closure. The Plaza Theatre’s owner, Chris Escobar, revived the Tara just in time for Memorial Day weekend, and I was excited to return to the place where I’d seen dozens of movies over the past decade, from obscure A24 indies to Oscar-winning dramas. But there was something off I couldn’t quite put my finger on.

How three generations of women guided the Cheshire Bridge Road restaurant for 50 years, creating a beloved Atlanta dining institution.

In A Night at the Sweet Gum Head, released this month by W.W. Norton, journalist Martin Padgett sutures this context into the accounts of two main subjects: Bill Smith, who helped lead the Georgia Gay Liberation Front, worked as a city commissioner, and published the South’s leading gay newspaper, the Barb; and John Greenwell, who rose to drag stardom performing as Rachel Wells at the Sweet Gum Head nightclub.

Manager George Trusler, who started as a waiter, has been a fixture at Taqueria del Sol for 25 years, and the secret menu dish he named after himself paved the way for other secret Taqueria del Sol dishes.

With a packed audience of firefighters, strippers, commercial developers and lawyers, today’s Atlanta City Council meeting provided an unusually rich showcase for how downright weird local policy-making can be.

At this point, Alex Wan is pretty tired of being called anti-gay.

Woodfire Grill on Cheshire Bridge Road has undergone many changes in the last year, but its most essential trademark endures. The sweet, smoky aromas drifting from the open kitchen at the dining room's entrance still tranquilize as if a lullaby had dissolved into fragrance. Borrowed from the playbook of California cuisine, the layout places the focal point of cooking directly in the path of newly arrived guests, who inhale scents evocative of campfire and barbecue en route to their table. Those first wafts anchor the meal. They communicate the tone and ambitions of the restaurant more effectively than words on a menu ever could. And now they act as an aromatic through-line that connects the restaurant’s past with its recent and remarkable reinvention.