Tag: dining

Wake up, Atlanta: Here’s your indispensable guide to breakfast. We pounded down the pancakes and ate our weight in eggs, reveling in familiar comforts—like Java Jive’s gingerbread waffle with lemon curd—and discovering the latest morning marvels.

Several architects, interior designers, and restaurant conceptualists swivel their heads to look around the room, and a couple of them thoughtfully clear their throats.

I grew up not far from Maryland’s Eastern Shore, where the South begins, feasting on crabs and oysters from the Chesapeake Bay estuaries. My father is a politician, and each summer my family traveled to a different state for the annual Southern Legislative Conference. I inhaled New Orleans beignets in a swirl of powdered sugar. I learned that North Carolinians eat tangy pork barbecue and that Texans prefer beef brisket. In 1995 I moved to Atlanta, excited to taste the city’s singular brand of Southern cooking.

In his book The Hidden Dimension, anthropologist Edward T. Hall defined the concept of proxemics—the cultural relevance of the spatial distances that individuals maintain. It helped me understand what felt so alienating about the United States when I moved here from Europe: I have a different sense of personal space. If I sit next to you on a sofa, I am practically in your lap. The rectangular two-tops in restaurants that put me at arm’s length from the person I’m dining with feel excruciating. I much prefer to eat at the bar, which fulfills my need for intimacy.