Tag: Downtown

For the second time in twenty years, the National Trust for Historic Preservation has put the Sweet Auburn district—once Atlanta’s center of African American business and culture—on its “endangered” list.

John Lewis came to Atlanta five decades ago as a founding leader of SNCC—the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee—and with an already impressive resume as an activist.

Among his peers, Paul Luna sticks out like an extreme skateboarder at a golf convention. As tiny and intense in his forties as he was two decades ago when he first landed in Atlanta, he has yet to cut the waist-long hair (now gray) that he braids tightly like a Na’vi in Avatar. His deep, dominant voice has mellowed, and he no longer relies exclusively on curse words for emphasis. Mostly he reserves his wrath for city bureaucrats who made liquor license and parking issues so difficult for Lunacy Black Market, the restaurant he opened in late 2009 on a blighted corner of Downtown.

Until now, burritos were pretty much a sideline gig for Matt Hinton, a young theologian who coped with shrinking hours at Morehouse College, where he was an adjunct professor, by starting a home delivery business. Hinton has many callings. He is, among other things, a director of documentary films, a record label owner, a pressman for his wife’s letterpress shop—and now a brand-new restaurateur.

If you missed last month’s Flux 2010 in Castleberry Hill (successor to Le Flash), be sure to head Downtown when Atlanta’s newest multimedia art experience, Luminocity, premieres two days after Thanksgiving. The evening kicks off at 7 p.m. with a fifty-minute performance in Woodruff Park, follo

I credit Julia Child for my first trip to the Municipal Market of Atlanta on Edgewood Avenue one bright morning in 1975. Eager to dazzle my new husband with my culinary prowess and introduce him to the food I grew up with, I had decided to make Child’s lapin à la moutarde, only to find that, back then, only poor people and country folks in Georgia ate rabbit. No regular grocery stores carried it. But the market did, so I dove into a world where my senses were assaulted by whole pigs, obscene-looking viscera, fatback encrusted with salt, baggies of edible kaolin, little bunches of yellow roots, enormous bouquets of collards, and, yes, fresh rabbit sold at the fish counter. I was hooked.

A thin but significant crack has appeared in the dining public's accepted wisdom about steakhouses, dividing our perceptions toward these wellsprings of rapaciousness into "then" and "now." The former cradles the archetypes of the American chophouse: wood paneling and hazy lighting, shiver-inducing martinis, the implied (if not actual) whiff of cigar smoke in the air. Many of us can recite the foundations of this menu—from the appetizer shrimp cocktail and the creamed spinach nuzzled against the T-bone to the unnecessarily hedonistic desserts—as easily as we can repeat the Pledge of Allegiance. Bone’s and Chops shoulder such traditions in Atlanta.