Tag: Hugh Acheson

In this weekly column, Evan Mah asks Atlanta’s sharpest wine minds about all things vino. What’s Karthäuserhof? Eitelsbacher Karthäuserhofberg? Kabinett? If you don’t know, ask Steven Grubbs.On a recent Sunday afternoon at Empire State South, Grubbs is leaning into a booth, his sleeves rolled up to his elbows, revealing a dark tattoo sprawling down his arm. The subject of talk is Rieslings, a grape varietal from Germany noted for its high levels of acidity, complexity and warm honey bouquet. And it is clear in this moment that nobody in this city loves this often-misunderstood grape more than he does.

Chef, author, restaurateur, television personality, and James Beard Foundation Award winner Hugh Acheson stays mighty busy these days. When he’s not at Five and Ten or the National in Athens, or Empire State South in Atlanta, he may be found working on his newest restaurant, an Italian spot in Savannah opening in March 2014. He’s also relocating Five and Ten from South Lumpkin Street to South Milledge Avenue, working on two new cookbooks and judging Top Chef. Below, he divulges plans for the Savannah restaurant—including a possible name, gives us a look into the offerings at the new Five and Ten, and shares some surprising news about Empire State South executive chef Ryan Smith.

Cakes and Ale, Cardamom Hill nominated for Bon Appetit's best new restaurants Represent. Bon Appétit has released their list of the top 50 Best New Restaurant Nominees for 2012, and two Atlanta hotspots made the cut.

How do you describe Southern food? Pursuing that answer is as much the daydreamer's indulgence as the academic's conundrum. It’s a workman’s meal of sugarless, butter-smeared cornbread, swiped through a bowl of potlikker and crumbled into the mouth. It’s an antebellum fever dream: she-crab soup, shad stuffed with roe, and the sherry-soaked dessert called tipsy squire consumed using weighty silverware on snowy linens. And it is, of course, an unconquerable buffet of fried chicken, fried green tomatoes, baked ham, candied yams, black-eyed peas, and small plastic bowls filled with peach cobbler sweet enough to give you the sugar jitters.

I have cried only once at a culinary event: the 2007 James Beard Foundation Awards, when a towering man in a tuxedo and a ruffled shirt bounded onstage, collected the medal that honored his restaurant as an America’s Classic, and opened his mouth. “I want to thank God, R.E.M., and the University of Georgia,” Dexter Weaver said with the booming voice of a preacher. The crowd went wild. All that love for Athens, Georgia, and Weaver’s place overcame me.

The name of Hugh Acheson’s new restaurant—his first in Atlanta—sounds retro and progressive at the same time, winking at the city’s history of preening boosterism: Empire State South.