Tag: Love Letter

With its recognizable logo in St. Patrick’s Day font, those simple but wonderful green awnings, and that chatty, sweet staff, Green’s operates stores across South Carolina and has two in Atlanta. But the original, and my favorite, dates back to 1937 on Ponce de Leon Avenue.

Seconds off Jimmy Carter Boulevard in Norcross, a small shopping complex is filled with the usual strip mall staples: Kroger, Pizza Hut, GNC, a hair salon. But unless you were part of the Pakistani and Kashmiri immigrant scene, you would never know, or guess, that sandwiched between the GNC and the hair salon is J. Junaid Jamshed (or just J.), a Pakistani fashion retail store stocked with light, soft, warm weather–friendly clothes that are almost impossible to find elsewhere without paying a hefty price.

Some wines are born great, some achieve greatness, and some are thrust into slushie machines and emerge as frosé.

In 2015, when my wife and I moved to Atlanta, I was looking for familiarity. I found it in a granite rock called Arabia Mountain.

As a kid, I was comfortable not just with a diversity of flavors but a diversity of people. As a journalist, I’ve spent a lot of time traveling and reporting stories around the world—but I owe my appreciation of diverse cultures to my own hometown of Lilburn.

No other place came as close to satisfying my simultaneous yearnings for discovery and acceptance as this weirdly tropical and uncharacteristically health-focused restaurant. When I found R. Thomas, it didn’t fit in, and I therefore believed in my teenage heart that it was just like me.