Tag: Ryan Smith

The best of Atlanta's food and drink in 2020, including best new restaurant, new chef, burger, diner, new barbecue, and more.

This charming little lounge tucked in an alcove above the highly celebrated restaurant Staplehouse feels more like a Brooklyn living room than a bar in the classic sense.

Staplehouse is a fine-dining experience as innovative as it is unfussy.

It’s been eight years since celebrity chef Hugh Acheson opened Empire State South and challenged Atlanta’s notion that Southern food is something preciously preserved in the past. But a lot can change in eight years. Empire State South’s next chapter, under newly installed executive chef Adam Waller, marks a deliberate return to the basics.

Shay Lavi is a master behind the grill, where proteins make up only about 30 percent of his impressive, vegetable-laden spreads. Now, the catering chef plans to open his own cafe downtown.

Staplehouse might have been ahead of its time when it introduced its tasting-menu format in 2015. But his time around, Atlanta is more ready for it than ever.

The James Beard Foundation's 2018 Restaurant and Chef Award semifinalists include seven Atlanta-based chefs and three elsewhere in Georgia received nominations. If you look closer at the list, you'll notice a trend: Seven of these ten chefs are people of color.

Sunday’s Landlocked Oyster Fest is the first of its kind put on by nonprofit Oyster South and will benefit the University of Georgia's Shellfish Research Lab. Chefs such as Staplehouse's Ryan Smith and Southern Soufflé blogger Erika Council will partner with farmers to present oysters on the half shell dressed up with various accoutrements at Color Wheel Studios in Decatur.

Quiet dining rooms are pretty much out of vogue. How many times have you crossed the threshold of a restaurant only to be assaulted by a racket resembling that of a colony of monkeys at the zoo?

Reservations at the 40-seat Staplehouse, a modern Southern restaurant in Atlanta’s Old Fourth Ward, have been hard to come by since it was named America’s Best New Restaurant by Bon Appétit last September.