Tag: Well Served Spotlight

Chef Craig Richards says Beethoven’s “Für Elise” was one of the first pieces of music he learned on the piano as a kid. Now at the helm of Elise, a seafood-focused fine-dining restaurant in Atlanta’s Woodruff Arts Center, Richards says the restaurant’s name is a nod to that piece of music and the neighboring Atlanta Symphony Orchestra.

At Osteria Olio, the wildly popular eatery inside the new Rivet House boutique hotel in Athens, Georgia, creatively prepared Italian favorites lure locals as well as hotel guests. And while the homemade pastas and entrees such as pollo Napoletana bring the crowds, the dessert menu has its own shining staple: the chocolate hazelnut semifreddo.

Brian Griffith grew up in Knoxville, Tennessee, where he says Chinese food in the 1990s meant sweet and sour pork or shrimp fried rice that came in waxy takeout boxes. Now, after years of cooking in cities from Copenhagen to San Francisco, the chef has returned to his home state to open Choy, a chic Chinese-American eatery in Nashville designed to evoke mid-20th century Shanghai.

“Gnocchi are traditionally made with potatoes in my country, but I wanted to make this lighter and fluffier,” says Andrea Rodella, executive chef at Amore de Lago, an Italian restaurant at the Ritz-Carlton Reynolds, Lake Oconee. Raised in northern Italy and hailing from a family of cooks, Rodella recreates recipes from his childhood at the popular lake resort in Greensboro, Georgia.