Tag: Westside

Where Iberian Pig takes its inspiration from all of Spain, Cooks & Soldiers focuses on the Basque region, which gained an international profile during the craze over molecular gastronomy and its first exponent, Ferran Adrià of elBulli.

Brash Coffee is opening its first Atlanta store on the Westside in early summer 2015. In 2011, owner Matt Ludwikowski was working at Octane and took a trip to El Salvador with one intention: work directly with coffee farmers to learn as much about coffee as he could. He practiced what he learned and, two years later, opened the first Brash Coffee store in Chattanooga, Tennessee.

It started with bud vases. But in just its second year, Courtney Hamill’s handmade ceramics line, Honeycomb Studio, has expanded into lighting. The Atlanta native works out of a backyard shed at her home on the Westside, sometimes sitting down at the wheel but more often making her porcelain vessels, holiday ornaments, turtledoves, antlers, and now three styles of lamp bases from original slip-cast molds.

It’s a classic story of ties that bind—except this one actually starts with ties. Kirk Stafford, who had a small tie company called Mast-McBride, walked into Billy Reid in September 2012. Thomas Wages, a partner at an advertising company, was inside talking to the manager over a bourbon drink. He owned a tie that was too skinny, and he wanted it made into a bow tie. The manager looked from Wages to Stafford; it was kismet. One conversation led to another, and the two discovered they wanted to open the same type of men’s boutique, right down to the last handcrafted leather detail.

When Greg Martin and Michelle Larrabee-Martin opened Kolo Collection ten years ago, they were among the earliest retailers in the Westside district and among the first to offer upscale outdoor furniture directly to Atlanta homeowners.

Local beer drinkers have fallen for Monday Night Brewing’s trifecta: the Eye Patch Ale IPA, the Drafty Kilt Scotch Ale, and the Fu Manbrew Belgian-style Wit, and the same is true of the brewery itself. Located off Howell Mill Road on the Westside, the company founded by Jeff Heck, Joel Iverson, and Jonathan Baker is a great post-work hangout, just as it was when the trio began brewing beer about seven years ago in the garage. A self-described group of white-collar guys with ties, they eventually followed their hearts (and palates), trading in the buttoned-up collars for the business of brew.

The phone rang in Mike Virga’s office in Union, New Jersey, one morning three years ago: “I hear somebody going, ‘I want some of that good Lioni mozzarella. Come on, sell me some. It’s me, Giovanni.’"

Ford Fry has a knack for creating likable, trend-driven restaurants that I've found capable but overly safe. His first, JCT Kitchen & Bar in the Westside Urban Market development, opened in 2007. Its tame versions of shrimp and grits, chicken and dumplings, and deviled eggs draped with ham helped usher in the era of that now-cliched genre, Southern farm-to-table, but they lack gutsy soul.

No. 246—Fry’s snazzy Decatur venture with executive chef Drew Belline—launched mid-2011 when fresh hot spots were a rarity amid the draggy economy. It satisfies its nightly crowds with busy pastas, Neapolitan-style pizzas charred in a wood-burning oven, and other Italian comforts. There, too, I hanker for more gusto, for more reach and spark to the cooking.

It might be easy at first to doubt the authenticity of the cooking at Cardamom Hill, Atlanta's first regional Indian fine-dining restaurant. In what other South Asian place have we seen such precise knife skills, or exquisite sense of composition, or range of colors? And who thinks of sliced beets with spiced yogurt, marinated boneless chicken thighs fried in lacy batter, duck and plantain croquettes with figs and cinnamon, or colorful salads topped with tropical fruit as part of the Indian culinary lexicon?