Omnivore Atlanta

To all who are interested in showing off their awesome culinary skills, “Top Chef”will  hold auditions here in Atlanta for season seven. This open casting call will be at Craft Restaurant, 10 a.m.-2 p.m., on Nov. 8. Be sure to bring a filled out application, video submission and all other required materials, which can be found on the Bravo TV website.

Also, be sure to brush-up on you pastries and cakes, as a new “Top Chef” spin-off, titled “Top Chef: Just Desserts,” will also be casting at the same audition. The newest version of the show was just recently announced on Oct., 26 and auditions are already underway. The spin-off is said to premiere in 2010.

Craft is located at 3376 Peachtree Road. 404-995-7580. www.craftrestaurant.com.

(Photo courtesy Bravo TV)

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HOW SWEET IT IS: The sweetbreads with kumquats at Craft

In June of last year, I ate at the original Craft during a trip to New York City. To say it was the best meal of my year doesn’t really do the experience justice. Everything was exceptional, from the imposing old windows overlooking 19th Street, to the pleasingly understated masculine décor, to the expansive wine list that still had room for quirks, to the simple, perfect food.

I’m not planning to do a compare and contrast essay here, although it is tempting (the hen of the woods mushrooms in New York — a juicy hedge of crispy and soft flavor; the hen of the woods mushrooms in Atlanta — a desiccated scattering of yummy oily bits). But many have questioned whether upscale restaurants can work as chain operations. Chefs who leave primary kitchens in the hands of staff members and set out to create empires do so with a fair amount of skepticism following them, and rightly so. Quality is often diluted, and the focus becomes celebrity and the money that follows it. Just ask anyone who dined at the recently deposed Atlanta Emeril’s, and you’ll hear just how bad the translation can taste.

But after my meal in New York, I had high hopes for Atlanta’s outpost of Craft. If chef/restaurateur Tom Colicchio could bring even a part of New York’s feel, precision in cooking, and quality wine list to Atlanta, then I figured we were in for something pretty damn good. (more…)

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BITTERSWEET: The brown sugar cake with grapefruit at Craft

Here is what William Grimes, former dining critic of The New York Times, wrote on June 27, 2001, not long after the opening of Craft:

“Craft invites diners to take a trip. The destination is a simpler, cleaner, more honest America, a place where the corn is bright yellow, the bread exhales clouds of yeasty sweetness and the fish swim in water as pure as Evian.”

What is it about Americans that we are always engaged in utopic yearning? Grimes’ words seem almost trivial until you read mention of the year 2001 and unavoidably think of the nation’s apocalyptic loss of innocence in the attack on the World Trade Center.

And yet, even now, in the midst of the worst economic times since the Great Depression, we are looking more zealously than ever for purity and transcendence at the dining table. We have become Proust, munching on a madeleine whose first taste prompts him to write: “And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory – this new sensation having had on me the effect which love has of filling me with a precious essence; or rather this essence was not in me, it was me.”

I can’t lay claim to a either Grimes’ or Proust’s experience after my first meal at the new Craft Atlanta (3376 Peachtree Rd., 404-995-7580). Undoubtedly, this will cause some to gasp. We’re talking a major pedigree and, dammit, I wanted to transcend the vicissitudes of life and become a precious essence. (more…)

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THE WHOLE HOG: Holeman and Finch encourages diners to eat head to tail

Where did the year go? The end of 2008 snuck up so quickly and stealthily, it blindsided me. One thing that helps bring me back to a relatively reasonable pace, or at least not a speed-of-light pace, is to look back the year’s restaurant openings. January might seem like yesterday when I think about the economy, but it feels like an actual year ago when I consider all the new restaurants that have opened since then. Many of those restaurants have contributed to making this otherwise sucky year a little easier to swallow. While the five on this list aren’t strictly the year’s highest rated, they are the ones that made my year better. (more…)

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Craft and Craftbar are set to open on Monday. They will be open for dinner 7 days a week. Craftbar will open for lunch Jan. 5.

Flip was set to open this week but the date was pushed back until next Wednesday.

Stay tuned for early reports of both.

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