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Best New Restaurant in America
Topic Started: Oct 6 2012, 09:43 AM (113 Views)
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According to Esquire, it is The Optimist in Atlanta. Anyone been?

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Restaurant of the Year

The Optimist, Atlanta

A soaring, convivial spot, the Optimist has a hopping oyster bar shaped like a surfboard, a first-rate cocktail program, and seafood cooked with old-school expertise over a wood fire. The term Optimist refers to a type of sailing dinghy used for teaching kids, and is an old moniker for a fisherman awaiting his next big catch. But judging from chef Ford Fry's exuberant cooking, it might also be a reference to his outlook on the world.

Fry already runs the admirable southern restaurant JCT. Kitchen & Bar, and he hosts the raucous annual Attack of the Killer Tomato Festival, so everybody knew his new place would be a big deal. But the Optimist is far more than a resounding local success: It is an overnight totem of all that is wonderful about American food today.

Start with the grandness of the space — its inspiration taken from a vintage photo of a seafood plant in Savannah. The main dining room, with a white wooden ceiling trussed with steel rods and a wall of wine and spirits behind a waxed-steel bar counter, seats 180, with booths covered in a gold wet-suit fabric. Every table is taken every night by a handsome, casually dressed crowd drinking signature cocktails and ordering frothy she-crab soup with shrimp toast, spicy glazed Spanish octopus with watermelon and coriander, and hearth-roasted red snapper in lime broth with herb salad that is somehow rich and bracing at once. If seafood can taste better than this, I can't wait to try it. Right now, the Optimist is American dining at its best, and that's why it's Esquire's 2012 Best New Restaurant of the Year.

Read more: http://www.esquire.com/features/food-drink/best-new-restaurants-2012-optimist-atlanta#ixzz28WvtDHF0



http://www.esquire.com/features/food-drink/best-new-restaurants-2012-optimist-atlanta#slide-2
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Tybee
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I haven't been yet, but a good friend went recently and said he really enjoyed it. He thinks I might have a problem with the noise. He knows how I hate excessive racket when I'm eating, especially when I'm paying for it. Apparently it can get pretty busy there. But I'll give it a try, probably next week when I have dinner with my best friend and my godson.
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My biggest complaint with restaurants is usually not the food, but the acoustics.

Many places fail to strike a good balance between tomb and riot, in trying to create "energy."

I went to one restaurant and the only thing in the entire room that absorbed sound were the napkins. It was almost impossible to hear the person across from you at a two-top. And I don't have any hearing problems, which may, actually, be my problem.
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Tybee
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I totally agree! It's for that very reason I've had to take some very good restaurants in Atlanta off my dining list. The Fish Market on Pharr and The Buckhead Diner are off my list for good. Always had good food at both, but the cacophony of sound in both places puts my nerves on end and ruins the visit.
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That's why it's nice to be able to eat outside.
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Did you try it out, Tybee?
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Tybee
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No, my godson had his mind set on South City Kitchen (the kid has gone nuts over that place), so we went there. Always have to please the kid.
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Erna
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Esquire used to be a magazine for tuna-tasters but for the past 25 years it has been 100% homosexual,
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Tybee
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I remember in High School the library had copies of Esquire but they were always kept in a small room most students never went in. You had to request to see them and the old bitty librarians would make a snap decision as to whether they would allow you access. I was a library assistant at one point and started perusing them. Pretty tame stuff, but in the very back there were ads with images for very suggestive men's bloomers and other unmentionables. In the 60's it was quite titillating.
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I went to The Optimist this past weekend.

That picture doesn't do it justice: It is a very warm, inviting space at night.

It may be a very hot spot right now, but it has a very friendly vibe. No attitude.

Everyone at my table loved the food. It was very tasty, allowing the ingredients to shine without too much seasoning. Oysters were wonderful. My "low country" black grouper was perfectly prepared.

It is very inviting when you arrive. Before you go in, there is a grassy courtyard with a palm tree and comfortable chairs. The bar was on one side, open to the night. The bar is fairly big and easy to walk around in. The restaurant area is very masculine, but warm. It has a huge vaulted ceiling (it reminded me of an airplane hanger built to hold a biplane) with the flames of the kitchen seen at the end of the room. The place was redolent of burning hardwood from the kitchen stoves.

The noise level was not as bad as I expected, given the ceiling. We were able to talk easily at our table, without feeling that adjacent tables were listening in. But maybe it was like the Capitol; people on the other end of the restaurant were able to hear our gossip a clear as a bell.
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