Food 101

4969 Roswell Road, Suite 200, 30342.

I made a quick trip to Atlanta, Georgia two weekends ago for a quick visit with the relatives. Of course when there, I wanted to eat out at something fresh and new, for the sake of this blog! Anyhow, my cousin made a reservation to a restaurant called Food 101, online… it was quite nice to receive a dinner reservation confirmation by email unsuspectingly, I must say. Kudos to you cuz for using opentable.com!

It was located at the end of a shopping strip. As you can see, Altanta was snowing that day. The reservation was for 6:30pm and the restaurant was just starting up so there wasn’t a lot of people around.

The table setting was nice and all was well, we had light conversation through the bread and butter.

For the first appetizer, I decided to get the Kobe Beef Tartare. I’ve never had tartare before, or so that I can remember… so this was a good opportunity as any to get it, especially since it will be made with ‘kobe’ beef. Basically a steak tartare is just raw meat combined with an egg, spices, and lemon juice. Horseradish aioli was served on the side to try and counter the mental phobia of bacteria lurking in raw meat. This dish was very tasty. There was no raw off flavoring you might get with non-fresh meat, and the spices complimented the meat well. The BBQ potato chips were freshly made and tasted quite delish as well.

The second appetizer dish was the PEI mussels chosen by my lovely cousin. The mussels are soaked in a roasted tomato broth and toasted ciabatta bread is provided on the side. The mussels tasted fresh, plump, and juicy. We ate it all, and didn’t even waste the bread.

For my main course I had the George Bank Scallops. I love big scallops. The scallops were seared, maybe a little tad bit too much, but it didn’t deflect the flavor of the fresh scallops at all. What came underneath the lusciousness, was a mushroom asparagus risotto. I don’t remember having risotto, but this risotto reminds me of oatmeal. Is it a taboo for me to call risotto oatmeal? Well, that was the closest thing I could think of. It was more like plump oatmeal, very tasty though mixed with mushroom and asparagus.

My cousin had the buttermilk fried chicken. Fried chicken done in upscale restaurant is just different. You can tell that lots of attention was given to the selection of the pieces, the thorough-ness of the batter coating, and the time they took to fry each piece. The fried chicken, more like chicken tenders, came out extremely juicy and not greasy. With a little brown gravy on the side makes it just right. The Idaho potatoes were whipped. At first taste, it was so light, reminded me of potato flakes, a different stance to the usual heavy mashed version.

Overall, this restaurant is definitely worth a second trip. I would try out some of their other southern fares while there. The prices might be a little high, but compared to other restaurants of the same caliber, it was expected. If you are ever in the hood, give it a go.