Atlanta, Part Two

This past Monday, on the Travel Chanel show The Layover, host and Chef Anthony Bourdain visited Atlanta.  During his time here Bourdain visited a number of establishments, some long standing and iconic and others new.  Some of the choices were curious, but all in all every one of them is representative of Atlanta.  It was great to see our city represented in a positive light.

Bourdain called Atlanta a “new Shanghai” based on the variety and creativity of the cuisine.  Many of the restaurants featured on the episode offer a farm to table, neo-southern style of cooking.  This is not the deep-fry-the-shit-out-of-everything-and-cover-it-with-butter southern cooking endorsed by Paula Deen.  This is something considerably less likely to give you diabetes.  He hit breakfast spots, bars with huge beer selections, and unique, late-night spots.  He introduced some of the Latin and East Asian cuisine with a jaunt up the Buford Highway.  Showing both the Buford Highway Farmer’s Market as well as the Sweet Auburn Curb market were nice touches as well.

While watching, as well as since watching, I questioned some of the choices.  Why the Buford highway and Sweet Auburn markets but not Your Dekalb Farmer’s Market?  (YDFM has a strict no pictures policy that probably precluded them from filming there).  Why Star Provisions and not Spotted Trotter?  Why Homegrown instead of, say, Thumbs up/West Egg/Ria’s/etc.?  Why Fat Matt’s instead of any other barbecue place? (Granted, Bourdain did say it wasn’t the best, or even really BBQ, just that he happens to like it).  I slowly began realizing just how many interesting and unique places there are here in Atlanta and just how close to many of them I live. 

During the show we were presented with a map of the city broken down by neighborhood showing where Bourdain headed.  While the episode stuck exclusively to intown neighborhoods, I constantly got a chuckle out of the fact that Home Park was a named neighborhood on the map that should be recognized.  When I lived there it was known as the white slums of Atlanta.  The place was inhabited by Georgia Tech students and random twenty-somethings who didn’t mind living four or five to a dilapidated house.  I remember it as a place of house parties and Sunday kickball, where you could get the region’s best Cuban sandwich sold from a corner grocery called Kool Korner.  Now, it houses nationally known restaurants.

Late in the show, Bourdain met Alton Brown for dinner before heading to the legendary Clermont Lounge.  During that segment, Brown stated that Atlanta doesn’t know what it is yet, which is somewhat true.  But, by identifying and recognizing all that is unique here, both what was shown in this episode and what wasn’t, we Atlantans can start to identify just what it is that Atlanta is and what it is not.  That was the most interesting revelation of the show to me.

This week, local establishments, cultural blogs, and publications were atwitter over this episode.  Among the “did you see us on” and “did you catch this week’s” posts I ran across one article that bugged me.  It touched on a subject that’s annoyed me for the over twenty years I’ve lived here.

There was an article in this week’s Creative Loafing written by Wyatt Williams about finally embracing the Atlanta food scene.  In the article, Williams discussed having concern for Atlanta’s food scene.  Why aren’t there month-long waiting lists to eat at these restaurants?  It was a concern not shared by any of Atlanta’s chefs whom he’s interviewed over the past year.  Williams compared Atlanta to New York, which is something I have seen, heard, or read people do far too often.  It’s not necessarily the comparison to New York that gets me; it’s measuring Atlanta against any other city and against any other criterion than Atlanta itself.

If it was Atlanta’s ambition to be a copy of New York, then that’s all the city would ever be: a sterile simulacrum, a copy of a copy with nothing original or creative.  If I wanted to live in Manhattan, I’d move to Manhattan.  Instead I want to live in Atlanta because there’s something about the city: the pace, the vibe, the amenities, the space, some je ne sais quoi that I like.  That’s why I got a job here.  That’s why I own a home here. 

As long as I’ve been here there has always been some ersatz urban planners ready and willing to tell me just what is wrong with Atlanta compared to some other city.  My current response is the classic Atlanta maxim, “if you don’t like it here, Delta is ready when you are.”  It doesn’t stop the criticisms, but it does illustrate something that they don’t understand about the people here: we don’t want to be New Yorkers, Chicagoans, or anyone else.  We want to be Atlantans. 

If you want to read some relatively recent examples of this kind of discussion, check out The Urbanist’s guest blog posts on the What Now, Atlanta site.  (Maybe, ATL Urbanist on tumblr?)    While I do believe this guy genuinely wants to better the city, his unilateral stances and inability to accept any sort of criticism of his ideas without coming across as petulant aren’t engendering his ideas to anyone.  Atlanta isn’t going to become what he wants it to be, but what we make of it.  That’s how this city will grow.

I continue to see similar movements going on in a bit more microscopic level in this town, neighborhood by neighborhood.  My neighborhood, the East Atlanta Village, has this “Keep East Atlanta Weird” vibe.  It’s on bumper stickers, signs, and sometimes painted places.  That’s Austin and Portland, not EAV.  Do we really want EAV to be nothing more than an imitation of the Pearl District or East Austin?  Do we want to be measured by the number of baristas per capita or the number of varieties of locally sourced wheatgrass we can get at our local farmer’s market?  (According to the Forbes list, L5P is more hipster than EAV.  I’ll take it.)

Since I initially visited East Atlanta in the mid-90s, when there was nothing more than a coffee shop and Heaping Bowl and Brew, I’ve seen which places have lasted and which have come and gone.  We, of EAV, have supported the places we’ve wanted in EAV.  That is how EAV should grow, not by some artificial mimicry of some cool neighborhood you visited somewhere else.  There’s a reason why So Ba and the Octopus Bar have survived in a spot where many others have failed.

I think we should extend this principle to our city as a whole.  As Williams suggests in his article and as the Urbanist has exhorted us to do in his own way, let’s embrace and support what is uniquely ours.  Leave the chains for those in the burbs who don’t have these options.  Let’s take advantage of what is Atlanta, whatever that actually is.

In the meantime, let the haters hate our city.  The traffic is already miserable and we don’t need anyone here who doesn’t want to be here.  Those of us who are here make Atlanta what it is and shape what it will be, whatever may come.  I like that.