Peace and Quiet in Decatur

Set on the edge of Atlanta, Decatur is a small town with more than the usual small-town resources. We've got great restaurants, some decent music venues, and (most importantly, to me) some lovely little pockets of wilderness. The town square is nice, but what I really like about my town is that it's pretty queer-friendly.

Quick Tips:

Decatur is a great place to eat, and it's even good for eating on a budget. Burgers, pizza, French, Italian, Thai, Vietnamese, Japanese, Mexican, Asian fusion, noodle houses, diners ... they're all here. The only really important cuisine we're missing is Chinese, which is present but poorly represented.

Best Way To Get Around:

MARTA will take you right to the town square, and, from there, you can take the world's slowest buses. Other than that, you're pretty much stuck with cars. There are some nice places in town to walk, though.

The new Decatur branch of Thai Bowl (a spin-off from the posher version in Virginia Highlands) is a real asset to the already-strong Decatur restaurant scene.

The restaurant has two specialties: first, and less advertized, is the sushi, which includes some innovative combinations (the yummi-yummi roll gets raves from piscovores), as well as good standbys (California roll, and my favorite, the veggie tempura roll). The sushi is what bumps this restaurant into the $10 to $20 category, as one roll will set you back $4 to $8.

The restaurant's other specialty, and its real raison d'être, are the enormous, steaming bowls of noodles. You can order a predesigned bowl (Chaing mai noodles, Thai noodles [aka pad Thai], Spicy Eggplant noodles, among others), or you can design your own. Six dollars gets you the noodles of your choice in one of four broths (by far the best is the coconut curry), along with three veggies, which you choose from a wide array (including enoki mushrooms and asparagus, two of my favorites). For a dollar or two extra, you can add tofu, meat, or shrimp. If you can restrain yourself from ordering sushi as well, a bowl of noodles will see you out the door very full and very happy for at most $9.

For drinks, Thai Bowl serves an array of fruit juices, Japanese beers, and delicious plum wine, as well as the inevitable Atlanta Coke products.

The Decatur branch of the restaurant is a mix of counter and table service: you place your order at the counter, and about three minutes later the 100%-androgynous staff brings it to you at your table. The best seats are outside on the patio; the view of the parking lot isn't exactly scenic, but if the weather's nice, it's much more pleasant than the frostily air-conditioned interior.

Decatur is full of former garages and gas stations that have turned into nice, little restaurants, but only one of them has a really good automotive pun in its name, and that's Universal Joint (named, for readers who have only driven cars produced post-1990, after a single joint in the drive train that controlled all four wheels on the car). Universal Joint doesn't have a universal menu -- it's mostly burgers and quesadillas -- but it does have near-universal appeal to people who eat burgers and drink beer.

Universal Joint takes the right approach for a small restaurant - it does a few dishes well. Burgers and fries; burgers and yummy, sweet onion straws; a bacon burger; a mushroom swiss burger; a veggie burger. Quesadillas with veggies or chicken or shrimp; buffalo wings; a cheese sandwich; a cheese steak; deep-fried appetizers; mixed drinks; and a good list of beers on tap. That's about it, but each one is done well - the onion straws are thin and crunchy, the fries are thick and meaty, the lettuce and tomato on the burgers is fresh, and the burgers really are cooked the way you ask for them. It's a good standby burger joint, and even better if you live in the area and can walk there through the nice (yet not over-gentrified) Oakhurst neighborhood.

Part of how you can tell how good it is, of course, is how full it is on weekend nights. The crowds are varied. It's at its fullest on warm summer nights, when everyone in Oakhurst brings their dogs to sit outside on the patio (larger than the restaurant's interior), in front of the orange stucco storefront and the big cut-metal sign. But winter weeknights, when it's cold and rainy out, Universal Joint can be a cozy place for a quick bite and a beer. Sometimes it's crawling with Young Marrieds; at other times it's entirely lesbian couples; at others, there are sports teams just back from games. But the food is consistent, no matter who's eating it.

As a final note--the Tuesday night trivia is actually sort of difficult (read: worth the effort).

Mexican food in Decatur falls into three categories: taquerias, specializing in quick, cheap plates of tacos and quesadillas; burrito joints, which vary from the most basic beans-and-meat approach to Raging Burrito's thousand-option menu; and upscale Mexican places with pretensions to cuisine. Zocalo is in the last category: it offers a range of non-burrito, non-taco Mexican options, plus the usual elaborate Margarita bar.

We have two favorites when we go to Zocalo. Paka gets the shrimp fajitas, which give you a large pile of shrimp fried with onions and sweet red peppers, together with tortillas and a goodly plate of condiments. I get the enchiladas verdes, one of the two vegetarian options on the menu: three slender cheese enchiladas (almost flautas) in a thick, zingy green tomatillo salsa, served with beans and veggie-studed rice.

Zocalo's main attraction from my point of view is the guacamole, which your server makes for you at your table. For about $4.50, your server will bring a shallow black stone bowl, which stands on three stubby legs, to your table, and pound a whole avocado in it with the ingredients of your choice -- onions, tomatoes, jalapeño peppers, etc. This is very satisfying to watch, especially after dark, when the restaurant is primarily lit by the small parafin lamps on each table, and the guacamole-making takes on a faint echo of Aztec ritual sacrifice.

Or maybe that's just the margaritas talking. Zocalo makes a good house margarita: tangy, with more flavor of fruit than usual, available salted or unsalted, frozen or on the rocks. They've also got a wide array of beers and some truly terrible sangria. (Nowhere in Georgia seems to make adequate sangria; it always tastes like bitter Kool-aid. If you know of any good places to get sangria within an hour's drive of Decatur, please send me a message.)

Like many places on the Square, Zocalo tends to have a youngish, blondish, richish-looking crowd on weekend nights. It's not exactly a hipster hangout, but it wouldn't mind being one. The outside tables can be hard to get, but inside is nice too, if you don't mind the dark (interrupted, more than illuminated, by light bulbs hidden behind a display pierced-metal screens near the door).

Zocalo's prime Decatur competitor, as far as I'm concerned, is Billy Goat's Tavern in Decatur. Both are good places: which one you choose depends on what exactly you're after. For shrimp, fajitas, hipsters, and noise, choose Zocalo; for tamales, mole sauce, hippies, and cushioned-bench atmosphere, choose Billy Goat's. For me, that swings the balance just barely in Billy Goat's favor; for Paka, who loves shrimp, it goes the other way. Your call.

This is our favorite sushi place in Decatur (and the pool is larger than you'd think). Service is friendly and low key, and the booths are cozy (though you can also sit at the sushi bar). They've got good sushi combo plates, including Miso soup and a salad, starting at $13, going up to an extravagant $23 for the sushi/sashimi combo. My dining companions praise the fish's freshness and flavor. Presentation is always lovely: brilliant slabs of fish arranged lovingly on muted Japanese stoneware.

The big draw, as far as I'm concerned, although not the restaurant's prime focus, is a wide and flavorful variety of veggie sushi, including asparagus and pumpkin tempura rolls ($4.50 each) and an array of interesting pickled Japanese veggies. The menu also has noodle dishes and tempuras (around $7 each), but who'd skip the sushi?

The plum wine is yummy, there's a variety of saki and Japanese beer, and there's champagne to celebrate special occasions.

The decor is pleasant: a highly polished wooden sushi bar where you can watch the chefs at work, and a long, very thin row of booths next to the exposed brick wall, with small framed prints hanging above each table. The wait staff is mostly young, including one charming young woman who always tries to talk me out of ordering too much food: she thinks one small woman can't actually eat three sushi rolls, but I keep proving her wrong.

Billy Goat's Cantina makes a mean tamale--a series of mean tamales, actually, with a different special every night. It's one of the few Mexican places in town that is clearly not based in Tex-Mex: it's not just tacos and burritos; it's the full range of tortilla-based dishes. And, much more importantly, it also has the full range of sauces. Billy Goat's understands mole sauce: the ground pumpkin seeds, the unsweetened chocolate-it's all there in its tangy, dense, and fattening glory.

While it's definitely a carnivorous restaurant, complete with serious beef dishes, there's an excellent array of vegetarian options on the menu, including a real variety of veggies, as well as the usual rice and beans. The authentic tamales ($6 to $8) come stuffed with everything you can imagine, and the chiles relleños ($7-ish) have a good strong punch. The guacamole ($4.50?) is excellent, and the homemade salsas have distinctive flavors.

And then there are the drinks. Let's not kid ourselves-what keeps a good Mexican restaurant in business are the margaritas. Billy Goat's array of tequilas, including some unusual imports, scores highly. The fruity-tasting house margarita goes for about $4.50, but you can upgrade it almost indefinitely if you're inclined. If you live near Oakhurst, walk there, and you'll hobble home happy.

I've spent the last 3 years combing the Decatur area for a good north Indian restaurant. (South Indian is available at every corner, which is some compensation, but not the same thing.) Touch of India looked like it fit the part at least: window shades in the shape of Mughal arches, tinsel decorations hanging like chandeliers from the ceiling, fairly cozy booths, and other diners actually eating there on a Monday night. The menu has the main standbys of north Indian cuisine as it appears in America: Chicken Tikka Marsala, Garlic Naan, a vegetarian and a carnivore thali, etc. But there are two alarming aspects to the menu. First, the vegetable dishes are labeled "side dishes." This is alarming not because portions are small--they're the usual Indian round-bottomed metal bowls--but because it suggests that the restaurant caters to a clientele that considers vegetables only as sides, rather than as a central part of Indian cooking. Second and worse, there's a section called "curries." "Curry" is a generic term referring to any dish made using one of a variety of different spice mixtures. To be told in an Indian restaurant that there's only one kind of curry is like going to a deli and being told that there's only one kind of sandwich.

The food, when it arrives, is fine, but dull. I asked for spicy and didn't get it. I ordered malai kofta ($6.50), which ought to be very rich and with a nutty, spicy flavor; the rich part was there, but the flavor wasn't. The mango lassi ($2) is sweet, but doesn't have any discernable extra seasoning (like pistachio). The garlic naan ($2.50?) was the best part of the meal: it was hot, buttery, and--unlike everything else--flavorful. My partner's shrimp dish ($12) seemed fine, but the sauce was a bit too tomatoey. We had it all over peas pullau, which is rice with green peas, almond slivers, and raisins--not bad, but again, not the pinnacle of the cuisine.

The search continues.

Why do I live in suburbia? The access to nature.

I'm a northerner -- I was raised in a place with a fair amount of snow. So when I moved to Decatur, I was excited to learn about the different ecology of the southern climates. We still get frost down here (for frost-free climes you have to drive another 4 or 5 hours south into Florida), but sure enough, the wildlife here is novel to a New Englander.

Case in point: the roaches. Seriously. This journal is really going to be about animals a sane person might possibly want to see, but, if I'm going to write about the local wildlife, the roaches have to get top billing. These things are large -- and I speak as someone who's swatted New York's finest. Paka just got one, as I write this, that was a good 2 inches long, not counting the antennae. They run like the Mars Explorer robot, jerkily, but at an impressive speed, although not fast enough to get away from the cat, who likes to dismember them. Interestingly, they aren't at all interested in our food or even the garbage; they only seem to come in for water. When it's just rained, we get fewer of them, and they're sorely missed, of course. Although their absence is compensated for by the spider crickets, another novelty – ungainly, stripy things even less able to get away from the cat than the roaches are. And best of all are the giant spiders, brown with neon-yellow stripes on their horrible long legs and, sometimes, brilliant orange spots on their bodies, which build perfect, two-foot-wide webs in my back yard.

But enough with the gross-outs. If you're willing to brave the bugs and arachnids, the birds you can see in Decatur are amazing.

To wit: the eastern bluebird. Who knew? I spent my youth in the woods of New England helping hammer together birdhouses to coax the shy bluebird back into the area, but I never saw one. Now, not a hundred feet from my own house in a suburb outside of Atlanta, what should I see but that unmistakable brilliant blue flash? But seeing the bluebird makes me nervous, because I fear for its poor rare life - I only see it smack in the middle of the hunting territory of a red-tailed hawk, which, by the way, I saw swoop out of the upper branch of a tree, snatch a squirrel off the ground, and fly away, the poor squirrel still squeaking.

And all that's within sight of my backyard. There's also the usual array of small mammals -- moles, chipmunks, squirrels -- everywhere. When I go out in the morning for the newspaper, it's like a scene from a Disney film, tiny animals hopping in and out of the ivy:robins, blue jays, and sparrows chirping; mocking birds everywhere; and the occasional loudmouth crow telling them all off. Plus, the neighborhood dogs. It's hard to be lonely here.

For wildlife in a more comprehensible setting, the place to go is the South Peachtree Creek Nature Preserve. It's a pond surrounded by woodland and wet meadowland (and a creek, of course), so there's a wide range of habitats in a very small area, and the density of animals is even higher than in my backyard. Rabbits, of course, and I presume some kind of predator, like foxes, though I haven't seen any myself. Turtles and frogs aplenty, and woodland songbirds all over, though. And on the lake, waterfowl: ducks, herons, geese, and various migratory species. I've heard rumors that there are beavers there, too, but I haven't seen them myself. It looks like a good place for them, though.

The other attraction of the South Peachtree Creek Nature Preserve is the blackberries, which grow wild all over it in early summer. If you go and find them, please leave some for me (and the birds)!

To get to the Preserve, Scott Boulevard to Medlock Road; take Medlock to the end and turn right, go straight until you reach the park. Tell the rabbits I sent you.

[Note to the editors: please don't insert random hyphens in my journal! It's the "upper branch of a tree," not the "upper-branch"; similary, the roaches are "2 inches long," not "2-inches long." If it were a "2-inch cockroach" the hyphen would belong, because the would "2-inch" would be functioning as an adjective. And it's "some kind of predator like foxes," because the foxes are an example of possible predators, whereas "predator-like foxes" would be foxes which merely resembled predators. Maybe they're vegetarians?]

There are two prevailing stereotypes about Agnes Scott College in Atlanta. The first: Scotties are all rich, white, pearl-wearing conservative debutantes attending the same school their grandmothers went to. The second: Scotties are all man-hating, lesbian, radical feminists.

The coexistence of these very contradictory myths reveals two important things about the college: first, its remarkable diversity, and second, just how much it's changed in the past 50 years.

Agnes Scott College is a small (1,000 students) liberal arts college for women, set on about three very pretty blocks just south of the railroad tracks in Decatur. It's a very good school, ranking high on lists of women's colleges nationally and lists of liberal arts colleges in the South. The college prides itself on its diversity, and rightly: 30% of the students come are members of racial or ethnic minorities, and, just as importantly, students of all races come from a wide variety of class backgrounds. There are some of those pearl-wearing third-generation Scotties from myth #1; there are also some of the radical lesbians from myth #2. There are also a lot of students who fit neither stereotype, including a strong Muslim population and a high percentage of international students. There are only two assumptions it's safe to make about an Agnes Scott student: 1) she's female; 2) she's smart.

Fifty years ago, things were different: the students tended to be not only smart and female but also white, Southern, and comparatively affluent. The shift towards diversity took place gradually, starting with the student body and expanding much more slowly into the faculty. The results are impressive. Agnes Scott has created a vibrant, sometimes contentious, but essentially open community.

None of this may be evident to the casual visitor, since students have a habit of mysteriously vanishing from the quad after class hours. But Agnes Scott has some attractions for non-students. For visual art, there’s the Dana Gallery, which exhibits artwork by students and professional artists. There are regular speakers, musical performances, and plays -- check campus postings. And, most unusually, the tree tour, a self-guided walk past an array of old and sometimes rare trees.

[Note to IgoUgo editors: It's a "small liberal arts college," not a "small, liberal arts college." Adding the comma changes the meaning from "a small college at which many of the higher branches of human knowledge are studied" to "a small arts school full of liberals." There are some liberals at ASC, but there are also plenty of scientists.]

....sigh. One thing Decatur isn't, and that's over-literary.

But we're not illiterate, either, thank God. So here, if you need it, is the rundown on local bookstores -- which I provide in case anyone else is in the fix we were in a few years ago, when we had just moved to town and desperately wondered if there were any books to be found.

For new books, your best bet within Decatur proper is Chapter 11 Books in the strip mall on the corner of Clairmont and North Dekalb. It's not huge, but it's adequate, and it gives the discounts, which gives it its name. There's also the alarming Discount Books cattycornered from Chapter 11; any time we go in there, we come out depressed and feeling a little dirty. It's often stack upon stack of Revised Standard Bibles with a few tattered art books. But their stock does vary, depending on what's recently remaindered, and, if you like reading last year's bestsellers, it's probably a good resource.

Used books are a slightly brighter scene, depending on what you're after. The largest array is at Book Nook on North Druid Hills, just east of Clairmont. Book Nook takes trade-ins and has a large array of genre fiction (mysteries, romances, science fiction) as well as a pretty reliable set of the major classics. If you want a cheap copy of, say, Jude the Obscure, this is a pretty good place to try, although it's a lot more reliable if you're after Dune or Warrior's Woman.

Books Again on North Macdonogh Street (just north of the tracks) will be a refreshing change after Book Nook -- it's the other end of the used book spectrum, offering nice hardcovers as well as first editions and signed copies, some of which, the expensive ones-,are kept separately in a locked glass case. Books must do most of their business over the internet these days, because I can't imagine that Decatur has high turnover in signed first editions of Faulkner -- though you never know.

Of course, if you're seriously looking for a particular book, you'll probably end up in Atlanta proper, at one of two places: Borders, whether the one in midtown or the one in Buckhead, or the excellently stocked used bookstore BOOKS on the corner of Virginia and Highland. BOOKS is the best used bookstore we've found in town: it boasts vast array of used paperbacks crammed, in good used-bookstore fashion, into far less space than they need. The books are moderately priced, but more importantly, they're clearly chosen by someone with good taste.