Looking for the Cool in Atlanta

Atlanta was a bit of a challenge for me. I traveled there for work, taking a couple of extra days at the beginning of my trip to explore the city, which I'd never visited. What I found was a mixed bag - Atlanta's been angling for World Class City status since it was selected to host the 1996 Olympics, but I think it still has a little ways to go, especially when it comes to smoothing the way for tourist-friendly transit to obvious destinations like the downtown museums.

There are good reasons to visit, though, and I've got plenty of advice if you want to avoid the pitfalls I landed in, so read on!

Most of the best things about the city take a little digging to find, but there are top-notch museums (and some nice public art in unexpected places), a lively local music scene, high end shopping and restaurants that makes up for their uneven quality with some good values and inventive concepts, like the excellent soul tapas I had my first night in town. There's even some of those fabled walkable urban neighborhoods (even one with an IKEA!), though it took me the better part of a week to find those. And as befitting a city with such a rich history, pockets of the past are everywhere - you can take a walking tour of civil rights-era landmarks and catch a peach-scented whiff of antebellum south if the wind's right. Drink a lot of sweet tea, keep out of the sun at high noon and don't try to walk as fast as you do in Manhattan (seriously, it's hot), and you'll have a good time.

Quick Tips:

Most of the hotels in the city are clustered together downtown, but if you're in the city purely for pleasure, I'd recommend staying elsewhere in the city. You'll be closer to good restaurants and walkable neighborhoods, and will probably avoid the overpriced places that thrive on expense account spending in the city center. I'd recommend Buckhead if you're looking to go high end, and Decatur if you're a young hipster and/or interested in the city's gay scene. Midtown is nice too, and close to Piedmont Park if you like spending time outdoors.

Doing some planning helps if you'll be visiting Atlanta - the city's big and sprawly enough that you'll want to pick an area and focus on it for the day, since crossing town will eat up a lot of time. Similarly, if you want to eat out a lot, put a little time into researching your choices. Winging it can result in some incredibly disappointing meals.

Get yourself a good map, one that covers the entire city. The maps in guidebooks don't provide enough context or detail to make sense of the city's layout, and for what it's worth I found the Fodor's 2007 guide to the city to be almost useless.

The Georgia Aquarium is a must-see - the highlight of my trip - as are the spots that make the city special, like the Sweet Auburn area where you can check out Ebeneezer Baptist, Martin Luther King Jr.'s church.

Best Way To Get Around:

I was careless for the most part, limited to MARTA, Atlanta's public transit system. It covers a lot of ground by bus and train (mostly bus), but doesn't overlap very well with tourist-y spots and walkable neighborhoods - I generally had to walk a ways from the nearest train stop to get where I was going, even when visiting downtown spots like the Georgia Aquarium. Single fares are .75, but if you're staying for a few days, you can save a little money by getting a 7-day pass. All the train stations have nice handy computerized signs telling you how long you'll be waiting for the next train. Unfortunately sometimes that wait will be close to half an hour - people run for trains in this town, and you'll figure out why very quickly.

My buddy Russ lives in Atlanta, and he hasn't set foot on a bus or train in an age. He's a transplant from Boston, where you don't need a car, but has gone fully native, and I was totally grateful for it when spending time with him. Atlanta is more car-friendly than most of the cities I'm used to, so I'm going to go ahead and say that you're better off having one available, especially if you're staying anywhere other than downtown. Traffic is reputed to be lousy and always getting worse as the city grows, so take a pass on dealing with rush hour if you can. Some neighborhoods might not be great for parking, but you'll probably have to do just as much walking if you're arriving via MARTA. I took a few cabs, but they're not as easy to flag off the street as they are in East Coast cities, so it would probably be helpful to keep the number of a cab company on you if you plan to rely on taxis.

My favorite methods of all, walking and biking, aren't much use, especially if you're visiting during the hottest months of the year. Being outdoors at all in late June wasn't a lot of fun, though it did make me grateful for the air-conditioned everything in the city.

If you’re in town for an event at the Georgia World Congress Center, stay at the Omni if you can – many hotels are within walking distance of the GWCC, but the Omni is the closest by far, and quite a nice place to stay, too. I wouldn’t recommend it for a tourist visit, though. Travelers would be better off staying in more neighborhood-y parts of the city. The only nearby tourist attractions are the (must-see) Georgia Aquarium and the World of Coca-Cola exhibit, as well as Centennial Olympic Park and the CNN Center/Studio Tour, but they’re right on top of each other, and can all be visited in one day.

I spent five nights at the Omni, booked through two separate reservations made on two different credit cards, only one of which I wanted to actually get charged, and I showed up about three hours before check-in time. The Omni staff didn’t even blink, and that level of service turned out to be the standard. Every evening I came back to a small bottle of milk in my ice bucket and a huge chocolate chip cookie next to it, plus turned-down linens and a small card on the nightstand letting me know the next day's weather. The layout of the hotel is a little tricky, with multiple sets of elevators and four floors of lobbies spread across two buildings, so staff members roam around just to point you toward the restaurant or tell you where the fitness center is. My room was spacious, with the requisite mini-amenities you’d expect in a low-end-of-the-high-end hotel: waffle-weave robe, extensive minibar, lots of unnecessary pillows on the (king) bed and some extra toiletry items like mouthwash in the bathroom. Lounge areas were similarly plush, and plentiful. Guests get free wi-fi access throughout the hotel, a big plus when traveling on business.

There are a couple of cons. The pool is minuscule, and overlooks a whole lot of nothing – train tracks and some criss-crossing highways. The window in my room faced those tracks too, and I was woken up more than once by the noise from passing freight trains, and I sleep like the dead. You can avoid that noise thing by requesting a room in the South Tower, or one that faces Centennial Olympic Park. The Omni does not appear to be with the program as far as opting out of linen refreshes (You’ll get new towels every day and you’ll like them!) which may chafe against your greener impulses. The proximity of the convention center means (duh) lots of business travelers and conference-goers may flood the hotel at any time, and overwhelm the lobby areas with loud shop talk and thousands of matching tote bags.

Check around for rates – I beat the conference rate by almost a hundred bucks for the weekend preceding it started by paying with AmEx and booking through the hotel’s website. Weekend rates are probably better in general, due to all the GWCC business.

Some of my colleagues chose Dailey’s for a semi-splashy expense-account dinner, and even though I didn’t pay a dime for my meal, I still left feeling like I’d been a little ripped off. The entire experience made me think of how a certain type of guy will describe a woman as a "Monet" – good-looking, until you get close enough to see what a mess she is. Dailey’s is a total Monet of a restaurant. There’s a dramatic second-floor dining room with dark wood walls and low-key decor oriented around an old carousel. It’s enough to distract you for a good ten minutes from the fact that you’re sitting on a cheap-o bent metal and padded vinyl chair, one step up from molded plastic. The hum of conversation and music is pleasant, until you find yourself straining to hear your waiter describing what’s on offer for the night – the menu is a verbal one, backed up by brief descriptions on small chalkboards at each seat. The chalkboard is the menu in shorthand ("Pork Chops," "Tuna") and if you miss the recitation of the menu, you’re pretty much flying blind. Dessert operates in much the same way, with the added wrinkle that instead of being given a chalkboard, you have to wind your way across the crowded dining area to a stationary display where choices are laid out - unlabeled - and wait around for someone to tell you exactly what it is you’re looking at. Desserts emphasize quantity over quality – unspectacular but massive portions that will run you close to ten dollars across the board.

Nearly every member of our party (ten people altogether) found the food to be underwhelming and pretty bland. My entrée was a tuna steak with a bog-standard soy-ginger glaze that somehow managed to be shockingly flavorless. I asked for the fish to be served as rare as possible, and got something dry and overcooked – a terrible thing to do to tuna. I do want to note that the red meat eaters among us were much happier than those of us having seafood or veggie meals, and all of us were well pleased with the wine list (or, more precisely, the selections of the senior sales rep who chose wine for the table). Cocktails were also well-made and strong, probably the best value in the house.

Dailey’s also has a downstairs cigar bar with live jazz in the evenings. The bar had a great atmosphere and was packed with a giddy, decidedly adult crowd (it struck me as the sort of place to go when you’re dating for the first time after your recent divorce), but we couldn’t handle the smoke for more than the time it took to down a quick drink.

Here’s a rhetorical question for you. It’s kind of like one of those zen koans: What do you call a seafood restaurant that has run out of almost every fish listed on the menu? The kitchen had run out of salmon, tuna, grouper and scallops by the time we showed up for dinner (admittedly on a Sunday night, which is the time when restaurants are most likely to run out of perishable food), leaving us about 5 different entrée choices, only two of them actually involving seafood. The rub is that we weren’t looking at a menu that gets handed to every customer every day of the week. Ray’s does a different menu every day, and the chef decided to offer multiple renditions of the most popular fish to get the menu to a good length, even though doing so pretty much guaranteed that he’d run out of all of them well before closing. We had been looking forward to the secondary sushi menu and sake list, after being burned by a closed-for-the-night-at-9-PM Japanese place on the other side of downtown, but our only options there were cucumber rolls and pieces of eel.

I ate with two colleagues, and all three of us ended up ordering crab cakes, which were good but not worth the price. This cost-to-quality disconnect seemed to be universal when it came to downtown restaurants.

Though it was a poor match with my meal, I ordered a small cold pitcher from the extensive sake list – Ray’s might be a good choice for a pre- or post-dinner cocktail, though, again, you’ll pay more than you ought to.

For sheer Atlanta-ness, Rare was hands-down the best restaurant I found in the city: a tapas-style take on soul food served in a plush, lounge-y room to a crowd of very well-dressed professional-types (seriously, I was a little embarrassed by my going-to-a-baseball-game-later outfit). There are bar seats and a cafe section near the front of the house, but you'll want to sit in the dramatic main dining room where a lucky few will eat their meals from pillow-laden cushioned benches. Everyone else will get more typical seating, but the fabulous casbah-inspired atmosphere should keep you from getting too envious, and once the food arrives you'll be past caring what you're sitting on.

The menu concept sounds a little jokey, and I wasn't really sure what to expect, but the newspaper review I read was a rave, and there was a seat at the bar available when I arrived. There's a specialty cocktail menu, but I stuck with my favorite anachronistic old man drink (highball) which was pleasantly strong. The universally awesome thing about tapas is that you can have a fairly inexpensive meal at a fancy-pants place. Rare helps you out by serving "small plates" that are actually pretty sizable. My Egyptian Feta Salad was served on a freakin' dinner plate and that, plus an order of Georgia Street Tacos (tilapia, remoulaude and southern caviar) was plenty filling. I don't eat poultry or red meat, which limited the menu somewhat, but there's a good selection for fish eaters. Vegetarians will not find much more than token acknowledgment. If I did eat chicken, I'd have felt obligated to try the Chicken and Waffles, because, dude, chicken and waffles!

My boss, who's about 15 years older than me, summers in Provincetown and old-school WASP (ie Not Like Me) was in Atlanta a couple months after I returned from my trip. I recommended this place to me and he's been raving about it as well - you get a bonus thumbs up with this review!

I ate a very early dinner on a Friday night and didn't have to wait for a table, but the restaurant filled up quite quickly so reservations are probably a good idea. This felt like the type of place that gets a big crowd at peak times, and rightly so. I imagine it's also a good after-dinner cocktail spot. A review I read on another website that shall not be named said Rare felt a bit like a Sex In The City kinda place, but it's in Atlanta, so not all the customers are white.

I was actually able to visit the Georgia Aquarium for free, because the conference I attended held an opening-night reception there, but I would have gladly paid the adult admission cost, which is $23 ($17 for kids). That’s not much more than what my local aquarium in Boston charges, and the Georgia Aquarium beats it by a mile. About three thousand teachers and school administrators, on top of the visitors who were already there, filled the place to bursting, and every exhibit was jam-packed so tight you could barely move. The pungent smell of not-so-appetizing catered food and Sterno carried throughout the entire building, and camera flashes went off approximately eighty million times a minute. Despite all these distractions and annoyances I was utterly transfixed, and had to be dragged out by my colleagues.

There are five major exhibits to explore, each featuring a different water ecosystem, and all include contextualized displays, giving you a sense of what the associated landscape might look like. You can walk around and under tanks, usually from multiple heights, and in the largest exhibit, the Ocean Voyager, has a 100 foot-long clear tunnel running right through its 6 million gallon tank, so you can watch creatures like 600 pound grouper swimming right above your head. The usual suspects are all here: otherworldly sea dragons and so-cute-you-wanna-try-to-walk-off-with-them penguins (from Africa!), but there’s also creatures you don’t often get to see in an aquarium (or anywhere else, for that matter) like beluga whales, giant Japanese crabs (which can grow to the size of cars), and whale sharks. The beluga tank alone dwarfed most of the exhibits I’ve ever seen in aquariums like the Shedd in Chicago, or California’s Monterey Bay, and you’d have to travel all the way to Asia to see another whale shark in captivity. The Georgia Aquarium has four of them! There’s a side mini-exhibit that looks like a commercial for a shipping company, but is actually a really interesting record of the massive effort of shipping those whale sharks to the aquarium before it opened.

A Georgia resident I met while in Atlanta said that he’d been waiting since 2005, when the aquarium opened, for visitor traffic to fall off a little, so he could see the place when it wasn’t so crowded. He’d been waiting two years and there was no sign he’d get his wish anytime soon. You’ll have to deal with large crowds, but it’s more than worth it, and you can probably avoid the worst of it by visiting on a weekday and showing up early.

Turner Field, in addition to being a great venue for a baseball game, is also a pretty fun place to hang out. It’s not a vertigo-inducing canyon like US Cellular Field in Chicago, or so protective of its heritage that it can be a little boring if you’re not riveted to the game and/or drunk like Fenway or Wrigley Field. The park was originally built as a venue for the 1996 Olympics, and was inspired by the then-new "throwback" style of Camden Yards in Baltimore. It’s got the big scoreboard and endless distractions that are de rigueur in the ADD age, including a number of kid-oriented activity areas, and there are tons of observation areas and standing-room spots that allow you to wander around to watch the game from a number of different angles and heights. My standing room only ticket cost me a whole dollar (though fees for online purchase pushed that closer to the cost of a matinée movie) and gave me entry into just about everywhere I was interested in going, including a seat, since the upper levels were half empty. Most games have some kind of giveaway or promotion on, as well. This is all really useful, given that the ballpark is in a bit of a dead zone – there's no real surrounding neighborhood where you can grab a meal or a drink before or after the game, and you have to get inside the gates of the park to get at any of the game-day atmosphere. I mean, I didn't even see any bootleg T-shirt vendors outside the park, and those guys are like roaches – they can thrive anywhere.

The downside to all the hand-holding and managed distractions is that the crowd isn’t particularly enthusiastic or passionate. It’s too easy to check out entirely. The game I went to was tied for five and a half innings, and most of the fans seemed disappointed by that. You certainly won’t see the passion exhibited by Red Sox fans (my gold standard), even in post-season games. As my friend Dave once said, watching an Atlanta LCS game on TV, "If you can’t be bothered to sell out your playoff games, you don’t deserve to go to the World Series." Not that the Braves are likely to get there anytime soon…

MARTA runs shuttle buses between Five Points station and the park – just make sure you tap your smart card on the exit turnstiles to get the free transfer. The old baseball park across the street is now Turner Field's parking facility, so there's a place to stash your car if you're driving.

First things first: No, you groupies, Anderson Cooper will not be personally leading your tour. In fact, you’re unlikely to see any of the more famous CNN personalities in the Atlanta studios at all – many shows are shot and broadcast out of NYC, including nearly all of the personality-driven shows like Cooper’s. But that doesn’t mean the tour’s a waste of time. For $12, you’ll get a trip through the back hallways of the studio, with stops to look down from observation windows at the studio floors for both CNN and Headline News (I watched one production staff member slacking off, looking at celebrity gossip websites.) You’ll also spend some time in a small theater to watch in real-time how all the different camera feeds are edited together into a live broadcast. I happened to be taking the tour during the landing of a Space Shuttle mission, which was a particularly complicated broadcast, with several remote cameras and NASA talking heads standing by, but the logistics are always complex enough to be really interesting, and chances are you’ll get to overhear a program director getting snippy with someone or making an off-color comment, which is always fun. Other stops include a demo of a TelePrompTer (one lucky member of your tour group will get to sit behind a desk in a fake studio and read some copy) and the tricks of the trade for working with a Chromakey (green screen) weather map. (Hint: don’t point directly at anything, because your monitor may not be showing you a perfect picture. Wave in the general direction of the city or weather system you’re talking about instead.) Some of the most interesting parts of the tour are quite literally in the back hallways of the studio – cases line the staircases displaying things like the vest a correspondent wore during the first Iraq war, with thousands of dollars in bribe money sewn into the lining. You’ll even hear a little about the history of the building housing the studio, and the reason why it boasts the world’s largest freestanding escalator (eight stories – you’ll ride all the way up to start the tour).

On the ground floor of the CNN Center is a mall-style food court and a couple of Turner Broadcasting gift shops, as well as a mini-studio where you can record a souvenir video of yourself behind a CNN desk reading some headlines. I wouldn't call this a must-see for every visitor to Atlanta, but anyone who's interested in TV production or a news junkie will enjoy it a lot.

Tours begin every 10 minutes from 9 to 6, 7 days a week, but CNN recommends you reserve a tour spot. I was able to walk up on a Friday afternoon and join the very next tour to leave. There’s a MARTA stop for the CNN Center, but it’s actually a couple blocks away from the building itself. Signs will point you in the right direction.

Criminal Records
466 Moreland Ave

Wax 'n Facts
432 Moreland Ave

I was sort of disgusted by the readership of Creative Loafing when I read the newspaper’s Best of Atlanta 2006 list: The editors opted for local businesses, but the reader’s poll named Best Buy as the best record store in Atlanta. After visiting Wax & Facts and Criminal, both within a block of each other in Little Five Points, I understood what they were getting at. Both places have a well-chosen but ultimately tiny selection, heavy on indie-flavored rock, most of which is stored out of customer’s reach, in locked cabinets or behind the counter. I found the latest National album at both, but neither had any of their back releases, even though the band had played a pretty good-sized Atlanta venue in the last couple of weeks. Criminal gave over most of its meager square footage to comics, plus a smattering of books and toys, rather than CDs, resulting in mediocre offerings on all fronts. For those who are familiar with Boston, imagine the breadth and randomness of Newbury Comics’ inventory, but without the real estate to do any of it justice. Prices were neither super-high or remarkably low. Criminal has the slight edge on prices – browse at both (they’re both, for all their shortcomings, good for that) but save about a buck a disc by shopping there.

This isn’t so much an "experience" as a set of recommendations for anyone who intends to eat a lot of meals out and doesn’t have a local source in the know. I’m in no way a snob about eating out, but overall I think Atlanta’s restaurants are so hit-or-miss that some work is necessary if you don’t want to be disappointed by your meal. I had a couple of terrific meals, but I had to go looking for them, and I paid way too much for food that wasn’t worth half its price more than once.

I don’t generally think of myself as a foodie, nor do I make a habit of researching the heck out of restaurant choices the way I do bookstores and obscure museums when visiting a new city. Most places I’ve been, it hasn’t seemed necessary – glance at a good local website for featured eateries, pick one with entrées in the $10-15 range and/or a novel menu gimmick/ethnic cuisine, and I’m good to go. It takes about a minute and a half, and I can’t remember ever feeling burned by this method. More often than not I pick a place to eat by glancing at menus posted in windows when I’m out and about. But man, Atlanta restaurants are not to be trusted.

Here’s the numbers: I tried to go to nine different restaurants. Of those nine, three were either not open when they should have been or out of business altogether. Of the six I actually ate at, four were disappointments. Two of the four disappointing places were expensive (entrées approaching thirty bucks) to boot. I went a whole 2 for 9 in Atlanta, when I usually bat close to a thousand. The Braves got swept that weekend, too. Maybe something was in the air.

I’m not sure if my experiences eating out in Atlanta were due to an extraordinary string of fantastically bad luck, poor judgment, or a baseline standard for what’s good restaurant food that’s way lower than what I’m used to, but I have my suspicions. In any case, even if you find you’re not as cranky as I was about the quality of the food, it’s absolutely necessary to call a restaurant before you show up. It’s not about getting reservations; it’s about making sure the restaurant actually exists and is open for business. I got burned several times by spontaneous closings ("We’re taking the day off to go to the Pride Parade!"), undocumented overhauls ("We don’t do tapas anymore, now we serve Modern American food!") and maddeningly unpredictable opening hours ("We think it’s absurd that you’d want to eat dinner after 8 o’clock!") Even if you’re not picky about the food, the practicalities of eating out in Atlanta are surprisingly tricky for a city that’s supposedly world-class.

Here’s what to do if you’re interested in the quality of what you eat: Ignore downtown, especially around Peachtree Center’s hotel tower canyon (i.e., where the Hooters is), even if you’re not footing the bill (because the food tends to be criminally overpriced in that area). Other options should be honest-to-gosh researched if you want to eat anything vaguely interesting – find at least two reviews if you’re doing things online, and check the dates. Good restaurants are out there – my first night in town I hit the jackpot with a "Soul Tapas" place that had terrific local atmosphere, plus mezze-style salad and chicken and waffles on the menu – but you’ll have to do a little looking for them. Don’t trust Creative Loafing (Atlanta’s alternative weekly newspaper) for this – the online restaurant database is seriously out-of-date, and whoever writes their reviews has awfully low standards. I had some good luck with Yelp.com, though the Atlanta content on the site isn’t nearly as extensive as it is for geekier cities like Boston or San Francisco. Dedicated foodie boards like Chowhound may be helpful as well. I decided my guidebook was fairly useless (glad I got it at the library!) early on, so no help there. The best food and drink I had was in Decatur, at places my buddy Russ took me to. Too bad I couldn’t carry him in my pocket all week long. Once you’ve chosen a restaurant, make sure you’ve got good directions, especially if you’re trying to get there by train or bus. Transit hubs don’t overlap very well with dense walkable neighborhoods in this city, and you may have to take a bit of a hike to get where you’re going, occasionally through an area that doesn’t look like it’s got any human life at all.

That sounds like a lot of effort - I feel obligated to point out again that I’m not picky - but I promise it’s worth it.