The verdict on 3 new Atlanta restaurants: Palo Santo, Mambo Zombi, and the Bite of Korea

Palo Santo
Palo santo (the wooden from the tree, burned for perfume) wafts via the eating room of Palo Santo (the brand new, upscale modern-Mexican restaurant on Marietta Road), the place ice cubes within the cocktails are stamped with PALO SANTO: This looks like a capital-p Manufacturing, from the second you hand your keys to the valet (the one parking choice) and enter via the rear of the constructing. Consideration to element is obvious throughout chef Santiago Gomez’s menu, with each dish exactly and sometimes gorgeously plated (tostadas, together with a hamachi tostada with charred serrano-yuzu mayo and burnt avocado, are served atop a mattress of dried corn kernels) and generally—as in a starter of papas bravas: crisp potatoes in chile de arbol mayo—completed tableside. (This final, the place the server principally tossed the potatoes with their sauce such as you would a salad, felt a bit extraneous. However, possibly some aptitude helps distract from the truth that you’re paying $18 for a bowl of potatoes and mayonnaise. An excellent bowl of potatoes and mayo—with black truffle shavings—however nonetheless.) A veteran chef who’s labored with such luminaries as Daniel Boulud, Gomez sources substances from regional producers in addition to small farms in Mexico and has assembled a pleasingly eclectic assortment of dishes. Meat lovers may be sated by entrees like carne asada with turnip-jalapeño puree, however seafood abounds (e.g., wood-fired branzino marinated in citrus and guajillo), as do vegetable choices like a winter squash tetela: a griddled masa cake with mushrooms and shiitake mole. Reservations can be found for 2 areas: the primary eating room and a rooftop lounge serving a smaller, snackier choice. Westside

Mambo Zombi
Far above the hustle and bustle of Edgewood Avenue, a cool respite: this new bar from the house owners of Joystick Gamebar and Georgia Beer Backyard, whose prime flooring this spot inhabits. On the apex of an exterior staircase, the door to Mambo Zombi opens right into a coffin-shaped aperture that glows pink—Freud would have a discipline day. However that’s only the start of the eye-catching decor, which mixes a Day of the Useless motif (e.g., plastic skulls on candelabras) with Afro-Caribbean and different visible parts, hanging crops, and informal furnishings such as you would possibly discover in a buddy’s house. One of many companions is Kysha Cyrus, a veteran Atlanta bartender whose drinks right here lean tiki-ish and rum-forward, incorporating substances as far-flung because the decorations: Curry leaf, as an illustration, perfumes a cocktail referred to as the Rum Ting Ting, and Cyrus’s Elote mixes Rhum Barbancourt from Haiti with housemade corn milk and sweetened condensed milk. The menu additionally contains a number of nonalcoholic choices (together with what the menu describes as a “pre–Incan Empire Andean drink” with purple corn, pineapple husk, piloncillo sugar, fruit, and warming spices), a hemisphere-spanning beer checklist (Costa Rica’s Imperial, Brazil’s Xingu Black), and varied insouciant jokes (underneath “Snacks,” the one merchandise listed on a latest go to was “YOUR DAD,” although it appeared like different choices are within the offing); the bogs, in the meantime, are adorned with stuffed animals with vulgar phrases written on them. Briefly, this place is ideal. Previous Fourth Ward

The Chunk of Korea
BOK for brief—the phrase means “fortune” in Korean—the Chunk of Korea will already be acquainted to many Atlanta diners; the enterprise launched two years in the past as a pop-up and has been a gentle presence round city since then, together with at a weekly Sunday outing within the car parking zone of A Mano. Now, proprietors Gavin Lee and Chloe Jung have landed everlasting digs similtaneously they’ve laid declare to being the one Korean restaurant in Tucker. The menu contains confirmed hits like BOK’s signature bulgogi quesadilla, which is . . . nicely, it’s nearly nearly as good because the phrase “bulgogi quesadilla” sounds, wealthy and gooey meat enclosed in a cracklingly crisp tortilla and served with bitter cream and spicy aioli. Not-too-serious avenue meals is a spotlight right here—see additionally BOK’s sodduk skewers (fried rice desserts with pork sausage, gochujang, and honey mustard) and corn cheese (an unctuous Korean fave, and a really melodious mixture of substances)—in addition to extra substantial bowls of bibimbap and gochujang hen, all of which include an assortment of very fresh-tasting banchan. Sporting an off-the-cuff, spacious eating room, the restaurant shares a car parking zone with a Publix in addition to one other space newcomer: the most recent outpost of Giovanni Di Palma’s Antico Pizza. Tucker

This text seems in our December 2022 problem.

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