Unfaithful

Dear Certain Favorite Restaurant in Atlanta, with a great bar, heavily tattooed & hardworking staff, possessive of the Best Burger in Atlanta award several times over,

We have been unfaithful.

We unabashedly love you.  We love your venues, we love your spirit and attitude, and we love that we can visit your place over the course of years and still see the same wait staff working there.  That's loyalty.

And we have professed our love for you in countless visits, to have the Black and Blue, the Blue 'Shroom, the Swiss Mushroom and the Four Horsemen.  And with tots.  Always with the tots.  We're sorry that you stopped serving the turkey burger option, but we're still good with guilt-ridden dining on occasion, and for that, we'll still see you.

We are grateful that these items can be accompanied by a small range of nice cold ciders, too.

 But here's the thing:  we've relocated on an extended basis, and the option to see you has now been drastically limited...

...and so, shamefaced and desperate, we eventually went looking for other paramours...

And ohmygoodness...we found one.

We're so sorry.  But we found one!

This is not to say that we didn't find another good, reliable purveyor of burgers here.  We did.  And we'll return to them, even if their ideas about burger toppings are...a little unusual.

But as long as Open Baladin of Rome is in our (squeal!) neighborhood, we will check in there first.

It may be painful for us and for you to see these photographs, but we feel the need to come clean:

That's right, onlookers, that's a wall of beer.  Craft beer made by the purveyor as well as select others.

Be still, my heart.  Excellent wings.  Note the use of environmentally minded, crafted and folded paper vessels for condiments.

For everyone who thought that Italy was just populated by little dark osterias and tavernas, with the signature red and white checked tablecloths, the old Chianti bottles covered in rivulets of candle wax, a mustachio'd, stained-apron-wearing nonna who brought you spaghetti with meatballs to eat while an accordion player wheezed out the Godfather theme...here is your stereotype-killer. You're welcome.

Funky logo design work

Hand-made chips, sprinkled with paprika? Why, yes.

When I told a longtime friend that I might be moving to Rome, she said with characteristic sarcasm:
'I hear they have some art there.'
The post script to that is: it turns out that some of that art is edible.
The stats: thick, lovely hand-formed burger, made only with Piemontese beef, all organic toppings, locally made sesame seed bun.
That amazing bun.
And when you order 'medium' and it arrives, blatantly dark pink in the middle, you turn to Mr. Food Safety, a.k.a. The Spouse, and you ask, 'do you think that this is o.k.?'* He doesn't answer right away because... 

WARNING: you should look away, if the images are too much carnivorism for you to handle.

Do you see any concern on that face?

It appears as though he's saying something, but it was not an answer to my question.  It was something like:
oh my...wow...this is such a mess...but it's SO...
And then, he said no more. 

...except for when he flagged down the tatted/pierced server and asked for a beer.

So, we should close this confessional in order to spare us all any more pain.

It's hard to say this, but we remain loyal - only stateside.

And while we're away from you, we have a 'girl in this port,' and she's amazing.

Hopefully, you can forgive us.

Love always,
The Relocated Americans

p.s.  We would like to assure you that we don't think we'll ever find even a temporary replacement for your other place, which we miss terribly.

*Actually, there is a quality explanation from The Spouse about the color of the beef in my burger (which I spared all vegetarian readers from having to actually see).  After a couple (ahem) different burgers on a couple different visits to this fine establishment, it is clear that the color of the meat is richer and well, redder.  So it's not that my burger was underdone.  It's that the color of the meat is different due to different standards.  The Spouse - who has worked extensively in food safety- explained it like this:
'American beef IS pale, because it's pretty anemic and fatty.  Think about what we do to cows (we don't let them roam much, if at all) and what we feed them (corn and antibiotics), and how Western European countries used to do this too, for awhile, until they started to draw links between rampant use of antibiotics and drug resistant strains of bacteria.  So about 15 years ago, they quit.  The Dutch and the Danes were the first, and everyone else has pretty much followed suit.  What do the cows eat here?  Grass, and not corn, sans antibiotics - the way Mother Nature intended - in open fields.
I'll be sure to snap some shots of those happy roaming bovines at some point in the future.  Moo!