All stories about "Atlanta"

Fred Segal Green, Los Angeles. (photo: L.A. Times)

Boston
• Orinoco: South End Venezuelan restaurant opens a new location in Brookline Village.

Chicago
• Angels & Mariachis: A two-story taqueria and "rock cantina" opened on Monday in the East Village.
• Veerasway: New restaurant in the Warehouse District offers Indian small plates by chef Angela Lee.
• Zed 451: New River North restaurant served global fare made with seasonal market products.

Rebar, Chicago.

Boston
• Leokadia: A new South End shop carries exclusive shoe collections, jewelry and accessories.
• Scampo: Local culinary star Lydia Shire opens a fine-dining Italian restaurant inside the Liberty Hotel.

Social, Cofresi.

Boston
• Atelier: A new Back Bay salon has just three coveted seats for haircuts with stylist Dean Mellen.

The London West Hollywood, Los Angeles.

Atlanta • Bliss Spa: A 4,000 square foot spa, which includes a retail beauty boutique and the brand's famous brownie buffet, opens at the W Hotel in Midtown. • Korean Catering House: With Korean signage, the English name of this new Duluth restaurant is actually yet-to-be determined. • Tierra Salon: A new men's salon offers services for all budgets, from $15 haircuts to $140 hot stone massages.

Boston
• Aroa Fine Chocolate: This South End chocolate shop satisfies sweet teeth with bonbons, plated desserts and seven types of hot chocolate.

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Dallas
• Ra Sushi: Sushi and Asian fusion restaurant chain opens a new location in Plano at The Shops at Legacy.

Las Vegas
• Starlight Tattoo: Celebrity tattoo artist Mario Barth, who has worked on Snoop Dogg and Nikki Sixx, opens a new, late-night tattoo parlor at Mandalay Bay.

InterContinental Hanoi Westlake, Hanoi.

Boston
• 606 Congress: A New American restaurant with a seafood-heavy menu is now open inside the Renaissance Boston Waterfront Hotel.

Chicago
• Berry Chill: This frozen yogurt shop opened last week, beating the arrival of a Pinkberry.
• Drew's Eatery: Catering to eco-conscious diners, this new café is entirely green -- from its organic food to its biodegradable serveware.

Downtown Atlanta is still trashed after Friday's tornado, which pummeled the city with 130mph winds. The police are warning citizens to stay out of Downtown unless they have business in the area: "You are coming into a zone that has a lot of safety issues." The hazards in Atlanta include traffic lights that don't work, and in some cases, are hanging precariously over the streets. Downtown skyscrapers are in such bad shape that "even a light breeze could cause glass to fall to the street or sidewalk." It's all good though, I'm sure they'll get all the aid and support they need from the government in a rapid and effective manner! [CNN]

The AP takes a look at Atlanta's most famous street, named for Georgia's most famous crop. One sign of the capital city's fruit obsession, Peachtree Street holds a number of hotels, the Lenox Square Mall, The High Museum, as well as the city's leading nightlife attractions. [via]

Boston
• Citrio: Newton Highlands catering company opens a café and provisions shop for gourmands.
• Privus: The owner of Irish pub Kells branches out with a Japanese sushi restaurant in Allston.

Bhutan
• Taj Tashi: Now open in Timphu, the Taj features 66 suites with a Bhutanese restaurant, spa, golf course.

Boston
• Brix: A wine shop in the South End featuring $75 wine six-packs and a private tasting room.
• Concepts: Browse limited edition sneakers, skateboards, snowboards, and apparel at this new Cambridge shop, then head downstairs to admire your purchases in a VIP lounge.
• Grezzo: There's 100% organic, raw, vegan food and fine dining atmosphere aplenty in this new North End eatery.

In their March 2008 issue, Bon Appetit takes a look at "the modern Southern cuisine movement" in Atlanta. This style of cooking re-imagines soul food and traditional Southern staples with innovative fusions and today's trendiest ingredients from truffles to sushi grade fish. As with all true foodie revolutionaries, Atlanta's nouveau Southern chefs pride themselves on using the freshest possible produce. Bon Appetit says mod Southern cuisine in Atlanta started with South City Kitchen and Horseradish Grill, but the movement has taken off of late. Here's a map of their Atlanta choices for haute comfort food in stylish surrounds.

If you enjoyed our graph of historical subway fare hikes, check out this more scientific and extremely thorough analysis of the fare structure for all the major public transit systems in the US. Nerd Alert: It's really pretty fascinating if you care about stats and/or transit in any way. [Goodspeed Update]

• Café Circa: New restaurant featuring island-inspired fare and live performances opens downtown.
• Cuerno: New midtown restaurant by the owners of neighboring Beleza serves food and drink with a Spanish flair.

The little bundles of red joy known as the Zagat guides are surveying the masses for upcoming Washington DC/Baltimore guides. Complete the online survey by February 24 and you'll get a free copy of the guide when it comes out. Atlanta and Chicago on deck as well. [Zagat]

Momofuku Noodle Bar, New York.

Atlanta
• Stats Food Play: This new American restaurant, which doubles as a recreation facility and sports bar, is now open downtown.

Chicago
• Me & Ro: New York designer Robin Renzi opens a Midwest outlet to showcase her celebrity-coveted fine jewelry.

London
• Alain Ducasse: This culinary icon opened an eponymous restaurant at the Dorchester hotel yesterday; a refined French menu showcases British ingredients.

It's a well-known fact that hybrid vehicles run on beautiful dreams, and their only exhaust is rainbows. Therefore it's no surprise that chauffeur car services that offer all-hybrid fleets are becoming popular in big cities as a way to get from point A to point B while minimizing your personal guilt footprint. Joining such services as New York's OZOcar, Los Angeles' Ecolimo, and San Francisco's PlanetTran, Atlanta's new Elite Green Car offers the usual fleet of Lexus RX 400 hybrids capable of navigating every possible combination and variation of streets named Peachtree and/or Dunwoody. No free wifi as in some of the truly decadent hybrid limos, but maybe you should get off the Internet for a moment and think about what you've done to help the environment lately. Rates for Elite Green Car start at $40 one-way, or a $55 hourly charge for some areas.

Elite Green Car [Official site]

We almost never write about Atlanta because it generally only gets national travel attention for peaches, crime, or baseball. But we feel we owe occasional guidance to the 5.1 million residents of that southern city and the countless people stuck there for conferences or whatnot. Luckily enough, Travel & Leisure ran comprehensive Atlanta restaurant roundup a few months back, which we trust since it was written and fact checked by real journalists. So here are our favorites of the T&L picks, analyzed and then forced into our beautiful mapping system.

Christopher Elliott is a meat & potatoes guy who spends most of his time covering the operational side of travel -- which in brief terms, amounts to collating and tracking a lot of consumer bitchery. In the latest installment of his syndicated column "The Troubleshooter," he notes that all travelers have their personal blacklists of entities they'll never do business with again, in the face of all reason, due to past slights (repeated or otherwise, imaginary or actual). Elliott then goes on to present a laundry list of collected grievances from his readers, which is all well and good, but I was hoping we'd get to see Elliott's blacklist. Of course, he can't really devote a column to that, since he's scrupulous journalist. Fortunately, I am not.

As the two ostensible weekend houseguests still sleeping on my couch attest, the nation's air traffic system -- particularly on the East Coast -- has become ridiculously fragile. Intermittent coastal weather that never seriously troubled either New York or Atlanta nevertheless delayed and canceled flights in both airports all weekend long, and those two airports were hardly alone. Things aren't much better on the ground, either. By Sunday night, La Guardia's already claustrophobic Delta terminal was a horror show of clogged toilets and overflowing trash cans, not to mention limited food and beverage service in the few concessions due to shortages. (Send photos of the carnage if you got 'em.) Some passengers bounced from overbooked flights were told to not even bother coming back today, given that every single Monday flight is now overbooked with weekend overflow. In other words: time to rediscover your love affair with Amtrak.

Airline delays are here to stay [Record]

Though we certainly do our best, we understand that sometimes you're going to find yourself in places where we've yet to scout out clean toilets. For those rare occasions when you're not near a bar or Apple Store (shame on you), MizPee promises to point you in the direction of minimal plumbing-related grime. Enter your location via your mobile web browser (currently limited to Portland OR, Minneapolis, San Francisco, Washington DC, Atlanta, Oakland, and San Jose), and you get a list of nearby toilets with address, distance, rating, cost, etc. Another inconvenience of urban life solved by the magic of the intertubes.

MizPee [Official site]

Just go through Canada! Say you're infected with a highly drug-resistant form of a deadly contagious disease. Should you get on an international flight with a few hundred other people in the enclosed space of a plane, potentially infecting them? Even if physicians who have tested you recommend against such travel? Well sure, why not -- if the doctors didn't explicitly forbid you from traveling, or legally compel you not to travel, how bad can it be? Aside from coughing up blood and having your tissue necrotize to the consistency of soft, white cheese until you die, it's not such a big deal. An as-yet unidentified Georgia man with dual Russian-American citizenship was diagnosed with tuberculosis in early May, and health officials advised him not to fly. But he'd already arranged for a wedding and honeymoon in Europe, so he went anyway. Then the Centers for Disease Control contacted him while he was in Rome, and things got a little more serious.

We had the pleasure of attending the James Beard Foundation Awards last night which honored the best chefs and restaurants across the country. The highlight for guests was the gala reception, where 30+ current and former rising-star chefs presented their off-the-hook creations -- think cotton candy wrapped around foie gras and peekytoe crab cappuccino with lemon verbena. But the real reason for the ceremony was to give out big gold medals. It's easy to say that everyone deserved to win, especially in food obsessed cities like New York, San Francisco, and Chicago. But in the end, some people deserved to win more than others. There weren't really any upsets except that foodie San Fran won surprisingly few awards. New York really put them away, but then again, the city has an award (Best Chef: New York City) all to itself. Find out all the winners after the jump.

It's hard to tell exactly what's "European" about midtown Atlanta's Bazzaar, other than the fact that it's not a sports bar. Nevertheless, it's a swank two-story lounge that has won over the locals with quality drinks and a chill vibe. The downstairs is open and simply decorated (heavy on the reds), with a nice marble bar and light app food service. The upstairs loft sports a few more intimate spaces for semi-public canoodling, and it's also where the DJ makes his lair. You can also reserve a "vintage sofa" in the "living room."

Bazzaar [via Not For Tourists]

-- Chris Mohney