Art of the Meal

So, you’re all grown up now, a successful professional with the tastes to match. But even if you can afford the champagne budget, you still like to indulge your beer taste.

So, have you been to the new aquarium? No, not the giant fish tank across from Atlanta's Centennial Olympic Park - Midtown's new aquarium, at the Woodruff Arts Center.Table 1280, the elegant restaurant designed by Renzo Piano, is not so much a bar and dining room as a habitat. Viewed from the outside, its huge, incandescent glass rectangles swim with beautifully languid diners.

In the comic strip "Mutts," the two faithful dog-and-cat pals are forever enthralled with an appropriately named butcher shop: The Fatty Snax Deli. They hang on the gruff proprietor's every muscle twitch, hoping against hope that some small tidbit - a crisp exterior trimming, a sausage link - might be tossed their way.

First, a warning: If you are a serious traditionalist, and you think pizza ought to be a dough circle with cheese and sausage, you're not going to like Piebar.

It wasn't Judgment at Paris. At that historic 1976 event, subject of a recent book by the same name, the most revered French critics blind-tasted the most famed French wines against upstart California labels - and to everyone's astonishment, the California wines won. The wine world was never the same.

Score another point for small-town resurgence: In downtown Cartersville, chef/co-owner Derek Morgan has (with the help of his contractor father) gutted and rehabbed a former furniture store to open a restaurant that seems out of place only until you go there.

Once upon a time, the town square was a business barometer. You could just about judge the area's prosperity by the opulence of the courthouse, and what kind of commerce was going on in and around it.

Fifteen years ago, Karen Hilliard opened Georgia Grille in south Buckhead, after returning to town from Texas.Closing her nine-table restaurant called Peach's and packing her battered old Coca-Cola cooler into a truck, she'd arrived determined to bring Southwestern flavors to the Old South.