The 16,000-square-foot Chattahoochee Food Works (CFW) on the threshold of Underwood Hills now has a movie star attached to it: Andrew Zimmern. According to a press release sent Monday, the restaurateur and host of Bizarre Foods is the “culinary consultant” to Robert Montwaid, the marketplace’s operator, and could assist “expand a unique and numerous expertise blend” at the “boutique food market.” The pair has a longtime record of beginning food halls: They have also partnered at the Dayton in downtown Minneapolis to open next year, and Montwaid opened the Gansevoort Market in New York City in 2014.
Like Ponce City Market, Marietta Square Market, and the but-to-open Halcyon in Forsyth County, Chattahoochee Food Works mainly follows the established food corridor method, with eating place stalls that feature “worldwide fare,” “artisanal” stores, chef activities, a take a look at the kitchen, an indoor-out of doors bar, and an all-weather patio with a firewall overlooking a quarter-mile park. The marketplace is a part of The Works, an eighty-acre overhaul of several warehouses alongside the as soon as a business strip in northwest Atlanta. In addition to the meals works, that’s slated to open later this yr off of Chattahoochee Avenue, a 2d region of Scofflaw Brewing Co., 500 residences, a boutique inn, retail stores, and a thirteen-acre greenspace can be built in phases over the following few years.
What isn’t pretty clear in the launch is which chefs, restaurants, or food producers Zimmern and Montwaid are looking to consist of at Chattahoochee Food Works. Based on prepared remarks furnished in the initial statements from Zimmern and Montwaid, the solution is a bag of buzzwords and blanket statements. “Atlanta and the Southeast in widespread have a thriving culinary scene with a number of the maximum great eating places and the most captivating meals lifestyle within the country. At Chattahoochee Food Works, we’re recruiting the place’s pinnacle chef skills and putting the stage for them to attempt new ideas or menu items,” Zimmern continues inside the statement. “The Works is a thrill for anyone at Passport [hospitality consulting group]. We want to make this a landmark and inclusive undertaking for all due to the fact the meals of the south is America’s food in every sense of the word.”
Zimmern replied Wednesday afternoon to Eater Atlanta’s questions, and clarified the meaning of “the food of the south is America’s food.” He factors to key terms, which Zimmern paraphrases, from The Potlikker Papers with John T. Edge, creator, and director of the Southern Foodways Alliance. “Over the course of its records, the influx of immigrants, a few visiting by using desire, others not, literally transformed the location” and that ingredients observed in the South are “foundational to American delicacies” due to the location’s many and varied “cultural impacts.”
Words like “inclusive,” “pinnacle chef talent,” and “numerous” lend little perception into the market’s destiny occupants. Instead, it may be an opportunity to reach out to cooks and eating place proprietors in the traditionally black groups of Atlanta and in any of the greater than 20 worldwide communities along an eight-mile stretch of Buford Highway. Zimmern says he and Montwaid haven’t “identified” the people they’re thinking about for the food corridor, as they’ve just started the manner. He claims but CFW will consist of “celebrated chefs, cooks, up and comers, girls, people of color, restaurateurs, and makers of all kinds.”
If proper, it could be good information for a few cooks and food marketers a part of Atlanta’s thriving pop-up scene. In an Atlanta Magazine tale published this February, editor Mara Shalhoup delves into the town’s pop-up subculture and why cooks inclusive of Chicomecóatl’s Maricela Vega, Mia Orino of Kamayan Atl, and Chow Club’s Yohana Solomon and Amanda Plumb, have chosen to the dollar the usual restaurant direction in prefer of kitchen residencies, supper golf equipment, and collaborations. “The town’s being certainly run over via deep-pocket [restaurant] standards,” Vega, who lately again to complete-time kitchen work as the govt chef at 8ARM, informed Shalhoup. “And I assume that, in a way, these little pop-united states were truely successful inside the metropolis inside the past 12 months or two due to the fact humans recognize that.”
