The sprawling city of Atlanta is home to some top-notch restaurants and smoky blues bars. Photo / Thinkstock
On my first night in Atlanta I ate arguably the city's most celebrated meal, at an incredible restaurant called Bacchanalia, among its silent, swarming army of soft-footed, white jacketed wait staff.
I ordered the five-course prix fixe menu, but because the "gifts from the chef" started before the first course and concluded with two more either side of dessert, and who knows how many in between, I ate at least twice what I expected, overwhelmed by surprise and delight. As I finished the tiny, explosive Valrhona chocolate dessert, I felt it unnecessary and possibly unwise to eat ever again. I then had one more course.
Joyfully sated, I spoke with staff about my plans for the evening, which were to listen to some blues.
I don't have any great love or affection for the blues. I generally like upbeat pop music that encourages punching the air. That's not the point. We travel, in part, to expand our horizons.
A popular blues joint called Blind Willie's had been recommended by an acquaintance who visited earlier this year, but the sommelier at Bacchanalia - a delightful man who spoke knowledgeably and not condescendingly about New Zealand wines - told me that I should try the nearby Northside Tavern.
If there is one thing I will always do, it is to shuck off the advice of people I trust in favour of world-class sommeliers of my recent acquaintance.
After a short walk from Bacchanalia, I arrived outside a shambolic building that was apparently once a corner store or gas station but now would not be seen dead as either of those things. A man outside was smoking a cigarette under an umbrella. "Excuse me," I said. "Is this the Northside Tavern?" He looked behind him, then turned back to me and said, "That's what it says on the sign."
Embarrassed, I pushed open the door and was hit by a gust of cigarette smoke and the discovery that there were no more than 10 people inside, with no sign of anyone playing, or about to play, any music. I figured this was as good a time as any to contract my horizons, and I returned to my hotel, and to bed.
I was in Atlanta in part to visit and write about Coca-Cola, which was in the thick of celebrations for the 100th birthday of its contour bottle, and so it was that on my second night in the city, several of their people took me to a ballyhooed local restaurant called Gunshow. The restaurant is owned and run by Kevin Gillespie, who established himself as a celebrity chef partly through his dominant performance on reality television show Top Chef, in which he was voted "fan favourite" in 2009, ultimately finishing runner-up.
Gunshow is a fantastically ostentatious place at which, in lieu of ordering from menus, we were confronted by a stream of chefs at our table trying to sell us their dishes. Some of the chefs were terrible at it. Of course they were. Nobody signs up to be a chef because they've got a talent for sales. But there was something beautiful about it and also something potentially joyful.
"Kevin Gillespie told me that with this kind of cooking, you expose yourself to the world," one of the Coke employees said.
Entrepreneurs and the aggressively self-confident love exposing themselves to the world. I much prefer having the world expose itself to me.
On my last night in Atlanta, I ate at JCT. Kitchen & Bar, with its rich, savoury, modern, massive-portioned take on southern standards and its inexplicable mid-title fullstop.
I ate late, and lingered after the gut-filling magnificence of the slow-cooked chicken and ricotta dumplings - and I was rewarded when the chef brought an incredible booze-infused buttermilk ice cream sundae to my table and I found the words "Happy Birthday Greg" written in chocolate around the plate's edge. It would not be my birthday for three months, and that made the moment extra special.
When I left at 10pm, full and happy, I felt like maybe I should give the Northside Tavern another try. In fact, it felt necessary. Bacchanalia's crafty, wonderful sommelier had built a career out of understanding people and making excellent recommendations. What did he know about me and about this place that I had missed?
It wasn't any less smoky and didn't look any less gritty than two nights before, and it was only a little more full, but on the tiny stage, setting up with his guitar was a man with a hat and a weathered face, whose name I knew, from the sign outside, was Mudcat. I decided to stay.
While I stood at the bar, waiting for a beer, the man next to me, who had a long, rough white beard, leaned over and introduced himself. His name was Earl and he was a regular. "I sat in this seat so long, it's got my name on it," he told me.
Every time I said something into Earl's left ear, he would grunt and turn his head right around so I could speak into his right ear, presenting to me in the process the full panoramic magnificence of his heavily lived-in visage.
I asked Earl if he liked the music here. "Love the music here," he said "and I [expletive] love Mudcat.
"There's cobwebs in here," he went on, pointing to a spot above the bar in which no cobwebs were visible, "and Mudcat's older 'n all of 'em."
Mudcat was setting up his equipment on the stage not 3m away, and it was plain as heckfire that he was younger than Earl, probably by decades.
Shortly after Mudcat began to play, I excused myself from Earl and took a seat at one of the long tables near the stage. "It's real folksy blues," Earl had told me. He was right. There was a lot about whiskey, about women, about the police. There was an awful lot about whiskey.
"I drank so much of that good whiskey," Mudcat's first song went, "I staggered in my sleep." A couple of songs in, he stopped playing and called out to the barman, "How you doing over there Slade? You got a little whiskey for me? It's been days."
Sitting next to me was a small, fat man of early middle age, sitting by himself, wearing glasses and drinking a bottle of Newcastle Brown Ale. Two or three songs into Mudcat's opening set, a tall, beautiful woman tapped him on the shoulder. He stood up, took her hand, and together they danced with such grace and sensuality that I wondered if this was a dream or a candid camera prank. Afterwards, she disappeared to the back of the bar. As far as I could tell, they never once spoke.
Mudcat threw out a drunk who refused to stop clapping out of time; people yelled out requests for songs whose ribald content was only vaguely apparent from their titles (Rattlesnake!); Slade brought him some whiskey; a woman came up and kissed him on the cheek in the middle of a song, then walked off without speaking.
It was such a strange and foreign scene to me - full of people, events and music far from my reality. I had been carrying a relentless cough all week and the bar was growing ever thicker with smoke.
It felt good to have been there. It felt good to leave. I had seen a little bit more of the world, and that was enough. I returned happily to my hotel bed.
For more information see DiscoverAmerica.com.
• 10best.com/destinations/georgia/atlanta/
• atlantamagazine.com/50-best-things-to-do-home/
Greg Bruce travelled to Atlanta courtesy of Coca-Cola Amatil.
The chef chats to Herald Travel about unforgettable foodie experiences in Aotearoa.