Food Feature: Bare fruit

When the Morningside Farmers Market reopened in May, Chef Shaun Doty of Mumbo Jumbo gave a cooking demonstration in which he sang the praises of locally grown and organic produce. The market, which operates at 1325 N. Highland Ave. 8:30 a.m.-noon every Saturday through October, is Atlanta residents’ best opportunity to buy summer produce from boutique growers.

As he cooked, Doty remarked that local organic produce retains its vitamins and taste, so that a “passionately simple” treatment, a la Alice Waters of Berkeley’s Chez Panisse, is always the best. And he made the point, too, that organic produce that is trucked here from out of state, like that sold in many of the larger stores around town, has probably suffered some environmental impact. They were heady words in a city where too many restaurants continue the Southern tradition of cooking every (often canned) vegetable for hours with a pound of pork fat.

Things have been changing for several years, and Doty is not alone in his concern about the quality and cooking of produce in our area. Many chefs, like Michael Tuohy of Murphy’s, have long histories of struggling to purchase decent tasting produce in our city. Tuohy was probably the pioneer in our city in this respect. His Chefs’ Cafe, closed for years but missed to this day, gave Atlantans their first taste of Napa Valley-style cooking, which depends on local ingredients for its famous good taste. He continues that at Murphy’s (997 Virginia Ave., 404-872-0904) in Virginia-Highland.

I asked Tuohy, who favors Doty’s “passionately simple” method with vegetables, about his menu: “Tonight, we featured crisp softshell crab with arugula and local beets marinated in Evolution, a delicious white wine from Oregon. Our veg plate was pretty local and included greens, beets, baby turnips, sweet potatoes and squashes. The long spring we are having coupled with the rains have been good to the growers.”

Basically, there are three threads one can follow in seeking respectable treatment of vegetables in Atlanta restaurants. One can go to a vegetarian restaurant, to an ethnic restaurant or to a place like Murphy’s or Mumbo Jumbo, where the chefs are making an earnest effort to use quality local ingredients. Actually, nearly all good restaurants attempt the latter now, often building specials around seasonal, local or specially imported produce. Even the unexpected do this now. Sundown Cafe, for example, features dishes made with New Mexico chiles when they come into season.

Oddly, American-style vegetarian restaurants are notorious for ruining the natural taste of good produce with too much seasoning and amateurish experimentation. The notable exception was In the Shade Cafe, which has closed, leaving Cafe Sunflower as the closest thing to a gourmet vegetarian restaurant in our city.

A recent visit to the Buckhead Cafe Sunflower (2140 Peachtree Road, 404-352-8859; also 5975 Roswell Road, 404-256-1675) actually proved more satisfying than my earlier visits. The food has grown more sophisticated and controlled. Pot stickers that are almost like little spring rolls and a Portobello mushroom cap filled with spinach and a bit of cheddar cheese with marinara were simple and very flavorful.

The problem with much American vegetarian restaurant cuisine, besides the way it tends to ignore the seasons in order to standardize menus, is that it attempts to re-create the ordinary meat eater’s diet with meatless ingredients. Thus I was less impressed with my entree of grilled veggies and fajitas made from soy steak. The soy steak was actually good enough — we’ve seen a real improvement in “mock” meat in recent years — but I disliked the sauce, a mushroom reduction that was much too sweet, almost hoisin-like. A Moroccan-style stuffed acorn squash filled with lentils, couscous, sweet potatoes and other veggies, plus (mercifully) unidentifiable mock ham, was much better but little influenced by the season.

A surprisingly good venue for more typical vegetarian dishes made with organic produce is R. Thomas Deluxe Grill (1812 Peachtree St., 404-881-0246), open 24 hours and a delight to the eyes, especially if you have any history of, um, eating mushrooms. I used to dine on burgers there constantly and then Mr. Thomas began making a shift to weird macrobiotic and vegan cuisine and I stopped going. Now, there’s a healthy balance of murderous meat and heavenly lawn clippings.

My friend the vegan rock star, Lee Flier, loves R. Thomas. “It’s a huge favorite,” she says. “The veggie side dishes are excellent, and I love the Magic Mountain Bowl (mushrooms and quinoa), the chilled penne pasta salad and the veg sandwiches like the portabella melt. It’s pretty hard to go wrong there, actually.”

There are other American-style vegetarian cafes in town, like the one inside Rainbow Natural Foods on North Decatur (try the walnut loaf and one of the soups), Vegan Way on Lavista and the kosher Broadway Cafe, which is irregular, on Briarcliff. You can also visit Soul Vegetarian on North Highland or Ralph Abernathy, if you can handle the vaguely religious atmosphere. But none of these seem content to just cook and present a vegetable in its wholesome simplicity. For some reason, they all seem to have a compulsion to re-work everything into enchiladas and lasagna.

For the money, if you want to taste vegetables in their purest flavor, you are much better off going to a restaurant where a contemporary chef like Tuohy is treating vegetables straightforwardly.

Daniel Poruviansky, lunch chef at Bacchanalia (1198 Howell Mill Road, 404-365-0410) insists that “it’s crazy to do anything complicated with a good vegetable.” The restaurant is one of the largest buyers from the Georgia Organic Growers (which operates the Morningside market). “The most I do is blanch the vegetable in some salted water and then I might sautee it in our French butter or use some chicken stock. Of course, this is the South and people now and then say they don’t like the vegetables al dente. They want them cooked and cooked, which ruins their natural beauty and taste in my opinion.”

Typical vegetable sides at Bacchanalia last week were a medley of three squashes, a salad of several types of beets with goat cheese and simple green beans. “I am really looking forward to the tomatoes,” Poruviansky said. “We’ll do a salad with fresh mozzarella selected by our cheese guy, Raymond Hook, of course. But I use them in many other ways, including roasting them slowly so they retain their shape.” Bacchanalia, by the way, will assemble an entree plate of vegetables for vegetarians but there is not a strictly vegetarian menu.

The grandest example of creative vegetarian cooking is Seeger’s (111 West Paces Ferry Road, 404-846-9217), where $58 will buy you five courses of ecstatic dishes, like a truffle flan with fresh morels, gazpacho with heirloom beets and a spring salad with vegetables, nasturtiums and tomato confit. I doubt Seeger’s morels are local, but I likewise doubt they aren’t all but imported in a velvet box. Reservations and a jacket are necessary. It’s worth every penny.

If you like Southern-style vegetables touched with meat seasonings, the place to go is Watershed (486 W. Ponce de Leon, 404-378-4900). Here, summer’s produce probably gets its best local traditional treatment. Chef Scott Peacock, renowned for his way with classic Southern cooking, prepares vegetables — from fried okra to corn on the cob and turnip greens — like your mama wishes she had.

He layers textures, temperatures and flavors in wondrous ways, using only local produce. The vegetables are served completely straightforward with his fabulous biscuits. There are also novel salads here, including Peacock’s ginger-marinated beets and black-eye-pea salad. Amazing soups are also made with local fresh produce. When summer passes, Peacock remains true to local availability, switching to root vegetables.

Peacock’s former employer, Horseradish Grill is also a large buyer from Georgia Organic Growers and provides a chance to taste good vegetables cooked Southern style but without overcooking.

Asian restaurants provide remarkable opportunities to eat vegetables in all kinds of states. Though they are usually not organic or locally grown, they are almost always treated with simple respect. Nothing is better than a plate of sauteed snow pea vines or on choy from Canton House (4825 Buford Hwy., 770-936-9030). There are a few Chinese restaurants, like Harmony (4897 Buford Hwy., 770-457-7288) that specialize in vegetables. Unfortunately, they tend to dote on mock-meat dishes. Thus you can have moo shu pork or Mongolian beef made out of soy or gluten. I once ordered a mock-chicken dish here and it arrived in the shape of a cartoon-looking chicken. While such dishes are amusing, skip them and order the straightforward vegetable items like the eggplant with garlic sauce and the pan-fried leek dumplings. Bean curd with mushrooms is also good.

My absolute favorite ethnic place, where I couldn’t care less that no meat is offered, is Udipi Cafe (1850 Lawrenceville Hwy., Decatur, 404-325-1933). You will find the best South Indian food you’ve ever tasted in our city: huge puffs of bread into which you can fold mango preserves, gigantic wraps full of fiery and mysterious ingredients with multiple textures and flavors, soups that sing, a crowd that rocks, a staff that runs. Alternatives are Indian Delights on Scott Boulevard and Madras Cafe on Briarcliff, but, honestly, going to Udipi has the same effect that going to Tamarind for Thai or Soto for sushi has. It establishes a benchmark that leaves nearly everything else a second choice.

Finally, if you’re interested in learning more about good produce as well as other ingredients, contact the new Atlanta chapter of Slow Foods International, headed by Julie Shaffer (indiasjules@hotmail.com) who leads foraging expeditions in the mountains and organizes tastings at local culinary venues.??