Decatur: Napoleon's Grill

Napoleon's is in the Oak Grove neighborhood of northernmost Decatur. The restaurant opened last year as part of a long-overdue revival of the long-neglected strip mall that formerly held Quinnie's BBQ. Napoleon's is a casual bar with a lot of indoor and outdoor seating.

The menu has a broad range of items: tacos, rice bowls, burgers, and dinners. If I may be a food snob for a minute, some of the items on the menu seem to suffer from the faux-fusion technique of randomly combining ingredients from different types of cuisines. I am all for new flavors, but I would like to think that an unusual combination is motivated by the natural compatibility of the ingredients, not by a radio button menu of combinations.

That being said, I enjoyed my tacos. They both had cabbage, which I consider an echo of the radio button approach, but both were quite good. One was a Korean BBQ short rib done up with a nice sauce, cabbage, etc. The other was fried tofu cubes with peanut sauce, cabbage, etc. Both were tasty and gave me just enough to enjoy the flavor of each without being overly filling. Tacos are a great neo-tapas kind of dish that lends itself very well to sampling.

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