Skip to main content

Decatur: No. 246

This was my second trip to No. 246 in downtown Decatur. The crowd was casually dressed but clearly there for a food experience.

On my last trip, I started with a cheese sampler, which I thoroughly enjoyed. This time I had the beet salad. I recently decided that I really like beets, so I was glad to see this on the menu. It hit a lot of different flavor notes: pistachio, goat cheese, and most memorably the blood orange, which was a great offset to the salad.

This is my margherita pizza. The crust was outstanding, just thick enough and wonderfully chewy. The basil leaves contrasted very nicely with the cheese. It came garnished with just a few pepper flakes and a little bit of salt. Before this showed up, I had tried a few grains of salt from the table bowl, one at a time. They are big enough that you can grab one. The flavor was outstanding---I recommend this as a good way to try a salt. That flavor on the pizza accented the salty cheese.

Their desserts are small in size, which was perfect for me. My cheesecake was full of cheese, just as any proper cheesecake should be. The added hint of rosewater is something I don't recall tasting in a cheesecake before but it went wonderfully with the cheese.

No. 246 on Urbanspoon

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Eating Around Georgia Tech: Ecco

Our Texas Instruments colleague Cathy Wicks was gracious enough to host several of us at Ecco tonight. This is one of those restaurants that has been on my list for a long time. Even though it is within easy walking distance of Georgia Tech, I hadn't made it there until tonight. The menu is a combination of Italian, Spanish, and French that make use of some local Georgia ingredients. The combination of those three countries is sometimes a little forced, although the georgia ingredients (fruit, cheese) were all great and perfectly appropriate. We started out with a meat and cheese board. This actually reverses the French tradition, where cheese usually follows the main course. Everything was excellent. The Georgia cheese was a big hit, as was the French cow/goat cheese. I thought the sauscisson was very subtle and very good. The waitress said that the roast pork pasta was their signature dish, so I had to try it. It had traditional broad pasta (fresh, of course) ...

DCA: Cava Mezze Grill

Cava is a DC area chain with light Mediterranean food. Saibal encouraged me to try lunch at their airport location and I was very happy with the experience. I ordered falafel on SuperSalad with assorted other toppings. The falafel was tasty. The SuperSalad was light, flavorful, and very easy to eat. Overall, a healthy and enjoyable lunch, something you can't always say about airport eating.

Pressure Cooker Candied Ginger

I made candied ginger a few years ago. It's not something I would do every day but I had a lot of fun doing it. I recently acquired a pressure cooker and it inspired an interesting idea to me: why not make candied ginger in the pressure cooker? It should be very soft and flavorful. Here is the result. I peeled two large ginger roots, cut them into small cubes, and put them in the pressure cooker with heavily sugared water. The traditional method first boils the ginger in plain water to soften it and then again in sugar water to candy it. The resulting candy was very tender but still with the characteristic ginger texture. It was also sweet without being overpowering. The traditional method leaves a lot of sugar crystallized around the ginger. The pressure cooker gives a much more subtle result. The ginger stays moist even after it cools but you can dry it in the oven at 350 degrees for about 10 minutes. That inspired me to dip it in chocolate. While I was in the b...