Page 30 - foodservice magazine Feb 2019

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DINING
A. Brigadero, coconut, mango. Dessert from the Brazilian menu. B. Atlas's wood-fired grill.
C. Atlas Dining. D. Spanner crab, farofa, Brazil nut. Entree from the Brazilian menu.
E. Charlie Carrington.
Atlas aims to deliver an affordable, accessible version of the degustation experience. Five courses ring in at $60, while six come up to $75. Carrington wasn’t the first to notice the trend to more casual
eateries, while overall dining out increased. But his solution was to find a middle ground between fine and fast, where diners can afford to come every few months. “People are looking for somewhere where it's not going to break the bank, but somewhere they love the food and the service and the whole experience,” he says. “If you spend $400 [on] one night, you can go out ... once a month. But if you spend $100 four times, then you can go out four times as much.”
Instead of cooking dishes with marron or caviar, (as each plate costs the customer just $12) the Atlas team does what great cooks have been doing for millennia – using technique to transform less-coveted produce. The primary tool that Carrington has at his disposal is a wood-burning fire – an element he learned to control under the tutelage of Firedoor chef-owner Lennox Hastie. Using said fire, and his classical training, the current cannon of dishes is simple, with just a few elements on each plate. There’s pork neck massaman; duck egg with morning glory, coconut and lime; red quail curry; and a dessert of fried golden egg yolk threads.
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