BUVEZ (585 Barber St., 706-850-0172): It’s been six years since Buvez opened on Barber Street and became a neighborhood fixture. With audiences for morning, brunch time, lunchtime, happy hour, later drinks and performances, it’s busy all day in a cheerful way, with hipsters and families (and plenty of hipster families) side by side.
Mimi Maumus joining the team in the wake of her own restaurant home.made closing was a natural fit, given the cafe’s welcoming of experimentation and its need to provide a bit more in the way of food. Gone are the sandwiches on Independent Baking Co. baguettes (sigh, they were perfect). Gone are the hard-boiled eggs and the snacks by the scoop. In their place is a small but still bigger menu full of things that are both healthy-ish (made with real ingredients) and fun to eat. If there aren’t enough staff behind the counter, things can move slowly enough to make you want to start a timer. On the other hand, it’s being made right then, not sitting around in a cooler or under a heat lamp. Maybe just don’t go if you’re already on the edge of hangry.
There’s a section of sandwiches, all available either on a bagel (plain or everything) or on wheatberry toast. The Strumpet combines whipped goat cheese, prosciutto, grana padano, fig jam, arugula and lemon citronette. It calls to mind the previous baguette sandwiches and is lovely. The Chicado, a massive open-faced sandwich piled with marinated cucumbers, avocado, mashed chickpeas with tahini, and toasted almond slivers, is an absolute disaster to eat without a fork, but it’s a nice combination of virtue and flavor.
Go expecting home.made, and you may be disappointed. It’s not always clear when your order is up, and if you don’t hear as well as you used to, you may want to stick close to the counter until you get your food. Instead, go looking for something that puts a twist on the familiar and incorporates a lot of greens and low-fat, high-protein choices that don’t make you feel like you’re missing anything. The Gobfather is a turkey sandwich, but it’s a turkey sandwich with hibiscus pickled onions and a cranberry vinaigrette. There are pizza bagels, but they’re far from Bagel Bites, with olives, capers and basil on top. There’s a marvelous cheesecake made with Three Porch Farms chai, lime and condensed milk.
Housemade sodas are bright and sweet, in flavors like hibiscus/ginger/lemon and cherry with ginger ale. Syrups for these fizzies, made in house, also get used in coffee and tea and in the snoballs, mounds of fluffy shaved ice that can be made boozy for grownups. Does she still go from day to night smoothly? She does. Buvez is open from 8 a.m.–9 p.m. Tuesday through Sunday, later if it’s hosting a show.
HIDDEN GEM (625 Barber St.): Literally across the parking lot from Buvez, on the lower side of the Atlas building (look for the gem-marked patio), is this charmer of a bar, opened a while ago by some folks connected to Normal Bar. It has different vibes from its site, more like a less divey Manhattan, full of plants, low tables topped with Mexican tile, several fireplace mantels (including one mounted behind the bar), paint-by-number-esque art (multiple iterations of the same scene hung salon style) and glass-gem-encrusted lamps. It’s not too dark or too loud on these summer evenings, and there are no dogs unless they are service animals. Best of all, both the cocktails and the prices are a pleasant surprise. While Atlanta has entered the era of the $25 cocktail (a fact that made me gasp), pretty much everything at Hidden Gem is between $9–11, with beers as low as $3 for a Famosa. At the same time, cocktails are beautifully made, with several different kinds of ice. They also taste good without being too sweet or a testosterone-fueled test of your ability to handle bitterness. They are balanced. The eponymous Hidden Gem has raspberry syrup, lemon, herbal genepy, gin and a few hits from an eyedropper of pistachio oil to lend it a smooth hit of novelty. The Whimsical Lad is a purple combo of Bolivian brandy, blueberry basil syrup and lime, no ice. The Divorce Lawyer marries anise (Cocchi Americano, Pernod absinthe) with a pear cordial. The Mezcal Paloma (maybe my favorite), made with housemade grapefruit soda, develops in your mouth before roller skating around your taste buds, trailing smoke.
The place is a Libra’s dream, or maybe what I mean to say is that if Goldilocks was looking for a bar, she’d love this one. Not too this, not too that, but pretty much always just right. Hidden Gem is open Wednesday through Saturday from 6 p.m. most days, and serves nothing to eat but a cup of vegan ramen.
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