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Advice for a few days in Atlanta please
This will be my first time there. We are interested to visit the Carter Center and the Martin Luther King center but haven't finalized plans. Lodging is taken care of. Is there food you highly recommend? Other sightseeing?
Thanks!
Thank you!
My favorite place to eat when I'm back in town is Taqueria del Sol. I just love southwestern style food with red and green chile on pretty much anything. Tacos La Villa is my overall favorite taco place in Atlanta, but it's probably a drive from where you're staying (not sure if you have a car).
If you can, spend some time in downtown Decatur. It's perfect for a progressive dinner/pub crawl if you can't decide on just one place to eat, plus my preferred Taqueria del Sol location is there. That whole area is accessible via MARTA.
Thank you!
I was just in Atlanta in May for a conference. It was only a few days but here's some of the things we did:
There's lots of cool stuff to see and do, I hope you have a wonderful time! I will say, there's also weirdly vacant areas downtown, buildings that were malls and stuff that are just empty so it can be eerie.
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I’ll just list out random food spots here, mostly with sweets…
For a kitschy atmosphere and great tea - Dr. Bombay’s Underwater Tea Party.
For a quick bite to eat when touring about MLK Jr. - Lottafrutta.
For (more) tea and coffee and wines and cocktails and pies (and other food) downtown - Cafe Intermezzo.
Also downtown, and perfect for a red bean bun or Portuguese egg tart and milk tea snack - Sweethut Bakery.
And to enjoy a lazy afternoon or evening with great drinks and food in a very chill spot - The Bookhouse Pub. (Edit: If you love Twin Peaks and dragons…:))
These are off the top of my head as places I’d cart visiting friends to back in the day. Also, there are some real gems of Mexican-Korean fusion in Atlanta which I’d highly recommend checking out (though I hesitate to list out, because it’s been awhile and I can’t remember the name of my favorite).
Happy travels!
Edit: I can’t believe I almost missed Joystick Gamebar! No idea what the quality is now, but it was good times back in the day.
Thank you!
Joystick Gamebar!! Mannn, when I was visiting my now-wife, that place was the absolute bomb. It had to have been about seven or so years ago, but it was popping then! They had a Halo 2 tournament in the other room (complete with a crummy old TV, just mwah). Ahhh I miss Atlanta!
I live near Atlanta too and can second a lot of the suggestions here. One I haven't seen is Buford Hwy. There are tons of restaurants serving cuisine from all over the world. Peruvian, Cuban, Mexican, Bangladeshi, Vietnamese, Korean, Chinese, pretty much anything. There are plenty of best of lists online, but I've had good luck just picking places at random.
If OP wants good Asian food, Doraville has a lot of Chinese residents, and Duluth/Johns Creek has a lot of Koreans. Like, 30% of the people you'll see are going to be Korean. There's also some Japanese specialty stores now, like a Kino that recently opened.
Not necessarily, I suppose, Atlanta "specialties" (they're arguably not even in Atlanta) but there's not a lot of southeastern or southwestern (basically just a few places in Texas) cities with large non-hispanic immigrant communities.
Shoutout for Sokongdong, fantastic small-plate Korean. Also Sweet Hut for dessert! Buford Highway is absolutely a must for any foodie in Atlanta.
Thank you!
Keep in mind that Atlanta is undergoing some interesting changes and in some of these suggestions, you’ll want to appear as not-tourist as possible. The Trap Museum, for instance, is right on the border of the Bluff. If you go any further west, you may be in for quite an adventure. The stuff downtown around Centennial Park is generally very tourist-friendly and the most you’ll worry about are semi-aggressive panhandlers (but what city doesn’t have those). (This is only intended to say that generally the area west of Northside from Donald Lee Hollowell (Bankhead) to MLK Blvd is definitely a rougher area, so weigh that against your comfort level of navigating such areas)
Ponce City Market is a pretty cool area, as is Little 5 Points if you’re just looking for places to walk around and visit some local shops and restaurants. PCM is right up against the Beltline, if you’re interested in doing some walking or biking and seeing some neat art along the way. You can even get from PCM to the Jimmy Carter museum pretty easily by the various connecting paths. L5P has a lot of great restaurants and is pretty much a local landmark - Hattie B’s, Fox Bros, Vortex are all worth checking out if you venture over that way.
I live in Atlanta, so feel free to ask any specific questions you may have.
Thank you very much. : )
Last time I checked you could get a pretty good taste of the Bluff on Google Maps. That's about as close as I want to get these days.
The "nice" part of town, or if you want to put it more cynically, the part that has all the "gentrification" from young professionals is Midtown, near where georgia tech is. That's a relatively safe area, and is where the new kitschy restaurants are. Five points and the area near downtown is, uh, hit or miss. Mostly miss.
One of the main attractions is world of coke, mainly because at the end they have every flavor of coke and you get samples of all of them, I'm not sure anyone actually cares that much about the history of coca-a-cola but that's fun at the end. They use to give a glass bottle of coke as well as a souvenir but they stopped.
The aquarium is nice but pretty crowded and also expensive. It has one of the largest aquarium tanks in the world.
CNN exists. Idk, it's like if coke didn't have the free coke samples at the end.
There's shopping at Ponce and Lenox. You can get to Lenox by MARTA, but as per usual you'll have to drive to Ponce. Or you can walk, it's like 30m from the nearest train station but there is a heat wave.
I think the botanical garden is nice, and not that expensive. It'll be hot as hell, though.
CNN is relocating and they stopped the CNN Center Tours permanently earlier this year.
Just FYI to anyone reading this, this is the upscale shopping area (Neiman Marcus, Saks, etc.)
Thank you!
The end of World of Coke is definitely the highlight. Especially The Beverly.
The National Center for Civil and Human Rights is a place everyone should visit while in Atlanta. It is a flooringly powerful reminder of how far we’ve come and how very far we still have to go.
Thank you!
Eats is my favorite place in Atlanta. It's a dive but a plate of veggies is all I need. I have been told their jerk chicken is fantastic but all I ever order is a plate of veggies and I've never gone wrong. Their sweet tea is done right, too.
There's also Slutty Vegan but that's a niche spot.
Thank you!
Haha, even the evenings here lately have been hot as hell. We've been trying to do as much as possible in the mornings, but the humidity is still through the roof.