Carroll St. Café

Carroll St. Café

208 Carroll St. SE
Atlanta, GA 30312
404-577-2700
website

The Carroll St. Café is on a skinny little street in Cabbagetown. Surrounded by a few other restaurants and bars, it appears to be the kind of place inside which you could eat a good meal. A few months back, during mardi gras, Callie and I stopped in because they had some good looking specials. While perusing the menu months ago, we noticed a number of good looking vegetarian options, so I decided that it might be a fun place to take my mom for mother’s day (she’s a vegetarian, not by choice).

My mother had the basil noodle bowl, though I think she should have gone with the panoramic veggie sandwich. The noodle bowl had some green beans and zucchini in it, but was not as full of vegetables as my mother had hoped. It’s very important to order the right thing. That can completely change your experience. In this situation, the waitress misled her though, giving her a completely false ingredient list.

Callie went with the tilapia sandwich. I tasted that, but the tilapia was so much more bland than my meal that I didn’t get a true feeling for it. Callie seemed to enjoy it. All of the sandwiches come with a little salad and some fruit, and are reasonably priced at $8-10.

I rolled with a special, but one they have regularly I think. They had it the last time we were there, at least. I didn’t eat it then, preferring to go with some mardi gras related concoction, but I remember it. The dish consisted of scallops, shrimp and creamed spinach (SSS) on top of a bed of white basmati. The scallops were pretty banging. There were four of those daddies, one of which was the size of a hockey puck. We were all pretty amazed by it. I should have walked back and given the cook a tip for hooking me up. The shrimp were fine. The sauce was a little creamier than I expected. I believe it had some feta in it. The rice was imperfectly cooked, with some hard little grains mixed in. They price the specials like you would a dinner at a fine restaurant ($17-21), so I have to take off some mental points for the uncooked grains. If I were cooking it at home, or if it was something I bought from any little rundown café, I wouldn’t care, but if I’m paying high-class prices, I expect a little better. But maybe the cook was just tired from hefting that scallop onto the grill.

We also ate a cheese plate before the meal, and finished with ONE piece of chocolate truffle cake. The cheese was fine. They give you a little fruit, and a baguette. There was some moldy French cheese there that tasted like the water out of my broken garbage disposal. I almost couldn’t eat a meal after it, but the cheeses change over time, so any future customers might not hit on that spot on the wheel. The cake was amazing ($5.50), but we only copped one piece. Well, we tried to order two, but our waitress kind of sucked, so she only brought us one. I gave it to my mother, since it was mother’s day, but Callie and I might have to go back for another slice some day.

All in all, it’s a nice place. It’s kind of quiet, but large enough to get a table with ease. If you order sandwiches, it’s not even very expensive, and you can get a healthier option than you would at a sports bar, though there are no TV’s to watch a game. But if you wanted to step it up to a nice meal with appetizers and dessert, they can do that too. There’s a tapas menu that we want to try, but it may not have enough options for our tastes to complete a full dinner meal. Callie had some good wine the first time we stopped in. If you lived in the neighborhood, I think you’d find yourself stopping by every few weeks, based solely on the café’s ability to step up or down to your dinner needs easily. I say this because though many places offer both the sandwich and the dinner menu, few do them both as well as Carroll St. Café does. I’ll go back, obviously, because I’ve already been there twice this year.

8 out of 10 mouth-feels