The best laid plans:

• failed when I announced I was planning to visit 30 restaurants in November on the first of that month and then had only have 29 days left. Um…oops? I made up for it by reviewing two ramen noodle restaurants — Blue Fin Sushi and Umaido – in a special twofer.
• also failed when I decided to visit the Busy Bee Cafe (a restaurant I’ve always liked a lot) on the day after Thanksgiving. I figured it would make a nice bookend to my somewhat critical look at Mary Mac’s Tea Room early in the series. It turned out the Busy Bee was closed on that day, so I drove around until I found a restaurant that was open. West Egg Cafe: perfect!

I was hoping, but never got …

Once inside the dining room, you can’t help but notice the high-water mark — a thin white line painted on the wall at about six feet above the ground.

If you were very familiar with Canoe before the flood, then you will notice a change in mood. The color scheme is richer, the lighting dimmer, the wood partitions darker. It feels more elegant — more like a special night out, less like a scene.

My memories of the antediluvian Canoe go back to its serious scene days. I first dined here soon after it opened in 1997 for a meal with a group of editors after a two-day job interview at the AJC. I remember that the bright, cheerful room thrummed with that Olympics-era …

When you pick it up, you realize that you are in for the long haul with this creation. It will fall apart into its slippery constituents should you loosen your grip. You have no choice but to bite, chew, bite, chew, bite, chew until you are close enough to the crust to lay it down without mishap.

Each one of those bites will be a mouthful of conflicting signals. That tomato jam is sweeeeet – too sweet you will think at first. But, no, those red onions respond with their sharpness and bite. The bacon, like a scary ex-girlfriend, will not be ignored, and chimes in with smoke and salt. Meanwhile the eggs, gooey cheese and gushy mayo keep trying, unsuccessfully,  to …

That’s why barbecue restaurants can be so disappointing. One time the barbecue is the stuff of dreams  — moist, tinged with pink, smoky in that way that suggest an alchemical union of wood and flesh. And then on another day it is dry, stringy and forgettable.

I still recall how exciting it was years ago to discover Hometown Barbecue when it operated from a weekends-only travel trailer in a Lawrenceville parking lot. People lined up early and waited to get their hands on a slab of the incredibly juicy and smoky ribs. Then the owners moved into a full-service restaurant. I visited a couple of times and found the product bedeviled by the inconsistencies that always beset barbecue restaurants.

Who knows how Community Q BBQ will fare in the long run, but I’m here to tell you that after a mere fortnight on the scene, this place is …

Chef Piero Premoli and staff

One of the most interesting things I’ve learned over this 30-day dine-a-thon is that restaurants throughout Atlanta are really thinking hard about the new economic reality and adjusting their menus to find that sweet spot where the prices feel like a bargain and the meal tastes like an indulgence.

At Pricci, the longstanding Italian restaurant in Buckhead, chef Piero Premoli has devised a fascinating concept. Each month, the Milan native focuses on a different region of Italy and explores that cuisine through a fixed-price ($29) three-course menu.There are several choices of appetizer and entree as well as two desserts.

On the night we visited, the special menu features dishes from Friuli Venezia Giulia — the corner of Italy bordered by Slovenia, Austria and the Adriatic Sea. I have good friends from Friuli and have visited them at their home in Udine. I remember going out to a restaurant and being impressed with the slight Germanic sweet-and-sour …

Umaido

Happy Thanksgiving! Today, let me tell you about something that will taste very good this weekend after feasting on turkey, potatoes, stuffing and pie.

It is ramen — not ramen from a crinkly package but from a steaming bowl in a Japanese restaurant.

Earlier in this series, I visited two restaurants that serve Vietnamese pho, which is made with rice-flour noodles in a clear beef soup.

Ramen is served with wheat-four noodles in a soup made of chicken, pork or combination of the two. The broth can range from pale, to soy-dark to milky white depending on what style it is.

If I can make one flaky comparison of these two Asian soups, it is this:

Pho, with its sweet spices and fresh greenery is cooling. It’s the kind of hot soup that tastes best to me on a sunny afternoon or a summer evening. Ramen is warming. It flicks the comfort-food switch in your head like no other food can on an overcast fall day.

Umaido in Suwanee is the only local restaurant I know of that makes the …

Madame #1 was in a resplendent red jacket covered in so many sequins that it shimmered like snakeskin. Madame #2 was plainly dressed in a black skirt and cardigan. Monsieur wore a turtleneck under a blazer and sported Daniel Libeskind black-framed glasses.

All three ordered the evening’s special — coq au vin served with a glass of the newly released Georges Duboeuf Beaujolais Nouveau ($19). Because there were three of them and they appeared to be regulars, sommelier Perrine Prieur gave them the whole bottle.

This scene made me happy. I loved seeing this dressy Buckhead party taking advantage of a bargain. Fifty-eight dollars for three — food and wine! It said to me that this restaurant that has struggled so hard to stay relevant in today’s economy had succeeded in making itself …

Eating and Tweeting (credit: funkidivagirl.com)

Have you ever been to an “Eat ‘N Tweet?”

I hadn’t either until last week when I visited Han Il Kwan — an excellent Korean barbecue restaurant on Buford Highway — with a trio of lovely social media powerhouses.

With handheld devices at the ready, we all logged into Twitter and Tweeted throughout the entire meal, simultaneously pushing tiny buttons and stuffing faces, fielding questions from followers and lobbing them at our savvy and amused waitress, snapping pictures and knocking back glasses of the warm barley tea called boricha. If anyone had asked me to pat my head or rub my stomach, I think I would have lost it.

My guests for this grand experiment included:

• @funkidivagirl
• @chatterboxcgc
• @AskWifey

The latter two also blog and Tweet as @blogrollers. For this event I, too, shed the name on my birth certificate and chewed as @jdkess.

We then proceeded to give a blow-by-blow of our meal and our conversation in real time, using …

a) incredibly delicious; and,

b) photographed reasonably well.

See those layers of phyllo? They collapse in crisp snaps as you bite through, like a little jackhammer.

Where am I? At Jerusalem Bakery in Alpharetta, where I have come in search of falafel that some think is the best in the metro area.

This spot is a branch of the original Jerusalem Bakery in Marietta, which sells Palestinian pastries and fresh pita breads both wholesale and retail from a small counter.

The Alpharetta location has a pastry counter, a nice selection of groceries and dry goods, and a quick-service deli counter where you can order all kinds of Middle Eastern specialties (falafel, shawarma, hummus) and pizzas.

Before we get to the falafel, let me show you the shawarma spits:

You can kind of see that they offer both chicken and beef — nice looking whole pieces of seasoned meat stacked up …

Rice Flour Tamales: AJC Staff

For at least a year, owner Alex Kinjo has been encouraging me to try the pho at Nam, which is his mother’s recipe.

I have always nodded politely and said, “Yeah, yeah.”

When I want pho, I go to a good, cheap pho parlor, such as I did yesterday at Pho Dai Loi #2. When I dine at Nam, I want something more restaurant-y, such as these rice flour tamales served in the shade of an anthurium. With or without the rude flower, they are wonderful.

But when I was making plans to meet friends for lunch in Midtown recently, I remembered Kinjo’s mom’s pho.

The menu at Nam has changed little over the years. This isn’t the restaurant where you go looking for daily specials and seasonal ingredients, but rather where you revisit old favorites.

We began with an order of cha gio rolls, served with well-trimmed lettuce leaves, marinated veggies and herbs for rolling. All the fresh greenery makes the fried crunch that much more satisfying.

This green mango (as in the …