Bob Cramer's Blog

Downtown Atlanta on Saturday night, Moms and Dads everywhere, waiting mainly for their daughters, most dressed in cowgirl boots and short skirts, bubbly appearing from watching Taylor Swift in concert, buoyed with big smiles, souvenir posters and a general air of refreshing happiness, joy and wholesomeness rarely seen in our slightly depressed city coping with a double whammy of bad economy and bad baseball.

These parents and their decked out kids made their way from the northern suburbs, from small towns in Georgia, from many points of light, to come to Philips Arena for the “Tay” concert (or a different definition of a “T party” so says my daughter).   My wife and I made our way from the northern Atlanta city boundaries, destined to spend a night in the Big City before the perfunctory concert pick up, finding our way to the delightful and often forgotten “Pitty Pat’s Porch” restaurant tucked in next to a garage on a side street off of the main attraction of Peachtree Street.  A delightful find though a different kind of ambiance than we expected as we too were decked out, dressed in black, sporting black leather jackets (first sort of cool night of Fall) and my own slicked back black (ok, gray) hair, ready to find some hip, not just weather cool in-town dining spot where we could mix with the happening crowd for one short evening, a real depart from our regular life, only for us, of course, to find our way to not only the least hip place in downtown Atlanta but perhaps on earth.

We thoroughly enjoyed  PPP’s collard greens,  fried chicken, and the feed-an-army basket of baked breads in the utterly un-modern décor of the windowless establishment, sitting under the watchful eye of deers, lions, and other creatures from the wild who met a disappointing fate only to be permanent enshrined on the walls of this southern, plantation-like eatery where they barely serve Yankees and Rhett and the gang from Gone With The Wind haven’t gone anywhere.  The food was wonderful, the people could not have been nicer but I never found the porch and we were finished a good two hours before the T show was to end.

To kill some time and show that we still did have a little (very little) hip in our step, we made our way to the delightful Café Intermezzo.  Well, this place did have windows, but we really went from 19^th century Deep South to 19^th century Europe all within the span of two blocks.   Café Intermezzo is a tribute to the great coffee shops of Vienna, Prague and Budapest that both predate Seattle-born Starbucks and provide a refuge for those who need a break, a drink, a snack, a TV to watch Alabama and Florida or quick pick me up from over a hundred different coffee concoction many including alcohol.  Café Intermezzo is an under the radar Atlanta success, from its start in the Brookwood section on Peachtree, to now four locations, including the Airport and Downtown.  Way to go!

Soon, sensing it was time to walk over the CNN food court abridged next to Philips Arena, we made the refreshing walk, feeling the happening, hip-hop vibe of downtown and joining hundreds of other hoping their little ladies were having a ball with Taylor.  It seemed like no one left disappointed and we even heard that Atlanta resident Usher showed up to do a special number with Taylor.  I need to check up on exactly who Usher is anyway.