Revival, Decatur GA

Comfort Food Weekend concluded with a trip to Decatur, where we enjoyed a mostly excellent Sunday lunch at Kevin Gillespie’s restaurant Revival, whose menu was inspired by Sunday cooking at his grandmother’s house. This place opened last year and everybody has said only nice things about it. Confident of a good lunch and still craving traditional comfort food after two days full of it, we made reservations and left for the aggravatingly long drive out that way. They can build a Braves Turnpike all along I-75, but they can’t build a flyover bypass to Decatur? A pox on politicians; no wonder we were late.

First things first: the service at Revival is either equal or superior to the very best in the city. It wasn’t only our table; I was eavesdropping and watching and whomever is training that crew must be on the hot list of every headhunter in town. Our server was awesome. I was not expecting a child’s portion here, and had sold our four year-old on the visit by telling him about their bean soup with cornbread. I figured that would please him completely, and he seemed interested (thank heaven) but our server suggested they could do an even less expensive child’s portion of meatloaf with mac and cheese. Our son surprised me by accepting that, and he completely loved it. He even shared a little mac and cheese and it is phenomenal. If that were anybody else’s son, I might have kept it for myself because I’m that evil.

I had the Closed on Sunday chicken sandwich and Marie ordered the meatloaf sandwich, and we had the pole beans and carrots cooked in a dill butter with them. We enjoyed just about everything except for a small detail missed from the menu.

Marie does not eat bacon, period. The meatloaf sandwich’s description on the menu reads “griddled meatloaf and aged cheddar on caramelized onion roll,” and so she was unhappy to have the meatloaf served wrapped in bacon. Rather than sending it back, I just had the bacon with my pole beans. She thought the meatloaf was pretty good, once the offending bacon was removed, and she loved the carrots, and I thought the beans were made even better with a little bacon in them, but we were disappointed that the menu didn’t disclose the surprise.

Whatever disappointment she had with the bacon, she forgave Gillespie and his team with the chocolate cake. This was really great, possibly on the same level as the chocolate cakes that my mom used to make, only with even better frosting. This was a pricier lunch than we’ve had in a while, but we enjoyed the experience, and while we know to ask a couple more questions should we come back for another visit and more of the mac and cheese, it was good to have all the nice things we’ve read about Revival confirmed.

Fully stuffed, I was, at last, satisfied with the amount of traditional Southern comfort food we had that weekend, and ready for something new. Interesting weekend; my body doesn’t usually crave things that way.

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