Peachtree Diner
By John Breech and Tim Altork / STAFF
This week, the dining duo thought they would broaden their horizons a bit, so instead of dinner, we did brunch at the Peachtree Diner.
Service/Atmosphere
The diner, located on Holcomb Bridge, has only been open for two years. Until you’re inside, you really don’t know what quite to expect at this place. For instance, as the hostess took us to our table, we passed a bakery area and a full bar. After a quick straw poll, we both agreed that we had never had a bad experience at a place that has a bakery area and a full bar.
John: I got to the Peachtree Diner around 11:45 a.m., 10 minutes after Tim. According to our server Kevin, Altork was already six cups deep into his coffee when I got there. You would think he just had a kid in the last two weeks.
I ordered water because the drink list was too extensive. Beverage options included martinis, beer and wine. Let’s just say that Peachtree is probably not a good place to hold your AA meetings.
Tim: If you have a hankering for something – anything – it’s probably on the menu at Peachtree Diner. They have pasta, burgers, sandwiches, salads, soups, drinks and home-baked desserts interspersed throughout their extensive menu.
They also serve breakfast until 4 p.m., which I would have appreciated a lot more about 10 years ago. Plus the coffee mugs are nice and big, which I did appreciate last week when we went there.
Appetizers
John: I suggested Calamari. But Tim doesn’t “do” calamari, so we settled on bruschetta. The bruschetta consisted of four grilled crostini’s (crostini is a fancy way to say thin, crispy toast) covered in a lot of healthy stuff. Among the healthy ingredients in the bruschetta were kalamata olives, cherry tomatoes, sun-dried tomatoes and imported feta cheese.
Olives have always been my kryptonite. I would rather use a hammer on my little toe than eat olives. However, in the bruschetta, the olives worked flawlessly. The veggie toppings were abundant and the dish was tasty. My 12-year-old self would be strangling me right now if he knew I just enjoyed a dish covered in vegetables.
Tim: Kevin told us it was an award-winning bruschetta and it’s quite clear why. Any time you can get two olive haters like us to chow down like we did there has to be some kind of award involved.
If my wife reads this sentence she may go into cardiac arrest, but I, too, thoroughly enjoyed a dish that was rife with olives. It was so rife, in fact, that my first instinct – to forage through the bruschetta and pick out the olives – was quickly discarded as completely irrational.
And this has nothing to do with anything, but I’m pretty sure my 12-year-old self would kick Breech’s 12-year-old self’s butt.
John’s appetizer grade: A
Tim’s appetizer grade: A
Soup
Peachtree has two soups that they serve daily, French onion and lemon chicken rice. However, we decided to be daring and went with the soup du jour, which happened to be Cream of Artichoke.
John: Cream of Artichoke?!? I suppose their liver and Brussels sprout combo soup was sold out. Honestly, I was afraid to put this soup anywhere near my mouth. Once I overcame my fear of choking to death on an artichoke, I was able to take a bite of the soup. To my surprise, I didn’t hate it, but I didn’t like it either. I found it to be mostly bland, but I did enjoy what little flavor there was.
Tim: I happen to like artichokes. And although I agree that the soup was a little disappointing, it wasn’t because of some inherent nastiness in the artichoke as a vegetable. It was just a bland soup.
John’s soup grade: C+
Tim’s soup grade: C
Entrees
Our Main course consisted of four entrees. We ordered two items off of the breakfast menu (French toast and the Mediterranean omelette) and two off of the lunch menu (char-grilled salmon paillard and the famous gyro platter).
John: Breakfast is easily my favorite meal of the day. If I could, I would eat breakfast three times a day, four days a week.
French toast sounds simple, but it can be a tricky dish. I’ve had French toast that was so bad I wouldn’t feed it to a wiener dog. However, that wasn’t the case at Peachtree. Their French toast was hands down the best restaurant French toast I’ve ever had. It was lightly crisped on the outside and soft and moist on the inside, cooked to perfection. When topped with syrup, this dish became winsome. I imagine that every time the chef finishes a batch of French toast he gets the same feeling Michelangelo must have gotten upon finishing the Sistine Chapel.
Now that I have lost all credibility by gushing over French toast, let me talk about the Mediterranean omelette. This healthy sized omelette was packed with spinach, sun-dried tomatoes, mushrooms, bacon and gorgonzola cheese. I’ve never been to the Mediterranean, but if their omelettes are this good, I should probably make plans to get there soon.
Tim: It took until the entrees section, but we finally got to Breech’s thesaurus word of the week. “Winsome?” The only other time he has ever used that word was when he consoled a coach he was interviewing by telling him “You winsome and you losesome.”
Anyway, I had the salmon paillard, which was a green salad topped with a salmon filet and dressed with balsamic vinaigrette. I have to say, the more I eat balsamic vinaigrette, the less I like it. It’s one of those things that is supposed to be classy and elegant and that everyone is supposed to like – like Guinness beer – but I just don’t like it. That and the below-average salmon made the salad unremarkable at best.
However, the gyro platter was fantastic. It’s essentially a traditional Greek gyro broken down into its component parts and served on a plate. Having spent my honeymoon in Greece, I can say that this dish was as authentically Greek as anything I have had stateside. The tzatziki sauce was perfect, the lamb was delightfully spiced and the pita slices were warm, soft and buttery. It was the highlight of the meal.
John’s entrée grade: B+
Tim’s entrée grade: B
Overall experience
Tim: Don’t be fooled by our negative comments about some of the individual dishes. We absolutely loved Peachtree Diner. We tried to branch out and order a broad spectrum of foods that we probably wouldn’t normally get, but the menu is so extensive that you can stay away from that stuff and find five other things that would be absolutely wonderful.
And we didn’t get to cover it in detail here, but their desserts – the baklava cheesecake in particular – are delectable.
This was a scenario where the whole experience was greater than the sum of its parts.
My wife and I have been looking for a high-class, inexpensive brunch type place in the area for awhile. Little did I realize that it would be right under our noses at Peachtree Diner.
John’s overall grade: B+
Tim’s overall grade: A